Odd John

Book 67: S.F. MASTERWORKS

by Olaf Stapledon

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

John Wainwright is a freak, a human mutation with an extraordinary intelligence which is both awesome and frightening to behold. Ordinary humans are mere playthings to him. And Odd John has a plan - to create a new order on Earth, a new supernormal species. But the world is not ready for such a change ...

Release date: March 1, 2012

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 320

Sample

INTRODUCTION

There have been plenty of stories about supermen but Olaf Stapledon’s superman story is unlike any other. It is, we might say, odd. Unlike other writers, Stapledon sees the idea that an individual might be born with more-than-human powers of mind and body not in terms of simple power fantasies, either power over regular humanity or the power to help regular humanity. For Stapledon, power is much odder than that. Indeed, the oddest thing about his John is not his strange physical appearance, his extraordinary mental powers, his precocity or inventiveness. The oddest thing about this superman novel is that it has remarkably little interest in ordinary mankind at all. Its attention is elsewhere.

That’s not entirely true, of course. In the early stages of the novel Stapledon can’t resist the opportunity to use his superboy satirically to critique the hypocrisies of the ordinary human society. John’s interview with the buffoonish millionaire ‘Mr Magnate’ is a case in point. It’s not that this scene lacks bite, or that it isn’t funny; but it’s hard to shake the sense that Stapledon’s heart isn’t really in this aspect of his project. The novel isn’t fundamentally interested in superhumanity as a lens through which to anatomise our world. Rather, Stapledon is genuinely – spiritually, we might say – fascinated by the concept of superhumanity itself.

It is this that sets the book apart from the clutch of specifically British ‘superman’ fictions written at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries; a body of writings to which Stapledon’s novel is indebted and which it is, simultaneously, critiquing. Indeed, Stapledon makes specific reference to one of these novels: J. D. Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911), a story about a child with superhuman intelligence and his struggle with the various hostilities of conventional humanity’s reactionary inertia. Beresford’s child, Victor Stott is physically unprepossessing but mentally so far in advance of ordinary humanity that he feels himself to be literally alienated (‘he was entirely alone,’ we are told, ‘among aliens who were unable to comprehend him, who could not flatter him, whose opinions were valueless to him’). The Hampdenshire Wonder ends tragically with Stott’s untimely death, although the novel is deliberately unclear as to whether this is the result of an accident, or more sinister forces at work. Stapledon, in an uncharacteristically bold piece of intertextuality, name-checks the book in the first chapter of his own novel – ‘Mr J. D. Beresford’s account of the unhappy Victor Stott’ – and Odd John maps out a rather similar, although expanded, narrative trajectory. But in fact Beresford’s novel was only one of a number of early 20th-century explorations of the theme of the coming of trans-humans.

To mention only a few of the more prominent examples: Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford collaborated on The Inheritors (1901) about a group of emotionally chilly homo superior, ‘the Fourth Dimension’, seeking to supplant ordinary humanity. The novel does not spell out the eventual result of the clash between the old and the new, but the reader is left in little doubt that the ‘fourth dimension’, personified in the figure of an irresistible beautiful and forceful woman, will triumph. George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah (these five linked plays were first performed in the UK in 1923) posits the spontaneous coming-into-being of a species of superhuman ‘ancients’, who first live amongst and eventually (the last play is set in the year 31,920) supplant ordinary humanity. Like Stapledon, Shaw imagines his homo superior characters as long-lived, and possessing a fundamentally spiritual connection with the cosmos we ordinary people lack. Indeed, in Shaw’s world an ordinary human can die, of ‘discouragement’, simply by looking into the eye of an ‘ancient’. But Shaw’s emphasis is on the limitations of his human characters, rather than the limitless possibilities of superhumanity.

The most direct conceptual source for this interest in homo superior is Nietzsche’s philosophy, and his hymn to the possibilities of superseding mundane humanity, Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883–85). Certainly, the first half of the twentieth-century marked the high-water-point of Nietzsche’s influence upon European and American culture; material and social ideas of ‘progress’ bled into metaphysical speculation, and many took the idea of Nietzsche’s Übermensch literally. Nietzsche’s actual idea is not so clumsily literal. The actual being-in-the-world of his superperson can only be gestured towards, not captured in prose – even in the experimental musical-poetic prose Nietzsche dreamt up for his project.

Stapledon writes much more straightforward and prosaically, but his book is just as insistent that its central theme is, in fact, inexpressible. Like the ‘superior’ music the supernormals enjoy, which sounds merely cacophonous to ordinary ears, the main chords of Odd John are – the central character repeatedly insists – simply beyond our mental capacities. One way the novel articulates this is through the metaphor of flight. We (John says) know less of his view of the universe ‘than an ostrich knows about the upper air.’ In a rather neatly-put phrase, John says that Man ‘is about as clever along his own line as the earliest birds were at flight. He’s a sort of archiopteryx of the spirit.’

