Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest by Olaf Stapledon
157 pages
Published 1935
Read from August 17 to August 18
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
The period between the heyday of Verne and Wells and the early stirrings of the New Wave is unknown territory for me. With the exception of a handful of short stories from various compilations (and of course The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings), I don't believe I've read any piece of speculative fiction that falls between The Food of the Gods and The Man in the High Castle. Someday I'll attempt an exhaustive catalog of every book I've ever read, and no doubt discover some forgotten historical footnote, but in general it's safe to say I'm as ignorant of pulp era and Golden Age sci-fi as I am of anything.
Olaf Stapledon frequently gets name-dropped as a Golden Age grand master, usually in the context of lamentation about his works (and his wider period of sci-fi evolution) are largely forgotten by the modern generation of genre readers and writers. When Julian May's narrator in Intervention goes on at some length about the influence of Odd John, I had to bite. I probably should have begun with Last and First Men, but that's on its way to my library as we speak, so that'll be one of my next books, and I won't miss out on what is supposedly Stapledon's best work.
Odd John is definitively a Big Lecture on the Human Condition sort of novel, a didactic exercise on the supposed deep truths and spiritual insights of a mental superman coming of age between the World Wars. Straining a bit at the size of the conceit, Stapledon deftly avoids committing any of these deep truths to paper, his narrator hand-waving the titular John's enlightenment away as too vast and profound to be grasped by mere Homo sapiens. In this Odd John conforms with Siddhartha and Lost Horizon in the Interwar spiritual novel tradition, while stylistically bridging the didactic social sci-fi of Wells with the psychic superman glut of the New Wave. It's a slim volume devoted mostly to John's harangues on the inferiority of the mere human brain, offering little to support Homo superior's elevation beyond a general sense of "Trust me, it is so cool." John manages to be somewhat absorbing despite all that, and I'm by no means dissuaded from plunging onward into the rather random assortment of Stapledon titles available through my library system.
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