Olaf Stapledon, page 1 of 2

I’ve looked at cosmic horror before on this blog in the case of individual works—is Stephen King’s Revival cosmic horror? or Lem’s Solaris?—and certainly some of my all-time favourites, from Alien to HP Lovecraft, are, but I’ve never been sure I could properly define “cosmicism”, or say why the horror in cosmic horror is “cosmic”. Ellen Greenham, in this 2022 book from Hippocampus Press (full title: After Engulfment: Cosmicism and Neocosmicism in H. P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, and Frank Herbert), on the other hand, can:

“The principal tenets of cosmicism are that the universe operates as an indifferent mechanism, without purpose or direction, and the human creature is not only insignificant but exists as a biological mutation or accident of elemental and chemical stellar processes.”

I’d add—or at least, this is an aspect I’ve latched onto in my look at, say, Roadside Picnic—that cosmicism presents the universe as being vast, and far weirder than we could ever expect, to the point of being overwhelmingly incomprehensible. (Though this could be seen as a bleaker variant on the sense-of-wonder of science fiction.)

In my Mewsings on Stapledon’s Last and First Men I called cosmicism the religious aspect of atheism, but I might instead say it’s a worldview not just with no God, but with an oppressive God-shaped absence, to the point where the universe seems not merely indifferent but actively hostile. As Greenham says:

“The hallmark of cosmicism embodied within Lovecraft’s corpus is the apparent lack of anything even remotely like human emotion and morality being employed in the process of human eradication. Lovecraft’s others simply swat the human creature as that creature in turn swats flies.”

Why “cosmic”, then? To the Ancient Greeks, cosmos was opposed to chaos; it was order and certainty. The idea of the “cosmos”, then, relies on having a cosmological model—an ordered mental model of how the universe works. But, as Greenham points out, such models, however accurate they may seem, inevitably fail, for “a cosmological model, like a map, is only one particular view and not the territory itself”. For her, there is always an ineradicable degree of chaos that makes the universe ultimately resist any attempt to turn it into a tame and knowable cosmos.

The horror of cosmic horror is all about incursions from the “outside”—the depths of space, other dimensions, other orders of being—but this “outside”, as Greenham says, “is simply the territory beyond the parameters of the cosmos”. “Outside” means outside one’s cosmological model. The thing that turns this into horror (as opposed to the sense-of-wonder of discovering something new), is that the outsideness is so extreme it doesn’t merely reveal flaws in the cosmological model, it shatters it so thoroughly that it destroys the protagonists’ very notion of themselves.

In cosmic horror there are usually two outcomes: madness or death. In this book, Greenham maps out an expansion of the ideas of cosmic horror into what she calls neocosmicism, and adds a third response, engulfment, a term that still captures something of the sense of fear and loss of self (as experienced by many a Lovecraft protagonist), but points to a way “the human creature” (as she refers to you and me) can move beyond a merely negative outcome:

“By choosing to be engulfed by the universe, rather than simply observe it from a distance, the human creature in neocosmicism can move beyond what stops and destroys it, to enter a vitalised engagement with the universe and with others.”

Being engulfed, one may drown, or one may (like the protagonist of Lovecraft’s “Shadow Over Innsmouth”) be transformed and take to the alien environment as one’s new home. But the transformation must be profound.

The primary Western cosmological model for centuries has been what Greenham calls “the Genesis model”, where humanity, God’s favoured creation, is “significant in its world”, and where there is a “moral code bestowed upon it by that God”. When this was assailed by the key ideas of the 19th and 20th centuries (the revolutions started by Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and others), it was replaced by “the Machine Universe”, one “without emotion or human morality”, ruled by “the cold equations” of the laws of physics. Caught between these two worldviews, you’re in what Greenham calls “the Schizophrenic Universe”, which is “no longer one stable thing or another”, “an alien and schizophrenic landscape that has become strangely separate from the human creature within it”. The way forward to a new understanding—or to a new way of relating to the universe without a full understanding—one must face the “gaping black hole between cosmos and universe” which Greenham calls the void. For, “the light,” she says, “can never be truly understood without knowledge of the darkness also”.

