How to approach Olaf Stapledon’s future history epic Last and First Men today? It was first published in 1930 (by Methuen, who clearly weren’t too burned by the poor sales of David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus ten years before), and its first chapters — all the ones which use such terms as Europe, America, Britain and China — were instantly outdated by the outbreak of the Second World War. These early chapters, which perhaps might be read as satire if Stapledon were of a more satirical bent, are anyway the least interesting. (The most successfully satirical moment, perhaps, is a Gulliver’s Travels-like glimpse the Second Men get of our own primitive descendants, still recognisably human but fallen into serving as beasts of burden and objects of mockery for a race of semi-intelligent monkeys, about 10 million years from now.)

It’s after the rise of the Second Men that Stapledon’s novel really becomes what it’s meant to be — not political commentary or satire, but a

“…serious attempt to envisage the future of our race; not merely in order to grasp the very diverse and often tragic possibilities that confront us, but also that we may familiarise ourselves with the certainty that many of our most cherished ideals would seem puerile to more developed minds. To romance of the far future, then, is to attempt to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and to mould our hearts to entertain new values.”

Last and First Men, he goes on to say in his Preface, “is not prophecy; it is myth”.

But what sort of myth? Stapledon is writing in the cosmic mode (which might be considered the religious aspect of atheism), but not cosmic horror a la Lovecraft. Take a passage such as this, a direct pronouncement of the book’s narrator (one of the Eighteenth, and final, race of humans, dictating this novel from billions of years in our future):

“Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies.”

The first sentence could be Lovecraft, but by the third we’re in a different mindset altogether. Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove, in their history of science fiction Trillion Year Spree, point out both Stapledon’s link to, and difference with, cosmic horror by comparing him to another writer in that genre:

“We may suspect that Stapledon’s alienation was at least as severe as [William Hope] Hodgson’s; but Stapledon’s powerful intellect has shaped his mental condition into a metaphysic.”

So if it’s not horror, what’s a better term for Stapledon’s brand of cosmicism?

To him, humankind is not, as with Lovecraft, an insect-like nothing crushed by immense and indifferent alien powers, but a potentially noble race. This nobility, though, doesn’t come from being the favoured creation of a benevolent Deity. It’s self-generated, derived from an intelligent self-consciousness that allows it to appreciate both its huge potential and its immense vulnerability. Humankind, in each of the eighteen “races” Stapledon presents us with, is constantly beset with difficulties, both self-created (the “anti-social self-regard” of the First Men, for instance, which led to so many self-destructive wars), and visited upon it by the workings of a genuinely indifferent cosmos, whether this be disease, natural disaster, or shifts in the conditions of our solar system that threaten our delicate survival.

A growing awareness of this vulnerability only heightens the potential, as Stapledon sees it, for each of the races of humankind to achieve a fulfilment of its place in the cosmos — not because this is destined to happen, but because not to do so would be a waste of such a “fair spirit”. Stapledon doesn’t believe this fulfilment is guaranteed by any means, even given the many millions, if not billions, of years through which he pursues these eighteen races, each one “in spite of innumerable digressions, a single theme, a single mood of the human will”. In fact, he seems to take it as granted that such a fulfilment may never occur (unless that fulfilment is to be found in the attempt, rather than a final moment of achievement).

Perhaps, then, the best way of describing Stapledon’s brand of cosmicism isn’t cosmic horror but cosmic tragedy, though it’s a tragedy of genuine nobility faced with insurmountable odds, not the Shakespearian type of tragedy in which an overweening nature gets ideas above its station. (Perhaps cosmic elegy might be a better term, if an elegy can be written while its subject is still alive.)

There’s something of this tragic air in the moment when the Second Men find the knowledge-tablets of the First Men, which that initial race of human beings created so as not to lose all they felt most valuable when faced with a race-threatening disaster. Deciphering the tablets, the Second Men find little in this culmination of their predecessors’ civilisation to be of any interest:

“The view of the universe which the tablets recorded was both too naïve and too artificial; but the insight which they afforded into the mind of the earlier species was invaluable.”