This evolutionary theme is discretely, but unmissably, developed. Like Nietzsche, Stapledon sees the coming of a more advanced homo to be natural and inevitable. His John is freakish – odd – but not in the sense of being ontologically eccentric. Evolution works via mutation and freakishness after all; its currency is, in a precise sense, oddity. More to the point, the novel is centrally and perhaps paradoxically interested in the impossibility of its own representation. Odd John can gesture towards what its superman knows and perceives, but by definition that knowledge and perception is beyond our present-day capacity to embody it.

In various ways Stapledon illustrates that his supernormals live (in appropriately Nietzschean phrase) beyond good and evil. They use conventional morality only in order to fit in with ordinary human society. Otherwise they dispense with it; and they are prepared to do anything they judge reasonable – up to and including mass murder – if they deem it in their own interests. This is as true of sex as it is of violence: chapter 8, largely concerned with John’s sexual experimentation, ends with this striking paragraph:

At last John told me something which it is better not to report. I did, indeed, write a careful account of this most disturbing incident in his career; and I confess that at the time I was so deeply under the spell of his personality that I could not feel his behaviour to have been vile … Years later, when I innocently showed my manuscript to others of my species, they pointed out that to publish such a matter would be to shock many sensitive readers, and to incur the charge of sheer licentiousness.

‘I am,’ says the narrator, ‘a respectable member of the English middle class, and wish to remain so.’ I am too, as it happens; although I have fewer qualms about making explicit what the novel intimates (howsoever unmissably) here – that John has sex with his own mother. He needed ‘soothing’, we’re told; ‘delicate and intimate contact with a being whose sensibility and insight were not wholly incomparable with his own’. But he also needed to ‘assert his moral independence of homo sapiens’ by breaking ‘what was one of the most cherished of all the taboos of that species.’ At this point in the book we might wonder whether ‘Odd John’ isn’t short for ‘Oedipal John’.

That incest remains unspeakable when cold-blooded mass murder (for instance) doesn’t says something, perhaps, about the relative values of our society. That Stapledon’s narrator can’t even bring himself to use the i-word says more. And this foregrounding of the perspective through which John’s career is filtered is canny. It is one of the main themes of the work: a narrative that denies its own representational grounds. This is as true of the individual sentences out of which the story is made as it is of its larger philosophical meditations. I’m talking about the sometimes clangingly antiquated idiom of the book (all the ‘Stephen, old man, I’m sorry I made you lose your hair’; ‘I say, Fido old thing’ and ‘what stuff!’) will interfere with our ability to enter imaginatively into Stapledon’s vision. This is a book whose expressive idiom has dated, occasionally even comically so. But it seems to me that this is, as it were, factored into the limitations of the frame. It points up precisely the insufficiency of the mode of telling to the tale itself.

This in turn, I think, relates to the ending of the novel. I can discuss this without spoilers because Stapledon spells it out right at the beginning of the first chapter: John founds a colony of supernormals on an uncharted island in the Pacific, but the governments of the world discover it and, afraid of the potential of these young superbeings, or perhaps simply afraid of what they do not understand, destroy it. Nevertheless, this ending is, to use an appropriate word, odd. By this stage in their development the supernormals have conquered matter, time and space; they are telepathic, spiritually transcendent geniuses, capable of a whole range of what a later generation would call ‘Jedi mind tricks’, and able to fuse atoms and generate nuclear power by thought alone. They have already demonstrated themselves perfectly capable of killing any ordinary humans who interfere with their plans, and the book makes it plain that they would have, according to their own supernormal morality, no qualms at perpetrating specicide upon the whole of humanity. Why, then, do they permit first lone ships and then human flotillas to bother them; and why do they explode their own settlement rather than fight off the invaders? John says something about how resistance ‘would bring the whole force of the inferior species against us, and there would be no peace till we had conquered the world.’ But impatience seems a strange trait in a near-immortal race of superbeings; one nowhere else exhibited by the characters of the novel. More to the point, there is never any doubt that John and his people would defeat homo sapiens, if it came to a fight. Nor do the supernormals ever doubt that their own extinction at the hands of ordinary humankind will follow (since they can see the future, this should not surprise us). The shift from ruthless extermination of humans to a quasi-Gandhi passive resistance even unto death reads very oddly indeed.

But perhaps this is precisely the point. The last weeks of the colony see them hurrying to complete their ‘real work’, an unspecified ‘spiritual’ task. The implication, surely, is that the apparent course of the novel is actually a kind of obfuscation, a final cashing-in of the text’s inability to provide insight into the lives of the supernormals. According to the mundane narrative they all die, and the novel gives us no reason to suspect that anything else happens. But if we read with enough sensitivity to the way the novel repeatedly separates out what middle-class English words can say about the supernormals and what they actually do and are, we may glimpse, out of the corner of the mind’s eye, a very different conclusion: an ending in which the supernormals do not die, but rather translate themselves beyond the limitations of matter, and the threat of homo sapiens, forever. I prefer that reading. It is more open-ended, more satisfying, but above all it is odder.