The void, of course, seems empty, meaningless, a frightening vacuum. But it has a useful purpose in this neocosmological process. Like Nietzsche’s abyss, its job is not so much to be stared into as to stare back: “The void is thus named because its function is to make void, to empty the full; to turn the human creature into a tabula rasa.” To accept a new notion of what the universe is, you must—painfully, if necessary—get rid of the old notions first, even if it means throwing everything out.

At this point, the universe becomes “a proving ground”, where “the human creature enters a relationship of ‘lethal proximity’ with the universe”. A prime example is the planet Arrakis in Herbert’s Dune, whose harsh conditions have resulted in the super-tough Fremen, a people who’ve learned to live with the “cold equations” of their particular environment. The apparent hostility of the universe, then, becomes a spur: the successful entrant into the proving ground is “facing imminent threat so that… [it] might also engage its vitality”. Ultimately, though, the idea is not to just become a machine for survival, but a human being that survives, one that seeks to find “whether it is possible to survive in the cold equations with emotion and empathy intact”.

All this points to a new relationship with the vast, sometimes hostile-seeming universe. Against the apparent insignificance of humanity that’s a given in cosmic horror, Greenham’s neocosmicism points to how the very hostility of the “proving ground” can lead to a new sense of significance: the proving ground may weed out those who can’t survive its ultra-harsh conditions, but “Gardeners do not remove weeds for the sake of the removal”. There is, then, an ultimate aim: to turn oneself into a creature that fits this universe, perhaps even adds something to it. This can, Greenham says, even be a liberating view, for:

“…in remaining indifferent to whether the human creature succeeds or fails, the universe nullifies any sense that creature might have of striving for a final result, thereby releasing that creature from the requirement—real or illusory—to be bound by a sense of finitude.”

In the end, the idea is to no longer see the individual human being as a thing contained in, and oppressed by, a vast universe, like a pea rattling around in an enormous box, but as a part of it, and perhaps even (in John Wyndham’s phrase) “the crown of creation”—the human that triumphs against incredible odds, and retains their humanity, and not because a god deemed that it was always going to be so, but through their own efforts.

Reading Greenham’s book, I kept thinking of one author she doesn’t mention, Olaf Stapledon, in particular his Last and First Men. Stapledon has some of his future races of humankind actively engage with the sort of ideas Greenham writes about. They see their role as surviving in the universe as it is, not as they wish it to be, and being prepared to accept that the end must ultimately be a tragedy—the universe’s “cold equations” (literally cold: they face the dying of the sun) will win out, but in the meantime, their role is to seek the fulfilment of their particular nature within this universe: “man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills”. And Stapledon adds something I think Greenham doesn’t mention, as far as I recall, a willed returned to that science-fictional sense of wonder. Stapledon’s future humans “render the universe that intelligent worship which, they felt, it demanded”, and learn to “admire the Real as it is revealed to us, and salute its dark-bright form with joy”.

It’s an excellent study of an idea that could really be applied to so much I’ve previously written about on this blog. (Reading it didn’t require an extensive knowledge of the writers she covers—I’m certainly not very familiar with Heinlein, or with Herbert beyond the first Dune book. I’m tempted now to read some more in the Dune series; not so much with Heinlein.)

You can hear Greenham interviewed on episode 152 of the Udda Ting Podcast (don’t worry about the Swedish intro, the interview itself is in English), on most podcast apps or here at Soundcloud.

First published in 1944, Sirius shares a lot, in its themes, with the previous decade’s Odd John — Stapledon even referred to it as “my ‘Odd Dog’ novel’” — but with the crucial difference that, whereas John is a human who far exceeds normal human levels of intelligence, Sirius is a dog raised to (high, but normal) human-level intelligence. So, he isn’t going to be creating any super-scientific technologies or casually getting rich through ultra-shrewd investments. And the limitations placed upon him by his body (his lack of hands), and the equally debilitating limits that come from living in a society where he, as an animal, has no rights, and where he’s even more likely than Odd John to be regarded as freakish and unnatural, are brought that much more to the fore.

(At a number of points, the tone of the book reminded me of William Horwood’s novel Skallagrigg, whose two main characters have cerebral palsy, and have to deal with both their own less-able bodies and being treated as inferior to other human beings. Stapledon’s novel could easily be read, metaphorically, as being about physical disability.)