The one thing the Second Men do value are the words of what the First Men called the Divine Boy, a prophet who preached an at-the-time unpopular way of understanding life:

“For I seemed to see a thousand worlds taking part with us in the great show. And I saw everything through the calm eyes, the exultant, almost derisive, yet not unkindly, eyes of the playwright.”

We should, Stapledon seems to be saying, learn to look at ourselves — our lives, our strivings, our failures — in purely aesthetic terms. Not as an excuse to escape into make-believe, but, in the words of the Second Men, so that “Seeing the depth, we shall see also the height, and praise both.” Or, as the Last Man-narrator puts it:

“But this we know: that we ourselves, when the spirit is most awake in us, admire the Real as it is revealed to us, and salute its dark-bright form with joy.”

Humankind, for Stapledon, “is dignified by his very weakness, and the cosmos by its very indifference to him”. It’s an outlook that has the same conditions as Lovecraftian horror, but which has plenty of room for things of genuine (though never lasting) human value.

The metaphor Stapledon reaches for is of “that great music of innumerable personal lives, which is the life of the race”. As the Last Men say:

“For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.”

Which reminds me of David Lindsay in Devil’s Tor — another novel of the 1930s — who uses the same metaphor, also in the same atmosphere of cosmic-level tragedy:

“It was like the ordered emotion of a far-distant orchestra numbering, not hundreds, and not thousands, but millions, it seemed, of instruments… … each instrument, with its voice of unique timbre, should be proclaiming its own peculiar message…”

C S Lewis found Stapledon (as he did Lindsay) both imaginatively inspiring and philosophically detestable. In fact it seems to be Stapledon, rather than Lindsay, who was the immediate spur to Lewis writing Out of the Silent Planet, through a need to take what he thought of as Stapledon’s “desperately immoral outlook” and critique it through the character of Weston. (And, just as Lewis found Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus “detestable, almost diabolist”, he thought Stapledon’s sequel to Last and First Men, Star Maker, “ends in sheer devil worship”.)

Whereas for Lewis the world was as God made it, and it was up to humankind to fit in with the cosmic harmony or suffer, for Stapledon suffering was the only thing that was guaranteed, making it all the more important that humankind should work towards its own kind of meaning and fulfilment. For Stapledon, there was no cosmic harmony, because everything is in constant flux, and we must instead learn to appreciate this difficult cosmic music, with all its dissonances. For him, humankind reaches its apex in the Fifth Men, but they’re not the end of the story — far from it — for no sooner have they embarked on their path of perfecting the expression of their potential, than they realise the Earth will soon become uninhabitable, and they’ll have to move to a new world, one where the need to adapt will send them back into primitive forms of life, and into a whole new series of cycles of striving and failure.

Last and First Men is not an easy read. As Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove say in Trillion Year Spree:

“The atmosphere Stapledon generates is chill but intoxicating. Reading his books is like standing on the top of a high mountain. One can see a lot of planet and much of the sprawling uncertain works of man, but little actual human activity; from such an altitude, all sense of the individual is lost.”

But something of its bleak but uplifting, tragic yet elegiac, mournful yet meditative feel comes through in the recent (2020) film by Jóhann Jóhannsson. This combines Stapledon’s words (read by Tilda Swinton), Jóhannsson’s sombre music, and black and white footage of the strangely futurological/modernist “Spomenik” — war memorials in the former Yugoslavia that were intended, through their abstract forms, to be relatable by all the region’s diverse cultures and beliefs. The result is “a requiem for the Last Men and for the ideals of a failed socialist Utopia” (quoted from the statement at the film’s official website) — but I nevertheless found it uplifting, through its insistence that, even in the face of a race-annihilating threat, humankind can strive for a level of meaning, and fulfilment, on its own terms.

