My life in books

Olaf Stapledon is not, I think, particularly well-known these days, nor is his fiction often read. Most science fiction fans have likely heard his name mentioned as one of the early lights in the genre, but don’t go much further. Stapledon was a philosopher as well as an author of fiction, and much if his fiction is engaged in working out scenarios that illustrate some of the ‘great questions’ that philosophy seeks to explore.

Darkness and the Light is for the most part an exploration of an idea that goes back at least as far as Plato’s Republic, if not further - the question of what are the characteristics of the best society for humans to live in. Stapledon was inclined toward socialism as a basis for a good society, though he did not consider himself a Marxist, and was no supporter of the imperialist and militarist formulations of totalitarian socialism that emerged in China and Russia.

In Darkness and the Light, Stapleton imagines two separate futures for humanity, either of which could happen, depending on the choices we make as a global society. One path leads to tyranny, the other to a functional socialist utopia. He begins with a ‘future history’ describing the path of world politics up to a crisis point, at which tine these futures diverge. He calls this the time of balance, in which things could go either way - a concept reminiscent of the principle behind Isaac Asimov’s ‘historical necessity’ as demonstrated in the Foundation series, whose first chapters were also published in 1942.

In Stapledon’s time of balance, Russia has conquered the majority of the planet, with China the only major power free of its domination, controlling Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia. The only country which has maintained independence from both powers is Tibet. It is in the success or failure of a political and social renaissance in Tibet that Stapledon locates his ‘crisis point,’ the point in human history where the future splits into two possibilities which he labels the darkness and the light.

“... the relations of the new Tibet with its two mighty neighbours constituted the occasion on which the great duplication became unmistakable and irrevocable. Henceforth my experience was dual. On the one hand I witnessed the failure of the Tibetan renaissance, and the destruction of the Tibetan people. This was followed by the final Russo–Chinese war which unified the human race but also undermined its capacity. On the other hand I saw the Tibetans create, seemingly in the very jaws of destruction, a community such as man had never before achieved. And this community, I saw, so fortified the forces of the light in the rival empires that the war developed into a revolutionary war which spread over the whole planet, and did not end until the will for the light had gained victory everywhere.”

Stapledon outlines the path toward darkness first. In this future, Chinese psychologists counter the spread of ideas from the Tibetan renaissance by creating a new religion based on acquiescence to the state and the purification of humanity though suffering and cruelty. Both Russia and China wage war against Tibet, which cannot withstand the assault and ultimately capitulates. The country and its people are destroyed. The two superpowers then agree to engage in a limited but long-term war intended to keep their respective peoples engaged and committed. However, over time China, where the doctrine of cruelty has taken precedence over the virtue of subservience - the reverse being true in Russia - slowly gains ground until China emerges as the victor and world ruler. Holding power through fear and sophisticated mind control, and glorifying torture and cruelty, the Chinese Empire slowly declines as its population decreases, natural resources are exhausted, scientific progress fails, the economy falters. Eventually the empire fractures, and humanity slips into a dark age if barbarism from which no escape is possible due to the slow degradation of human beings themselves into a species of limited intelligence and motivation. The end of man comes when a change in the behaviour of rats, making then more aggressive, brings about food shortages and ever increasing numbers of deaths from rat attacks. Thus ends the future of darkness.

Stapledon’s narrator then turns toward the future of the light. In this future, the confidence of those influenced by the Tibetan renaissance gives them courage in the face of persecution and allows them to ridicule and ultimately defeat the religion of cruelty and submission promulgated by the Chinese. The core of the Tibetan renaissance - part philosophy, part faith - which takes hold in the other nations of the world is simple:

“Love, they said, and wisdom are right absolutely. True community of mutually respecting individuals, and also fearless free intelligence and imagination, are right absolutely. And we all knew it. There is one intrinsic good, they said, and one only, the awakened life, the life of love and wisdom.”

Russia wages war against Tibet, but is hampered by numerous rebellions throughout its territories, and by corruption and inefficiency within the war effort itself. Over time the Russian empire disintegrates; many of its territories are seized by China, while a few gain independence and ally with Tibet in the Mountain Federation. Tibet has a more difficult time defending itself against China, but eventually manages, at great cost, to effect a state of truce. During this period, the influence of the Tibetan philosophy continues to spread, quietly eroding the control of the Chinese imperialists over their people. When war came again, despite some serious setbacks, the Federation holds out long enough for the Empire to begin to collapse from within. Much of the world falls into civil and interstate wars and confusion, but over time more and more nations decide to adopt Tibet’s principles and join the Federation. The Light prevails.

