Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss
readers. Quite apart from the intrinsic interest in his writing, there is also the wider question: why is not SF, or work which closely resembles SF, accepted into the general corpus of the century’s literature? The writing is excellent; the subject under discussion is a central one; the author was not exactly a backwoodsman; nor did he write in obscure tongue; so how is it that he suffers a general neglect? Why is he not considered as is, say, Jorge Luis Borges or Mikhail Bulgakov or even William Burroughs?
These are perforce rhetorical questions. I cannot answer them. Nor, as far as I can see, can anyone else. De gustibus non est disputan-dum. And yet … we must continue to dispute …
I was instrumental in having Penguin Books reprint Last and First Men in 1963. The edition contains my Foreword, and was reprinted more than once. Harvey Satty, the active chairman of the Olaf Stapledon Society, published Nebula Maker in 1976, an interesting early attempt of Stapledon’s to write Star Maker. Later, Satty, in collaboration with Curtis C. Smith, produced a comprehensive bibliography (1984). The volume contains an essay by Stapledon never before published. In 1982 came Patrick A. McCarthy’s Olaf Stapledon from Twayne Publishers. This slender volume presents excellent summaries of Stapledon’s novels. McCarthy collaborated with Charles Elkins and Martin Harry Greenberg to produce The Legacy of Olaf Stapledon in 1989.
In 1987, the Los Angeles publisher, James Tarcher, published an edition of Star Maker with my introduction and, in the following year, Last and First Men, with a Foreword by Gregory Benford and an Afterword by Doris Lessing. This is claimed to be the first complete edition of the novel to be published in the USA. In fact, Dover Books had published the complete text in 1968.
A curious player in the Stapledon game is the celebrated critic, Leslie A. Fiedler. Fiedler’s Olaf Stapledon: A Man Divided was published in 1983.[1] Fiedler had shown interest in Stapledon some years previously. When Harry Harrison and I were editing a series of hardcover and paperback reprints of classic SF in the 1970s (SF Master Series), Harry persuaded Professor Fiedler to write an introduction to Odd John.[2]
The authority on Stapledon is undoubtedly Dr Robert Crossley. Again an American weighs in to great effect. Crossley has a better grasp of British weirdness than Fiedler; he is familiar, for instance, with the deadly English habit of litotes; as witness his exemplary editing of Talking Across the World: The Love Letters of Olaf Stapledon and Agnes Miller, 1913–1919.[3] These gentle, humorous letters of courtship during a terrible war are touching and beautiful. They carry us closer than anything else to the private man, and far beyond the world of science fiction, though they are not without speculative content.
Crossley follows up with his massive biography, Speaking for the Future: The Life of Olaf Stapledon.[4] This will always remain the standard life.
The new biography brings out well Stapledon’s sense of division within himself, manifest in his fiction. Even the august Star Maker—the very emblem of Stapledon’s cogitations—is given, like the god Shiva, a dual nature, both mild and terrible. The opening sentence of Last and First Men makes the division clear: This book has two authors’.
Other examples of this division are not far to seek. The title of Stapledon’s last book, clearly autobiographical in nature, and published only months before his death in 1950, is A Man Divided. In ‘The Peak and the Town’, the posthumously published essay included in the 1989 book mentioned above, one of the characters speaks of ‘the double life’ as ‘a marvellous duplicity’. This submerged quality—Mary Shelley speaks poignantly of it too—manifests itself in the first of the letters Crossley preserves in Talking Across the World. In a letter declaring his love to the distant Agnes in Australia, Stapledon says, ‘I fear lest you might in answering say there is no hope at all, and if you were to say that I should only outwardly accept it, and inwardly go on hoping and acting as if there was a chance …’
Stapledon served as an ambulance driver in the First World War. For his courage he was awarded the Croix de Guerre. In that serving capacity, he observed the divided nature of his fellows, remorseless in enmity, at other times compassionate to friend and foe alike.
Mathew Arnold has a splendid poem, ‘The Buried Life’, in which he says how
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life
This element in Stapledon drove him to extend the boundaries of conventional human sensibility.
Stapledon was in his fifties when Star Maker was published. So let’s finally talk about this masterwork.
It is the most wonderful book I have ever read, while its central premise is the most difficult to accept. Star Maker is grander in theme than Last and First Men, more felicitous in style, and subtler in approach. And more overwhelming in its imaginative power.
It’s not an abstract book. Rather, it’s chock-a-block with great common agonies and private lonelinesses—often the lonelinesses of entire solar communities. Madness, that kith and kin of loneliness, is often present in Stapledon’s mind. The intellect is threatened by the prospect of endless galaxies formed—for what?
As we searched up and down time and space, discovering more and more of the rare grains called planets, we watched race after race struggle to a certain degree of lucid consciousness, only to succumb to some external accident or, more often, to some flaw in its own nature, we were increasingly oppressed by a sense of the futility, of the planlessness of the cosmos.
The sombre mood owes much to the pessimism of Schopenhauer. The conviction that God was dead is characteristic of the thinkers of the late nineteenth century. But we cannot call it unearned: this was a man who had been through the carnage of the Somme.
Pessimism unrelieved is not much to anyone’s taste. The pessimism of artists is a different matter. We drink down the pessimism of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels because of his and our delight in artifice. Stapledon is short on dialogue, but he keeps us reading by the prodigality of his imaginings, expressed in delicate imagery.
In one section of Chapter X, the journeying human soul, together with its spirit friends, observes the galaxy at an early stage of its existence. The passage concludes with an overview of the fully evolved galaxy:
The stars themselves gave an irresistible impression of vitality. Strange that the movements of these merely physical things, these mere fireballs, whirling and travelling according to the geometrical laws of their minutest particles, should seem so vital, so questing. But then the whole galaxy was itself so vital, so like an organism, with its delicate tracery of star-streams, like the streams within a living cell; and its extended wreaths, almost like feelers; and its nucleus of light. Surely this great and lively creature must be alive, must have intelligent experience of itself and of things other than it.
And then follows one of those rapid contradictions which endow the narrative with its tensile strength and astonishment:
In the tide of these wild thoughts we checked our fancy, remembering that only on the rare grains called planets can life gain foothold, and all this wealth of restless jewels was but a waste of fire.
Under the cool tone is an almost animist belief in conscious life everywhere, a marked Stapledon characteristic. One of his last fantasies, The Flames, postulates a madman’s vision of fire with intellect.
Any similarity between Stapledon’s sweep of cosmic events and conventional SF is coincidental. After discoursing with the minds of the nebulae, his questing spirit moves on to achieve a discussion with the Immanent Will, the Star Maker itself. The finely sustained climax of the book is the Maker’s description of the series of universes with which he is experimenting, of which ours is but one in an almost infinite series. Where does one look in all English prose for an equivalent of the magnificent Chapter XV?
For here Stapledon describes a succession of flawed cosmoses, each one of greater complexity, yet each one in turn failing to satisfy its creator—who