Before he’s born, the puppy Sirius is injected with hormones to promote the growth of his brain. He’s not the only dog to be treated, but the others either only develop remarkable-for-dogs but less-than-human intelligence (they can’t talk, for instance), or die young. A crucial part of Sirius’s story, though, is that his creator, the physiologist Thomas Trelone, decides to raise this dog within his own family, as much like one more human child as possible. Trelone’s wife, Elizabeth, has just given birth to a daughter, Plaxy, so the two are raised as, in effect, siblings, and develop an almost twin-like intimacy, with little wordless calls they use as their own private language, and so on.

It’s not long, though, before Sirius becomes aware of his limitations. Having no hands, he’s stymied in what he can do — and, thus, is also limited in how he can use his intelligence to explore the world as his foster-sister does. His eyesight is poor, too (he’s also completely colourblind), though his far superior sense of smell gives him access to an entirely new perspective on the world than his human family possess.

Trelone has plans for his canine prodigy. After as much of a human-level education as he can get (Sirius can’t go to school, and Plaxy soon tires of passing on the lessons she’s learned every time she gets home), he’ll be sent to a nearby farm to gain some experience as a sheepdog. After this, he’s to come to Cambridge and be more thoroughly tested in the lab, while working to devote himself to the field Trelone thinks will be most suited to him, animal psychology.

Sirius suffers the first two stages as much as he can — working on the farm, he has to pretend to be just one more smarter-than-average dog who can’t speak — but after a while at Cambridge he begins to develop his own ideas. One such impulse comes from moments in which he has felt a wider, and bleaker, sense of his place in a vast, indifferent universe:

“Sometimes when Sirius was out on the hills alone in the winter dawn, examining the condition of the snow and looking for sheep in distress, the desolation of the scene would strike him with a shivering dread of existence. The universal carpet of snow, the mist of drifting flakes, the miserable dark sheep, pawing for food, the frozen breath on his own jaws, combined to make him feel that after all this was what the world was really like; that the warm fireside and friendly talk at Garth were just a rare accident…”

This prompts him to want more than Trelone’s purely scientific education, and he starts to ask about religion. He’s sent to spend some time with a cousin of Trelone’s wife, a priest who works among the poor around London’s docks. Sirius soon realises he needs to find his own mix of these two approaches to life, the religious and the scientific, and settles on that very Stapledonian word “spirit”, which crops up in the future histories Last and First Men and Star Maker, meaning that sense of a thing that transcends the merely physical circumstances of life, yet, unlike religious ideas of a soul, comes with no guarantees or guidelines. Whatever it is, it’s still evolving, and needs work. Like those future races Stapledon wrote about in his first novel, Sirius finds “in fate’s very indifference… a certain exhilaration” — a challenge to create his own meaning, rather than the despair of meaninglessness. By the end of the novel, the dog has come to embody Stapledon’s ideal of how to live as an intelligent being in the modern world:

“[Plaxy] saw that Sirius, in spite of his uniqueness, epitomized in his whole life and in his death something universal, something that is common to all awakening spirits on earth, and in the farthest galaxies. For the music’s darkness was lit up by a brilliance which Sirius had called ‘colour,’ the glory that he himself, he said, had never seen. But this, surely, was the glory that no spirits, canine or human, had ever clearly seen, the light that never was on land or sea, and yet is glimpsed by the quickened mind everywhere.”

As the novel enters its final quarter, it returns to a theme from Sirius’s early life, the close relationship with his human foster-sister Plaxy. The two have grown apart, tortured by the differences between them, yet always drawn back to the unity they call “Sirius-Plaxy”. It’s here the novel presents its most challenging aspect, as Stapledon takes their relationship into a physical intimacy which, although strongly implied in the published text, was apparently more forthright still in the draft he first submitted.

I have to admit it’s this part that comes close to breaking the book’s spell, for me. Stapledon heads into this sexual territory as though it were the natural, even only, next stage in the couple’s relationship, when it should surely be possible that the two would feel absolutely no sexual pull towards one another, being of different species. And if that weren’t enough, there would surely be the incest taboo of their having been raised as siblings. It feels, though, that this is an area Stapledon is intent on exploring — not for its salacious aspects, which aren’t dwelled upon, but as it allows him to philosophise on love, and how it can thrive on difference:

[Plaxy:] “We are bound to hurt one another so much, again and again. We are so terribly different.”

[Sirius:] “Yes… But the more different, the more lovely the loving.”

