"Olaf Stapledon - Bio" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

insists on retaining until her death. "What is the sense of visiting the home of Olaf Stapledon if
the soul and spirit have been removed?" she asks. "People who have some regard, some love,
some feeling for his work can secure small satisfaction in seeing just the physical walls and
furniture of his rooms. But to find his library, scrapbooks, diaries and papers actually still in
place is something else again. The real essence of the man remains.
The nature of some of the serious works he read and which are in his library is shown in the
bibliography of his second book of philosophy, Waking World, published by Methuen in 1934.
These are categorized under the following headings: To-Day and the World-Aim, Human
Personality, Art, Science, History, Philosophy, and Religion. It is of particular interest to note
that Haldane’s Possible Worlds is cited. The preface to Waking World reveals that Stapledon
could accept criticism and was willing to rewrite when necessary, for he twice refers to a rejected
earlier version of the book and credits five people for helping him revise it into acceptable shape:
these included his wife Agnes; E.V. Rieu, a long-time friend and an editor at Methuen; and
Professor L.C. Martin of Liverpool University.
He had similarly credited all these three, and in addition Gerald Heard, in the preface to his
second work of fiction, Last Men in London. (Heard was to become an important writer of
detective stories and science fiction.) This book, originally published by Methuen on October 27,
1932, was reissued at a lower price in 1934; the printings were small, and copies soon became
difficult to find. Perhaps the fact that more than half of it was devoted to the origins, execution,
and aftermath of World War I, told by a Briton from a British viewpoint to a people who had lost
millions of men and no longer constituted the dominant world power, gave it a certain narrow
appeal.
 I say this because, judged by today’s standards, Last Men in London is at best a dull work.
Only the device of telling the story through the observation of an inhabitant of Neptune, two
billion years in the future, gives it any claim to being science fiction. It was certainly
disappointing to those who marveled at the unparalleled scope of Last and First Men and then
found themselves focusing on just a few years of man’s history. There was some outstanding
imaginative material about the Neptunian world in the early and last chapters, but those between
were outdated before they appeared.
We find the method which was the entire thrust of A Man Divided utilized here for the first
time. Doltish man bumbles along, has rare flashes of insight that give him an unusually
perceptive view of the human condition, and then lapses back into his customary mindless
behavior. This supplements the ability of the protagonist to enter the minds of others and see
events briefly from their viewpoints. All this is brought about through the agency of the last
human race on the planet Neptune, which is exploring and influencing the past. Its motive is to
give those it contacts a clearer perspective of their world, themselves, and their potentialities.
Yet, as the book ends, Stapledon tells us that these Last Men are already in their own decline and
are descending into a final period of mental and physical degeneration. Man is being advised,
then, by a being that may no longer be his superior. Why listen to a recital of the causes,
meaning, and results of World War I from one who may be no less confused than his readers?
Interestingly, however, Last Men in London does furnish us a sort of prelude to Stapledon’s
Odd John. This is in the form of the mentally superior youngster Humpty, who theorizes that he
is the first of a superior, if not entirely different, race of humans. He is convinced he must either
lead the human race or destroy it and create a new species. Humpty, who has a grotesque
physique, dies without achieving his aim, but the protagonist of the story, Paul, feels that he was
a mutant with the capability of raising mankind to a new level.
Considering that it was a patchwork of odds and ends rather than a unified work, Last Men in
London received more critical acclaim than it deserved. Reviews were chiefly confined to
England, for there was not to be an American printing of the book for forty years. Nevertheless,
there is one chapter of considerable interest for the insight it gives into Stapledon’s four years in