Adam Roberts

I

John and the Author

When I told John that I intended to write his biography, he laughed. ‘My dear man!’ he said, ‘But of course it was inevitable.’ The word ‘man’ on John’s lips was often equivalent to ‘fool’.

‘Well,’ I protested, ‘a cat may look at a king.’

He replied, ‘Yes, but can it really see the king? Can you, puss, really see me?’

This from a queer child to a full-grown man.

John was right. Though I had known him since he was a baby, and was in a sense intimate with him, I knew almost nothing of the inner, the real John. To this day I know little but the amazing facts of his career. I know that he never walked till he was six, that before he was ten he committed several burglaries and killed a policeman, that at eighteen, when he still looked a young boy, he founded his preposterous colony in the South Seas, and that at twenty-three, in appearance but little altered, he outwitted the six warships that six Great Powers had sent to seize him. I know also how John and all his followers died.

Such facts I know; and even at the risk of destruction by one or other of the six Great Powers, I shall tell the world all that I can remember.

Something else I know, which will be very difficult to explain. In a confused way I know why he founded his colony. I know too that although he gave his whole energy to this task, he never seriously expected to succeed. He was convinced that sooner or later the world would find him out and destroy his work. ‘Our chance,’ he once said, ‘is not as much as one in a million.’ And then he laughed.

John’s laugh was strangely disturbing. It was a low, rapid, crisp chuckle. It reminded me of that whispered crackling prelude which sometimes precedes a really great crash of thunder. But no thunder followed it, only a moment’s silence; and for his hearers an odd tingling of the scalp.

I believe that this inhuman, this ruthless but never malicious laugh of John’s contained the key to all that baffles me in his character. Again and again I asked myself why he laughed just then, what precisely was he laughing at, what did his laughter really mean, was that strange noise really laughter at all, or some emotional reaction incomprehensible to my kind? Why, for instance, did the infant John laugh through his tears when he had upset a kettle and was badly scalded? I was not present at his death, but I feel sure that, when his end came, his last breath spent itself in zestful laughter. Why?

In failing to answer these questions, I fail to understand the essential John. His laughter, I am convinced, sprang from some aspect of his experience entirely beyond my vision. I am therefore, of course as John affirmed, a very incompetent biographer. But if I keep silence, the facts of his unique career will be lost for ever. In spite of my incompetence, I must record all that I can, in the hope that, if these pages fall into the hands of some being of John’s own stature, he may imaginatively see through them to the strange but glorious spirit of John himself.

That others of his kind, or approximately of his kind, are now alive, and that yet others will appear, is at least probable. But as John himself discovered, the great majority of these very rare supernormals, whom John sometimes called ‘wide-awakes’, are either so delicate physically or so unbalanced mentally that they leave no considerable mark on the world. How pathetically one-sided the supernormal development may be is revealed in Mr J. D. Beresford’s account of the unhappy Victor Stott. I hope that the following brief record will at least suggest a mind at once more strikingly ‘superhuman’ and more broadly human.

That the reader may look for something more than an intellectual prodigy I will here at the outset try to give an impression of John’s appearance in his twenty-third and last summer.

He was indeed far more like a boy than a man, though in some moods his youthful face would assume a curious experienced and even patriarchal expression. Slender, long limbed, and with that unfinished coltish look characteristic of puberty, he had also a curiously finished grace all his own. Indeed to those who had come to know him he seemed a creature of ever-novel beauty. But strangers were often revolted by his uncouth proportions. They called him spiderish. His body, they complained, was so insignificant, his legs and arms so long and lithe, his head all eye and brow.

Now that I have set down these characters I cannot conceive how they might make for beauty. But in John they did, at least for those of us who could look at him without preconceptions derived from Greek gods, or film stars. With characteristic lack of false modesty, John once said to me, ‘My looks are a rough test of people. If they don’t begin to see me beautiful when they have had a chance to learn, I know they’re dead inside, and dangerous.’

