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Contexts

Peculiar Lives

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PECULIAR LIVES

CONTEXTS

1950: THE EUGENIC UTOPIA

As I’ve said in the Afterword to Peculiar Lives, it’s my sincere hope that readers will be able to experience my novella in isolation from its literary influences. The book is designed to stand alone, and if it doesn’t then I’ve failed to achieve something which I set out to do¹.

However. The novella wears its debt to the novelist Olaf Stapledon on its sleeve, to say the least, and it’s deliberately immersed, both stylistically and in terms of theme and content, in the British tradition of the ‘scientific romance’ – the intellectual science fiction of the pre- and inter-War years.

I’m more familiar with this milieu than most, having written in detail about the fiction of (among others) HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw, CS Lewis, Aldous Huxley and, of course, Stapledon himself, as part of my doctoral thesis. I don’t expect my readers to be similarly conversant. So here – purely, it must be said, for the entertainment of those who wish to delve a little deeper into the book’s themes – are some notes relating the novella to this cultural background.

As the Afterword suggests, ideas of long-term social planning and the biological perfectibility of ‘mankind’ had become an intellectual commonplace after the First World War. Perhaps, as my character Gideon Beech suggests, it was the War itself – an evident and horrific failure of humanity on the part of much of Europe’s population – which made such ideas so appealing. However, they had already been apparent in embryo in late Victorian imperialistic attitudes, and in the early models of evolution which saw humanity’s development as an ‘ascent’ from the status of the animals.

Certainly these and similar notions were highly popular among the intellectuals of the day. In Gaudy Night (1935), the detective novelist Dorothy L Sayers has a minor character who campaigns for ‘the sterilisation of the unfit, and the encouragement of matrimony amongst the intelligentsia.’ Sayers herself was a Christian humanist, both liberal and humane in her outlook, and Miss Schuster-Slatt’s views are most certainly not hers nor those of her protagonists. Even so, the character is treated as a harmless crank, as comic relief in fact, and not – as a modern novel would surely depict her – as a dangerous madwoman or fanatic.

Similar views were held by many among the literati of Europe and America, as well as scientists such as the Marxist biologist JBS Haldane. Prof John Carey’s book The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992) charts their evolution in the literature of the time, particularly in the works of Wells, Shaw, DH Lawrence, Graham Greene and various writers of the Bloomsbury set². What Carey does not mention is that this complex of ideas was particularly prevalent in the science fiction of the era, which as a future-oriented genre paid particularly close attention to the question of humanity’s fulfilment, or otherwise, of its social and biological potential.

One manifestation of these ideas in SF was the prevalence of the ‘superman’ story, wherein a ‘highly evolved’ and superior human being is born, usually by a genetic accident, and demonstrates his superiority to contemporary humanity before (usually) they kill him. The implication is that contemporary humanity is not yet ready to face its responsibilities, but that the superman’s day will come. The classic of this sub-genre is JD Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911), after which the ‘Hampdenshire Programme’ in Peculiar Lives is named³.

There were other manifestations, however. Much futuristic fiction of the time portrays (usually approvingly) extensively thought-out programmes for the sociological and scientific ‘improvement’ of humanity. The aim of these is usually to improve people morally, as well as physically and intellectually: to create, as Beech suggests, a world in which the horrors of the Great War could never recur. This is, of course, a long-term end, and so far as it goes an admirable one. It is the means which the authors usually suggest for attaining it which tend to horrify the modern reader.

The usual proposal – seen to its fullest extent in works like Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come (1933) – was for the establishment of a global scientific elite who would take over the responsibility for ‘directing’ the masses. Their enlightened will would be enforced, both politically in the short term with education and indoctrination, and biologically in the long term with eugenics and (what we would now refer to as) genetic engineering.

The parallels with the principles and methods which informed Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich are obvious (a point which Carey’s book makes rather heavy-handedly, by analysing Mein Kampf (1926) alongside the work of the British intellectuals). The Nazis’ brainwashing of the younger generation of Germans, their attempts to remove from the gene-pool all those whom they considered unfit, their Nietszchean cult of the superman and even their rhetoric of a society which would last for a thousand years, are all profoundly reminiscent of the programmes which Wells and others had been formulating in their fiction.

This is not to say that Wells and co were Nazis themselves, nor even necessarily right-wing in their outlook⁴. Most certainly the racial premises on which Hitler based his Final Solution would not have presented themselves to these writers in the same terms. While the idea that the different ‘races’ of humanity had different intrinsic characteristics was a commonplace of the time, the proposition that certain races were essentially inferior (or even evil), to the extent that they must be wiped out, was one that most contemporary intellectuals would certainly have blanched at.

Nor is it the case that such assumptions were universally accepted, or that such programmes of futurological planning had no critics. Huxley’s dystopia Brave New World (1932) famously presents a future based on precisely these lines as being a living hell, while Lewis was vocal on the faults of what he called the ‘metabiological heresy’.

Nevertheless, in working to generate a cultural climate in which such ideas were admired, in proselytising so enthusiastically for a eugenic solution to the problem of building a utopia for humanity, Wells and his disciples must bear some portion of the responsibility for making the Holocaust possible. Ironically, their crime was one of lack of imagination. The real-world implications of the philosophies which they had expressed in fiction – and in particular the extensive and horrific human suffering which these implications entailed – seem to have been beyond their ability to predict.