Stapledon has his narrator ‘quote’ from the preamble to the new global federation’s constitution:

“We acknowledge that the high goal of all the lives of men is to awaken themselves and one another to love and wisdom and creative power, in service of the spirit. Of the universe we know very little; but in our hearts we know certainly that for all beings of human stature this is the way of life. In service of the spirit, therefore, we the human inhabitants of this planet, unite in a new order, in which every human being, no matter how lowly his nature, shall be treated with respect as a vessel of the spirit, shall be given every possible aid from infancy onwards to express whatever power is in him for bodily and mental prowess, for his own delight and for service of the common life. We resolve that in future none shall be crippled in body or perverted in mind by unwholesome conditions. For this end we declare that in future no powerful individual or class or nation shall have the means, economic or military, to control the lives of men for private gain.”

I must acknowledge here that as a socialist and social justice advocate, these words appeal greatly to me, as does the general shape of the emerging global society the Stapledon goes on to describe in the penultimate, and most political, section of the book - with one very important exceptions.

A recurring theme in the novel is a strongly eugenicist argument that the downfall of civilisations results from intelligent and industrious people choosing to have fewer children while the ‘dullards’ of the world procreate indiscriminately. Stapledon incorporates eugenicist policies in his global utopia, including the forced sterilisation of “defectives and certain types prone to criminality” - a policy that is not only abhorrent, but without any scientific basis.

But Stapledon does not end with his socialist-syndicalist global utopia. The end of the novel delves deeply into metaphysics, positing a vast uncaring and chaotic universe underlying our material one, that resembles more the darkness deemed vanquished than the prevailing light. Humanity engages upon a final struggle, with the very nature of this universe substrate, seeking to bring light to existential darkness. Despite many setbacks, a new form of human evolves to wage this metaphysical war, and our narrator, unable to comprehend the minds of this advanced humanity, can no longer see where the future leads.

This is not a novel as we ordinarily understand the term. There are no characters, no narratives based on personal actions and relationships. Stapledon’s narrator simply offers a sustained description of the events that occur in the two futures he has seen, and of the societies that emerge as a consequence of these events and the forces at work behind them. The metaphysical ending seems rather out of place with the sense of material, historical forces that drive the details of these futures, but does fit into the underlying image of an ongoing struggle between darkness and light.

It’s an interesting read, but not a particularly satisfying one.

One might not think that a trilogy of science fiction books about the various ways one might go about creating a society based on Plato's Republic, and what the outcomes of those societies might look like, is going to be engaging, at times exciting, and hard to put down. And maybe it isn't, if you have little interest about such ideas as justice, the good life, excellence, the nature of conscious self-awareness and the soul, the origin of the universe and the meaning of time.

But since I have a strong interest in these things, and since Jo Walton has, in her Thessaly trilogy, written an amazing set of characters you can't help caring about who take part in explorations of these ideas through debate, daily living, and various travels and adventures, it was probably inevitable that I would fall in love with these somewhat unusual novels.

I've already talked about the first two novels in the trilogy, The Just City and The Philosopher Kings. In the third novel, Necessity, Walton continues her explorations of the deep philosophical questions that have troubled humanity for millennia.

Necessity begins 40 years after Zeus, in order to save Athene's experiment in building a true Platonic society and continue its isolation from human history, has moved all the existing cities to a distant planet and to a time in the 26th century. Survival on Plato, as its new inhabitants have named it, is not as easy as it was on the island of Thera - the climate is colder, and the planet has no indigenous land-based animal life (though it has fish in abundance). But the people of Pluto have prospered, and their cities occupy the planet in peace. Living with them and taking part in Plato's society are two sentient Worker robots that were transported with them, and some members of an alien space-faring race, the Saeli, who find their Platonic ideals appealing.

The narrative that drives the further philosophical explorations Walton engages us in involves the disappearance of the goddess Athene from not only time and space, but the dimensions out of time. When Apollo, returned to his divinity by the death of his human incarnation, Pythias, discovers that he cannot sense Athene anywhere, his decision to search for her becomes a quest to understand the underpinnings of existence and the meaning of life.

This quest is interwoven with the lives of several inhabitants of Plato, key among them: Jason, who operates a fishing boat; Marsilia, one of the consuls of the City - the first Platonic community settled by Athene on Earth - who also works with Jason; Thetis, her sister, who works with the City's children; Hilfa, a young Saeli who is also part of Jason's crew; and Crocus, the first sentient Worker.

The death of Pythias and Apollo's discovery that Athene is lost take place place against the backdrop of an event the Platonians have long anticipated - the arrival of the first spaceship from another planet of humans. The planet's inhabitants must decide whether to follow the advice of Zeus, and present the story of their arrival on Plato as a kind of origin myth, all the while leading the space-faring humans to believe Plato was settled just as any other human colony - or just to tell the truth and let the other humans make of it what they will.