Stapledon, evidently, had a belief in humankind as a united thing, with values and aims in common. Their enemy, as well as their teacher, was the cosmos in which they were born, and in which they are to die, and his eighteen races of humanity, though often breaking out in war, just as often find unified civilisations through which to express a common character. It’s hard to connect this with our often very fragmented world today, but it’s nice to be reminded of it as a possibility every so often.

I thought I had read all the Louise Lawrence books that initially grabbed my fancy, but when I happened upon the premise of this, her second novel, I had to read it because it sounded so bizarre: a girl is bitten by a rabbit and gains the destructive “power of the stars”. I was sure, from my recent reading of Lawrence’s Wyndcliffe, Star Lord, and The Earth Witch, it couldn’t be as radioactive-spider ridiculous as it sounded. It turns out to fit very much with the kind of late 1960s/early 1970s YA novel I’ve covered on Mewsings before — things like Alan Garner’s The Owl Service and Penelope Lively’s The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy — so that, in the end, I found The Power of Stars (1972) interesting for its preoccupations, even though I didn’t think it quite worked as a novel.

The setting is the borderland mountain region between England and Wales, and the cast is that old Owl Service/Earth Witch formula, the bickering trio of teens (two boys, one girl) with added class tension (two are working class, one is middle class). The girl is Jane Bates, 15 years old and the poorest of the three, who lives with her Granny as her mother abandoned her before moving abroad and breaking all contact (as with Owen in The Earth Witch). Walking home from school with the local lad she’s known all her life, Jimmy Keir, and an English boy, Alan Grant, whose divorced, soon-to-be-remarried mother has recently moved to the area, all three, separated in the dark of the village countryside, are distracted by a strange, powerful brightness in the stars. They hear a weird scream, but it’s only a rabbit, caught, somewhere in the dark, in a trap. The following evening, the three are again walking home when they find the poor thing, still alive, though out of the trap. (They find the trap, which seems to have been hit by lightning — it’s just a lump of molten metal.) Jane picks up the rabbit, intending to take it to a vet, and it bites her, deep in the wrist. Uncharacteristically for a rabbit, it hangs on, as though to make sure she’s thoroughly bitten. Jimmy flings the rabbit off her, and they take her to Alan’s stepfather-to-be, Dr Nick Mackenzie, who, once Jane has been taken to A&E, seeks out the rabbit, thinking he might find something unusual about it because of its behaviour. He and Alan bump into local oddity Marcia Cotterel, known to the area’s kids as the Batwoman, because she’s a scientist studying bats (also, they think she’s a bit crazy). Her dog, it turns out, was also bitten by a rabbit — perhaps the same one — and she’s also trying to find it, to see if it was infected by some odd new disease.

Things tick along for a while, with the trio of kids bickering lightly but constantly, in the way of bored teens, when two odd things start to occur with Jane. First, she seems to have gained a new fear of machines — though only at night, when the stars are out. Second, if Jane is particularly worked up, those machines suddenly fuse, or melt, or even blow up, as though hit by a blast of intense energy. Afterwards, Jane will usually be found alone in the dark, staring up at the stars, drinking in their light.

It turns out Jane has been infected by a sort of alien life-form, an intelligence that exists as tiny, neuron-like protozoa, simple on their own but somehow forming, together, a sort of intelligence. And it’s an intelligence that feeds off starlight and hates machines, perhaps because (Dr Nick suggests) they might have once become too reliant on machines in their own, more advanced, society that self-destructed, and now they’re trying to save us from the same fate, using Jane as a focus. (They also use her to drink up the experience of embodied life, something they’ve evidently been missing since becoming space-bound protozoa. That, and music.)

This hatred of machines, combined with bouts of the irrational need to destroy them, reminds me of The Changes. The BBC series came out in 1975, but Peter Dickinson’s trilogy of novels the series was adapted from were all out by 1970, and I can’t help wondering if Lawrence wasn’t proposing an alternative explanation for those books’ outbreak of irrational anti-machine violence. (Star-bound protozoa with a beef against the mechanical is a little bit better — though only just — as explanations go, than Dickinson’s Merlin-on-drugs.) But the idea of a rabbit bite infecting Jane with an alien life-form is less about scientific plausibility, I’d say, than a sort of imaginative pressure on the author to bring together the two archetypal forces that come out again in her later novel Star Lord: the science-fictional force from the stars, and the ancient forces of nature, only here they’re united, rather than being inimical as they are in Star Lord.