* * *

In Peculiar Lives, the general rule is that writers who were dead by 1950, when the narrative is supposedly written, are referred to by their real names and identities. HG Wells (1866-1946), in particular, is mentioned repeatedly – it would have been impossible to discuss the history of British science fiction without mentioning him by name – and indeed The Time Machine (1896) is quoted directly on p72, as an example of Victorian thinking in SF (This was a somewhat quixotic decision on my part, as – in contrast with the Stapledon quotes, which Olaf Stapledon's son John Stapledon kindly allowed me to use for free, the 44-word Wells quote cost me £65 in copyright permisssions.) Authors who were still alive in 1950 appear in the novella under fictional identities: George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) appears as Gideon Beech, CS Lewis (1898-1963) as John Cleavis⁵, and, of course, Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) becomes (with certain caveats laid out in the Afterword) my narrator, Erik Clevedon.

Stapledon was a literary disciple of Wells, and his fiction was firmly of the eugenicist-utopian school of thought. Last and First Men (1930) describes, as part of the vast sweep of future human history with which it deals, numerous occasions when ‘Man’ betters himself through programmes of selective breeding, genetic engineering, educational indoctrination and, on occasion, wholesale genocide. While the negative aspects of these are acknowledged (the ethnic cleansing of the natives of Venus, for instance, is a decision which agonises the high-minded Fifth Men and which blights the lives of their immediate successors) they are seen ultimately as mere episodes in humanity’s noble struggle to achieve its evolutionary destiny, the utopian society of the Last Men on Neptune, billions of years in the future. Star Maker (1937) reveals that many other species in Stapledon’s fictional universe have gone through similar processes, giving rise to harmonious and godlike group-minds which come to dominate whole galaxies.

One chapter of Last Men in London (1932) tells the brief story of an oppressed and embittered ‘superman’ whose values his early-twentieth-century contemporaries can never accept, and the theme of a potential successor to Homo sapiens being born before his time is treated at much greater length in Stapledon’s Odd John (1935). Odd John could well be called my primary source for Peculiar Lives, and it is supposed to correspond closely with the account of Percival’s early life, The Peculiar, to which Clevedon’s narrative is supposedly the sequel⁶.

While certain elements of his history (the farm upbringing, for instance) are more familiar from Stapledon’s Sirius (1944), the story of an augmented dog with human intelligence, my character of Percival the Peculiar is closely based on that of Odd John⁷. Similarly, the far future which Percival and Lechasseur tour in Chapter IV is based – in broad outline if not in detail – on that of Stapledon’s Last Men, whom Sanfeil’s species resemble.

Needless to say, Peculiar Lives takes liberties with Stapledon’s philosophy, primarily in showing how both Clevedon and Percival come to think better of their eugenicist principles. From the moment when he experiences his moral revelation in Chapter V.4, Clevedon becomes my mouthpiece rather than Stapledon’s. The original Odd John dies rather than give up his superhumanist ideals, and – as seen in the second quotation printed as an epigraph to the novella – Stapledon himself continued to espouse eugenics as late as 1948, well after the full extent of the Nazi atrocities had become apparent. The line from Odd John with which I have accompanied this quotation in the book becomes an ironic counterpoint to this.

George Bernard Shaw – in whose voice I had enormous fun writing Chapter III.4 – was another proponent of eugenics. His plays Man and Superman (1903) and Back to Methuselah (1921) are his equivalents of Odd John and Last and First Men: the first portrays a contemporary ‘superman’ from whom future generations may be bred, and the latter a sequence of progressively distant futures which result from such breeding.

Both men were of a mystical bent, but there were marked differences in the speculative theologies of Stapledon and Shaw, which I have Clevedon sum up, as accurately as I was able to make him, on pp64-65. Where Beech talks about ‘the Will of Life’, Shaw wrote of ‘the Life Force’, but otherwise the opinions of Gideon Beech correspond with the ‘genuinely scientific religion’ espoused by Shaw in his lengthy Preface to Back to Methuselah. A few aspects of the future portrayed in the final act of Shaw’s play, ‘As Far As Thought Can Reach’, also find their way into Sanfeil’s world as seen in Chapter IV.

Finally, Lewis – one of the sternest contemporary critics of this strain of scientistic thinking – did indeed see Shaw and Stapledon as subscribing to a joint dogma, one which in his view ran the risk of remaking humanity’s descendants as a species without human values, their good or evil acts lacking any kind of moral dimension because their decisions had been predetermined by their eugenicist ancestors. His own science fiction trilogy – Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945) – savagely satirises the proponents of such ideas.

There are many points on which Lewis and I part company; but ultimately his opinions of the world which Wells, Shaw and Stapledon hoped to usher in are not so very distant from my own. Of these men’s creative imagination, on the other hand, he was a great admirer, as am I.

In the Preface to That Hideous Strength, which draws on many Stapledonian ideas for its inspiration, Lewis wrote that ‘Mr Stapledon is so rich in invention that he can well afford to lend, and I admire his invention (though not his philosophy) so much that I should feel no shame to borrow’. This, as much as the dual quotes from Stapledon himself, could stand as the epigraph to Peculiar Lives.

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NOTES

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