For Stapledon, the key point is “the fundamental identity-in-diversity of all spirits”. And this is needed to combat Sirius’s alienation:

“There is no place for me in man’s world, and there is no other world for me. There is no place for me anywhere in the universe.”

To which Plaxy counters:

“I’m your home, your footing in the world.”

(There is, apparently, another thing that could have driven Stapledon to have this novel contain a forbidden love-relationship. In his biography of Stapledon, Robert Crossley says that parts of the book were inspired by an affair Stapledon had around this time.)

The book received a good amount of attention on its release. The Times Literary Supplement named it their “Novel of the Week”. The Western Mail’s H M Dowling brought in comparisons with Swift, Shelley (Percy Bysshe, though those with Mary are there, too), and Robert Louis Stevenson. Robert Lynd of The Daily News was less impressed:

“The book, repellant as the exhibitions of freak sideshows in old fair grounds, is written in the semi-scientific language of a work of popular psychology and in this, perhaps, Mr. Stapledon sins against more than the dignity of science.”

While L P Hartley, in The Sketch, was mixed. For him, “As an allegory of the spirit, tormented in the search for a fulfilment it cannot find, and of the individual persecuted by the mob, there is much to be said for this book.” Yet, “The physical aspects and embarrassments of Sirius’s peculiar make-up are ruthlessly insisted upon, with a complete—indeed, with a positive and challenging—lack of humour.” Ultimately, for him, Stapledon “fails because he cannot effect a unity between fantasy and realism.”

I think Sirius is the most accessible of Stalpedon’s novels yet. It contains the same themes — of the spirit in a constant struggle against an indifferent fate, and exalting in the challenge of life even though it knows it must fail — as his earlier novels, but couched in, oddly enough, far more humanly-relatable characters. Stapledon’s long-distance view and challenging moral stance is still here, to some extent, but so are thoughts about love, loyalty, family, and the business of making a living, which didn’t feature in the future histories. Its ultimate message — “the most valuable social relationships were those between minds as different from one another as possible yet capable of mutual sympathy” — might have been brought out by the war that was raging as the book was written, but it remains a valid idea to this day, just as Sirius remains a readable book.

Stapledon’s third novel, Odd John, began life as an appendix to his second, Last Men in London (1932), a short piece that was called “John’s Story”, which was never published. (In a neat chain effect, Stapledon’s next novel, Star Maker, which he began working on before Odd John was finished, can be linked to this one, as one thing the titular John leaves behind at the end is “an amazing document… purporting to give an account of the whole story of the Cosmos” — a pretty accurate description of Star Maker.)

Odd John (published in 1935) tells the story of the (short) life of John Wainwright. Born to a British GP and his Scandinavian wife after an eleven month gestation (Stapledon makes no mention of how difficult the birth must have been, particularly considering the baby’s outsized head), John proves to be mentally quick but physically slow to develop, in part because his increased brain-power means he has much greater control over his bodily processes. So, we’re told, he “actually had to learn to breathe”, while his walking, when it finally begins, “was probably seriously delayed by [his discovery of] mathematics”. Nicknamed Odd John, he’s obviously physically different, with particularly large eyes and a large head (the cover for the first edition is closely based on Stapledon’s own painting of his protagonist, so, however cartoony it seems, it gives a good idea of how odd Odd John is supposed to look). He is, in fact, an example of Homo Superior, the next stage in human evolution.

The novel recounts, first of all, John’s self-education and his attempts to understand those peculiar things called human beings he finds himself living among; then, when he realises the differences are too great — when he announces “I’m through with your bloody awful species” — his contacting the few other examples of his own kind, and their attempt to set up a colony on a remote island where they can study, develop, and seek to fulfil their potential away from the judgements, incomprehension, and inevitable conflict with the “sapients” — the rest of humanity.

It’s a very Wyndhamesque novel, though with a colder, more satirical tone. With its tale of strange (bleach-blond, in both cases) children whose evolutionary advancement (or, with Wyndham, alien origin) puts them at odds with the rest of humanity, leading to isolation and eventual conflict, there’s an obvious parallel with The Midwich Cuckoos. But there’s also a touch of The Chrysalids in John’s telepathic reaching out to others of his kind, and with Chocky, too, in the way John’s parents, like Matthew’s in the latter novel, decide not to bring their prodigy of a child to the attention of the authorities, for fear he’ll be taken away and experimented on (and there was me thinking suspicion of governments was a Cold War thing).