This is Lawrence’s second novel — her second published novel, anyway — and I thought it perhaps showed in a couple of structural weaknesses. The lengths she goes to in order to ensure her trio of teens are out at night (under starlight) in a machine (Alan’s car), far from home, near the climax of the novel, felt a bit too much like an author over-thinking things (they run out of petrol, then a tyre blows). And the chapter where Dr Nick and Miss Cotterel theorise on the nature of the neuron-like protozoa that have taken up residence in Jane’s brain relies a bit too much on some far-fetched guesses being taken by two scientists as the only likely explanation.

But it’s a short novel, and I enjoyed it for how much it fits in with the other books of the time. The constant tensions between the characters have that post-Kitchen Sink era air of gritty social realism, as do their goodnatured but cranky attempts not to give in to class resentments (Alan always has money, Jimmy never does); the writing style has that poetic terseness writers on the literary side of late 60s/early 70s YA seem to slip into (Garner eventually taking it to the extreme, but it’s also there in John Gordon and William Mayne); and there’s another theme of early 70s YA, broken families and the added emotional burden this places on adolescents who not only have to deal with puberty, but some sort of supernatural/science-fictional menace as well. (And Jane’s “power of the stars” feels very much like that horror trope that became increasingly prevalent in the 70s, of what I might call Teenage Telekinetic Breakout Disorder, or Carrie’s Syndrome.)

It’s perhaps more interesting when read as part of Lawrence’s own body of work and her development as a writer (I now want to read her first novel, the more purely SF Andra), or as one more part of early 70s rural fantasy (folk fantasy, as it might be called), so I wouldn’t recommend The Power of Stars as a first read if you’re interested in Lawrence, but it’s by no means a bad book. I’m still not entirely sure about the rabbit, though…

First broadcast in six parts from 19th September to 24th October 1976, Raven was written by Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray, the duo who also brought us Children of the Stones. And Trevor Ray has another connection to 70s kids’ telefantasy, in that he acted in an episode of Sky, playing the sinisterly avian Rex. Perhaps that gave him the seed of the idea of creating a series called Raven.

The series is named after its main character, Raven (played by Phil Daniels, best known now for Quadrophenia two years later, and Blur’s “Parklife” 17 years later), a 15 or 16 year-old orphan (found as a baby in an earthworks maze, watched over by a raven) on trial release from a borstal. He is to spend time with archeologist Professor James Young (played by Michael Aldridge, later Professor Diggory in the BBC’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) and his ornithologist wife (Patsy Rowlands, of Carry On fame). The Professor is currently investigating a subterranean cave system he believes to have been an ancient sacred site associated with King Arthur. (It also has a circle of standing stones above it, which he claims to be the origin of the idea of the Round Table.)

The Professor, though, only has a month to finish his work, because the government is putting plans in motion to turn the caves into a containment site for nuclear waste, and to build a reprocessing plant above it. Raven, on first hearing this from the project’s manager, Bill Telford, is all for it: “No good living in the past. Got to look after the future, right?” But the Professor is horrified. “Why are you talking like the establishment?” he demands (knowing how best to win over this rebellious young man), and gives him a pile of reading about the site, saying he should be better informed.

Raven has already had some visionary moments in which he’s seen the old professor as a bird — a merlin, in fact. Now he goes down into the caves and has a vision of himself as King Arthur, who presses his thumb to Raven’s forehead, leaving him with the astrological mark of Pluto between his eyes. From that point on, Raven is committed to saving the caves.