But let me complete the description. Like his fellow-colonists, John mostly went naked. His maleness, thus revealed, was immature in spite of his twenty-three years. His skin, burnt by the Polynesian sun, was of a grey, almost a green, brown, warming to a ruddier tint in the cheeks. His hands were extremely large and sinewy. Somehow they seemed more mature than the rest of his body. ‘Spiderish’ seemed appropriate in this connection also. His head was certainly large but not out of proportion to his long limbs. Evidently the unique development of his brain depended more on manifold convolutions than on sheer bulk. All the same his was a much larger head than it looked, for its visible bulk was scarcely at all occupied by the hair, which was but a close skull-cap, a mere superficies of negroid but almost white wool. His nose was small but broad, rather Mongolian perhaps. His lips, large but definite, were always active. They expressed a kind of running commentary on his thoughts and feelings. Yet many a time I have seen those lips harden into granitic stubbornness. John’s eyes were indeed, according to ordinary standards, much too big for his face, which acquired thus a strangely cat-like or falcon-like expression. This was emphasized by the low and level eyebrows, but often completely abolished by a thoroughly boyish and even mischievous smile. The whites of John’s eyes were almost invisible. The pupils were immense. The oddly green irises were as a rule mere filaments. But in tropical sunshine the pupils narrowed to mere pin-pricks. Altogether, his eyes were the most obviously ‘queer’ part of him. His glance, however, had none of that weirdly compelling power recorded in the case of Victor Stott. Or rather, to feel their magic, one needed to have already learnt something of the formidable spirit that used them.

II

The First Phase

John’s father, Thomas Wainwright, had reason to believe that Spaniards and Moroccans had long ago contributed to his making. There was indeed something of the Latin, even perhaps of the Arab, in his nature. Everyone admitted that he had a certain brilliance; but he was odd, and was generally regarded as a failure. A medical practice in a North-country suburb gave little scope for his powers, and many opportunities of rubbing people up the wrong way. Several remarkable cures stood to his credit; but he had no bedside manner, and his patients never accorded him the trust which is so necessary for a doctor’s success.

His wife was no less a mongrel than her husband, but one of a very different kind. She was of Swedish extraction. Finns and Lapps were also among her ancestors. Scandinavian in appearance, she was a great sluggish blonde, who even as a matron dazzled the young male eye. It was originally through her attraction that I became the youthful friend of her husband, and later the slave of her more than brilliant son. Some said she was ‘just a magnificent female animal’, and so dull as to be subnormal. Certainly conversation with her was sometimes almost as one-sided as conversation with a cow. Yet she was no fool. Her house was always in good order, though she seemed to spend no thought upon it. With the same absent-minded skill she managed her rather difficult husband. He called her ‘Pax’. ‘So peaceful,’ he would explain. Curiously her children also adopted this name for her. Their father they called invariably ‘Doc’. The two elder, girl and boy, affected to smile at their mother’s ignorance of the world; but they counted on her advice. John, the youngest by four years, once said something which suggested that we had all misjudged her. Some one had remarked on her extraordinary dumbness. Out flashed John’s disconcerting laugh, and then, ‘No one notices the things that interest Pax, and so she just doesn’t talk.’

John’s birth had put the great maternal animal to a severe strain. She carried her burden for eleven months, till the doctors decided that at all costs she must be relieved. Yet when the baby was at last brought to light, it had the grotesque appearance of a seven-month foetus. Only with great difficulty was it kept alive in an incubator. Not till a year after the forced birth was this artificial womb deemed no longer necessary.

I saw John frequently during his first year, for between me and the father, though he was many years my senior, there had by now grown up a curious intimacy based on common intellectual interests, and perhaps partly on a common admiration for Pax.

I can remember my shock of disgust when I first saw the thing they had called John. It seemed impossible that such an inert and pulpy bit of flesh could ever develop into a human being. It was like some obscene fruit, more vegetable than animal, save for an occasional incongruous spasm of activity.

When John was a year old, however, he looked almost like a normal new-born infant, save that his eyes were shut. At eighteen months he opened them; and it was as though a sleeping city had suddenly leapt into life. Formidable eyes they were for a baby, eyes seen under a magnifying glass, each great pupil like the mouth of a cave, the iris a mere rim, an edging of bright emerald. Strange how two black holes can gleam with life! It was shortly after his eyes had opened that Pax began to call her strange son ‘Odd John’. She gave the words a particular and subtle intonation which, though it scarcely varied, seemed to express sometimes merely affectionate apology for the creature’s oddity, but sometimes defiance, and sometimes triumph, and occasionally awe. The adjective stuck to John throughout his life.

Henceforth John was definitely a person and a very wide-awake person, too. Week by week he became more and more active and more and more interested. He was for ever busy with eyes and ears and limbs.

During the next two years John’s body developed precariously, but without disaster. There were always difficulties over feeding, but when he had reached the age of three he was a tolerably healthy child, though odd, and in appearance extremely backward. This backwardness distressed Thomas. Pax, however, insisted that most babies grew too fast. ‘They don’t give their minds a chance to knit themselves properly,’ she declared. The unhappy father shook his head.

When John was in his fifth year I used to see him nearly every morning as I passed the Wainwrights’ house on my way to the railway station. He would be in his pram in the garden rioting with limbs and voice. The din, I thought, had an odd quality. It differed indescribably from the vocalization of any ordinary baby, as the call of one kind of monkey di. . .