Rounding out this mix of events, Sokrates is returned to the Platonic cities, having been found by Apollo on his quest to find Athene. Not at all changed by having spent time in the Jurassic period, living as the gadfly Athene transformed him into, Sokrates becomes an essential part of the continuing philosophical dialogue that is Plato, and of the lives of the Platonians involved in Apollo's quest.

In Necessity, Walton proposes some possible answers to the questions being asked in these three novels, but also leaves much still to be considered by the reader, just as she gives her characters some degree of closure in their daily lives, while leaving the future open-ended.

The entire trilogy is a kind of experiment, the success of which the reader must judge for themselves. For me, it succeeds gloriously.

The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, Laurence Davis & Peter Stillman (eds.)

I'll admit it, this wasn't an easy book to read, and it took me a long time to go through it, reading one section of an essay at a time and taking more than a few side-trips into the philosophies of the major thinkers of the anarchist movement to fill in some of the gaps. for the most part, I'm still digesting what I've read.

I will say that making my way through these essays has given me a far more profound appreciation of The Dispossessed in particular and LeGuin's way of examining political and philosophical points of view in her work. From now on, I think I will see more - which is saying something, because there's always been a lot to see in her work. I also think that I might want to go back and re-read some of my favourite LeGuin yet again, to see what new thoughts come forth.

Elisabeth Vonarburg, translations by Jane Brierley:
The Silent City
The Maerlande Chronicles

I first read Elisabeth Vonarburg’s The Maerlande Chronicles (published in the US as In the Mother's Land) some years ago. It captured my imagination in a way that no other feminist exploration of a female-dominated society has. It remains my favourite example of the subgenre, more so than other, better-known feminist revisionings of society, be they utopian, dystopian, or somewhere in between.

It’s hard for me to put my finger on just why this book is so meaningful to me in the midst of such powerful works as Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, Suzy McKee Charnas’s Holdfast Chronicles, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or Sheri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country, to name but a few.

Part of it is the mystery, I think - the fact that Vonarburg lets us look at her future society from the inside out and leaves her vision incomplete and unfinished. Vonarburg’s Maerlande is a commonwealth of matriarchal societies at a pivotal point in their history. We know some of what has gone before, but only through the eyes of the characters - we do not know, nor will we ever learn, the uninterpreted truths. We know that changes are coming, from the discovery of new evidence about the past, from explorations planned for the future, from plans old and new only referred to and never described explicitly, but we do not know what those changes will be or how they will affect Maerlande and its people. There are characters whose functions in this change are only partially seen and understood. Vonarburg gives us an image of a future that is as open to speculation, interpretation, and conjecture as any real society is, and furthermore, one in which not only gender roles but gender itself may be less fixed and certain than we, and the women of Maerlande, believe.

Some time after my first reading of The Maerlande Chronicles, I discovered a library copy of The Silent City, which is set in the same universe as a time some centuries before. While the events of The Silent City – set during a period of worldwide social disintegration out of which the commonwealth of Maerlande will some day evolve – illuminated some of the questions, the uncertainties, the mysteries, there was still much that I didn’t have a clear interpretation of.

For some time, I thought this might be due to the fact that I read them in the “wrong” order, so this fall, after finally acquiring my own copy of The Silent City, I decided to read both volumes in order, only to find that the tantalising lack of definitive determination of objective fact remains.

The Silent City is set at the end of technological Civilisation; a plague has swept around the world, disproportionately killing men, and most of humanity is sinking into various forms of barbarism, most of which are violent and patriarchal. At the same time, the last remnants of "civilised" humanity have withdrawn into underground fortresses, from which they send out, from time to time, cyborg observers to watch the disintegration happening around them. The novel tells the story of one of the last inhabitants of the last functioning city, whose genetic experiments may ultimately bring about an unfathomable change in human existence.

The Maerlande Chronicles takes up the story several centuries later. Humanity is recovering from the devastation of the past, although some variation of the old plague remains a threat to all children and men are still in the minority. A commonwealth of matriarchal societies has come into existence, each one somewhat different in the ways it deals with issues of gender, reproduction and leadership, among other aspects of life, but all drawing much of their culture from a key religious event involving a female saviour figure and her apostles. We see the events of the novel from a number of perspectives, one of which may be informed by at least some, if not all, of the information and experience of the key protagonists of the earlier book, but the crucial mysteries of the past – the reality behind the religion of Maerlande – and the future – what will be the ultimate effect on humanity of the combination of the plague and the genetic modifications that are part of the first novel's plot – remain unanswered.

And there is something both comforting and compelling in that uncertainty, because it is so very real.