He falls in with local cub reporter Naomi Grant, who as well as junior reporting jobs (where she always has to follow the editorial line, however much she’s personally against it, and at the moment the paper is for the nuclear waste dump), does the paper’s horoscopes. When the professor gets her to recognise the symbols carved outside each cave as ancient versions of our modern astrological symbols (Gemini once being a giant, and Cancer a ship, apparently), she realises Bill Telford’s men are trying to tunnel between two caves whose astrological energies are in direct opposition. She’s convinced it will lead to disaster. Bill doesn’t listen — who would? — and so gets trapped in a cave when the new tunnel’s roof collapses. Naomi and Raven pick a more astrologically-harmonious route into the now-sealed cave, and though the surveyor doesn’t think it will work, it does. The rescued Bill emerges with the sign of Pluto on his forehead, converted to the anti-nuclear-waste point of view…

There’s a way of looking at Raven as a sort of reverse folk-horror. The cave site is sacred, and must be protected, and to ensure people protect it they’re forcibly initiated into its cult, usually by being trapped in the caves, leading to a vision of King Arthur pressing the mark of Pluto onto their foreheads. After this, they change their minds about the nuclear waste site. Professor Young is the head of this coven, and it seems even more folk-horror-coven-like when we learn the local vicar is one of his main allies. There’s even a night-time gathering of all the main players at the sacred stones, and a hint of ancient ritual sacrifice when a skull (of a young male of Raven’s height and age) is found in one of the inner caves.

Key to the Professor’s efforts is convincing young Raven he’s the reincarnation of King Arthur — or, at least, the latest incarnation, as “Some people believe that Arthur was the name of the office, rather than the man himself.” Raven is, at first, resistant:

[Professor Young]: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”

[Raven]: “Yeah, and some thrust it right back again.”

But he comes round, not because he believes he’s King Arthur, but because he believes in the cause, and finds that other people are listening to him: “First time in my life I’ve ever felt useful.” This is the only one of these 70s’ kids’ telefantasy shows I can think of to so heavily feature the media as a necessary part of its story. Raven not only has to recruit the local newspaper to get his message across, but, through TV man Clive Castle, the general public:

[Raven]: “They’re destroying the countryside to make way for a lot of industrial garbage. They’re starting a dangerous game with no idea how it’s going to finish. And they’re dumping a lot of poisonous waste which might top us all one day…”

[Clive Castle]: “So you see yourself as the guardian of the future, as the representative of a younger generation who’s battling against the shortsightedness of your elders?”

[Raven]: “Listen, mate. We’re responsible for the kids who ain’t even born yet.”

This echoing of ancient mythic patterns in the modern world recalls The Owl Service, but in this case in mostly a benevolent way (Raven does get its replaying of the Guinevere story, though). I did find people seemed all too eager to see Raven as a new King Arthur, but for me it was the astrological stuff that was the least convincing. Perhaps if a little more effort had been made to tie modern astrology with ancient Earth-mysteries and ley line energies it might have seemed a little less ridiculous that knowing the incompatibility of two birth signs could lead to predicting a rock fall and saving someone trapped by it. Perhaps that’s just because I find one sort of nonsense (ley lines) a little less nonsensical than another (astrology), but to me it seemed Raven took the Earth-mysteries-type mysticism of Sky, Children of the Stones and The Changes just a little bit too far into the ridiculous — not because it is unbelievable, but because it was too convenient, story-wise.

It’s the acting that makes Raven work. Phil Daniels is properly both annoying and charismatic as a spiky, street-wise rebel, a ne’er-do-well with his head on straight, and you never doubt he might actually become the sort of public leader he does become. It can almost make you ignore the fact that the story culminates not in the sort of exciting confrontation with dark mystical forces you find in Sky, Children of the Stones and The Changes, but in a public hearing in a local government hall — and that the tactics our heroes use basically involve the sort of mind-control most often associated with the villains in this kind of story.

Was Raven starting to show the limits of this brief cycle of Earth-mystery-inspired kids’ telefantasy? I think The Moon Stallion, which came two years later, showed there was more to be mined from this particular subterranean strata, though perhaps that show’s being set in the past helped. Still, Raven’s an interesting entry in this little sub-genre.