But Odd John is very much a between-the-wars novel. For one thing, there’s its attitude, prevalent among the intellectual circles of the 1930s, that it was nationalism that was to blame for the coming conflict (here, John says: “A nation, after all, is just a society for hating foreigners…”). Its protagonist is also a distinctly pre-Nazi superman, in that Stapledon presents him quite coolly making ethical choices that, a decade later, it would be unthinkable to present without explicit condemnation. In fact, it’s John’s ethics that, to me, stand out as the most evident point Stapledon is making about his “next step” in human evolution. Stapledon’s narrator — in his own words “a rather half-hearted free-lance journalist” and “a very incompetent biographer” — has a tendency to downplay, if not entirely excuse, what are in fact acts of cold-blooded murder, incest, the rape and vivisection of women, and even genocide by either John or his small community of “supernormals”, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kind of way.

So, what’s going on here, in a book Stapledon subtitled “A Story between Jest and Earnest”? Are we supposed to take John’s occasional and self-justified acts of inhumanity — or, as he sees it, of his true humanity applied to a race (us) that cannot be called fully human — as part of a rollicking adventure, a light jest about a big-brained superman who in earlier chapters dismisses all our science, religion, psychiatry and poetry as the products of a race that’s “not really grown up”? I think, if anything, Stapledon’s calling his novel a “Jest” is defensive — a brush-off in case we really are offended. But what he wants to do is shock us. Stapledon wants us to realise how alien, how inhuman (in our terms), the next stage in evolution might be, and the best way to do that is to present it treating us as though we’re so much less than it, less than its own definition of human.

(Another take is that the narrator — whom Odd John nicknames “Fido” as though to underline how we’re all below his degree of human — may in fact be under some sort of psychic-hypnotic influence. We learn, later in the novel, that John and his fellow supernormals can bamboozle normal humans with the power of their minds, and John wants “Fido” to write his biography — not so we norms can better understand him, but so the next wave of supernormals knows a little more what to expect — so it’s in his interest to downplay the more negative aspects of John’s career. At the same time, John is presented as engaged, curious, open, personable, and even kind, so it’s sometimes hard to equate the persona with the occasional atrocities.)

What is this next stage of human evolution anyway? Right from the start, John has an ambivalence about not only the life and sufferings of we human beings, but his own, too. He laughs at his own pains and misfortunes, seeing them from a cosmic perspective, even while in the throes of suffering them. This is an attitude found in the more advanced beings in the other two Stapledon novels I’ve covered, Last and First Men and Star Maker, in both of which our more evolved descendants learn to see their tragedies, even their own coming extinction, as necessary events that “deepened and quickened the universe” itself.

Living among the community of supernormals, the narrator is given a glimpse of what Homo Superior (and, presumably, Stapledon) regards as the true measure of an evolved outlook:

“The true purpose of the awakened spirit… is twofold, namely to help in the practical task of world-building, and to employ itself to the best of its capacity in intelligent worship.”

(“Intelligent worship” meaning something like a combination of scientific understanding, philosophical enquiry, and aesthetic wonder.)

Meanwhile we humans, who think ourselves so advanced, are seen, by these supermen, as “about as clever along [our] own line as the earliest birds were at flight. [We’re] a sort of archaeopteryx of the spirit.”

(Elsewhere, Odd John announces that “Homo sapiens is at the end of its tether”, which resonates with H G Wells’s final, despairing end-of-life outburst against a world that had just been through a second World War, Mind at the End of its Tether (1945).)

Odd John received a fair amount of mainstream attention when it was published. (Stapledon seems to have found a position as a sort of public intellectual, perhaps after the model of Wells.) Not all of the reviews were positive, but nevertheless, Odd John was a book everyone felt the need to remark on, even if only to say how odd it was. The Evening Standard made it their book of the month in October 1935, declaring Stapledon “a writer who has one of the deepest and strangest imaginations of our times: perhaps the deepest, perhaps the strangest.”

It perhaps seems less strange today, now we have supermen of all kinds flooding our culture, but the ethical shocks Stapledon delivers through his seemingly so personable and child-like version of the Übermensch are perhaps the thing that gives this novel a lasting place, not just in science fiction, but the culture as a whole.