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- Herausgeber: Cheapest Books
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
This Excellent Collection brings together Stapledon's longer, major books and a fine selection of shorter pieces and Science-Fiction Books. This Books created and collected in Olaf Stapledon's Most important Works illuminate the life and work of one of the most individual writers of the XX century - a man who elevated political writing to an art.William Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) is one of the great figures in the history of British science fiction. The philosophical depth and imaginative breadth of his novels signified an important stage in the development of the genre, inspiring and influencing many subsequent writers.As a lecturer for the Workers' Educational Association and The University of Liverpool, Stapledon began publishing academic essays in 1908 and took a doctorate in Philosophy in 1925. He was a relative late-comer to fiction but eventually found in this expansive form a means of exploring his complex ideas of 'community' and 'spirit'.Last and First Men coverIn 1930 he published his first novel, Last and First Men, followed by Odd John (1935), Star Maker (1937) and Sirius (1944). Although Stapledon wrote other works of fiction, these are the novels that made the greatest impact during his lifetime and which continue to receive widespread critical acclaim.This Collection included:· The Man Who Became a Tree· A Modern Magician· East Is West· Arms Out of Hand· A World of Sound· The Flames· The Road to the Aide Post· A Man Divided· Four Encounters· Death into Life· Last and First Men· Last Men in London· Odd John· Sirius· Star Maker· Nebula Maker· The Seed and the Flower· Far Future Calling
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Olaf Stapledon Collection
"Father of Science-Fiction"
The Complete Works with Illustrated & Annotated
William
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E-ISBN: 978-625-7287-20-3
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Table of Contents
About the Book & Author
The Man Who Became a Tree
A Modern Magician
East Is West
Arms Out of Hand
A World of Sound
The Flames
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
THE LETTER
EPILOGUE
The Road to the Aide Post
A Man Divided
Chapter 1: A WEDDING FIASCO
Chapter 2 VICTOR'S EARLY LIFE
Chapter 3: BEGINNINGS OF OUR FRIENDSHIP
Chapter 4: BUSINESS MAN AND SOLDIER
Chapter 5: NEW START
Chapter 6: MAGGIE'S EARLY LIFE
Chapter 7: UNCERTAIN HAPPINESS
Chapter 8: A DISTRESSING INTERLUDE
Chapter 9: VICTOR FORGES AHEAD
Chapter 10: CHECK
Chapter 11: GLOOM
Chapter 12: STRANGE TRIUMPH
Four Encounters
A Christian
A Scientist
A Mystic
A Revolutionary
Darkness and the Light
PREFACE
Part 1: CRISIS
Chapter 1: MAN'S TWO FUTURES
Chapter 2: THE MODERN AGE
Chapter 3: MANKIND AT THE CROSS ROADS
Part 2: DARKNESS
Chapter 1: THE QUENCHING OF THE LIGHT
Chapter 2: THE REIGN OF DARKNESS
Chapter 3: THE TRIUMPH OF THE RATS
Part 3: THE LIGHT
Chapter 1: THE SPARK SURVIVES
Chapter 2: PRECARIOUS ADVANCE
Chapter 3: NEW WORLD
Chapter 4: REMOTE HORIZONS
Death into Life
Chapter 1: BATTLE
Chapter 2: EPHEMERAL SPIRITS
Chapter 3: THE SPIRIT OF MAN SURVEYS HIS PAST
Chapter 4: THE SPIRIT OF MAN CONSIDERS HIS PLIGHT
Chapter 5: MAN'S FUTURE
Chapter 6: THE COSMOS, AND BEYOND
Chapter 7: SALVATION
Chapter 8: HERE AND NOW
Last and First Men
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION: ONE OF THE LAST MEN
Chapter 1: ALKAN EUROPE
Chapter 2: EUROPE'S DOWNFALL
Chapter 3: AMERICA AND CHINA
Chapter 4: AN AMERICANIZED PLANET
Chapter 5: THE FALL OF THE FIRST MEN
Chapter 6: TRANSITION
Chapter 7: THE RISE OF THE SECOND MEN
Chapter 8: THE MARTIANS
Chapter 9: EARTH AND MARS
Chapter 10: THE THIRD MEN IN THE WILDERNESS
Chapter 11: MAN REMAKES HIMSELF
Chapter 12: THE LAST TERRESTRIALS
Chapter 13: HUMANITY ON VENUS
Chapter 14: NEPTUNE
Chapter 15: THE LAST MEN
Chapter 16: THE LAST OF MAN
Last Men in London
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION: THE FUTURE'S CONCERN WITH THE PAST
Chapter 1: THE WORLD OF THE LAST MEN
Chapter 2: EXPLORING THE PAST
Chapter 3: THE CHILD PAUL
Chapter 4: PAUL COMES OF AGE
Chapter 5: ORIGINS OF THE EUROPEAN WAR
Chapter 6: THE WAR
Chapter 7: AFTER THE WAR
Chapter 8: THE MODERN WORLD
Chapter 9: ON EARTH AND ON NEPTUNE
Odd John
Chapter 1: JOHN AND THE AUTHOR
Chapter 2: THE FIRST PHASE
Chapter 3: ENFANT TERRIBLE
Chapter 4: JOHN AND HIS ELDERS
Chapter 5: THOUGHT AND ACTION
Chapter 6: MANY INVENTIONS
Chapter 7: FINANCIAL VENTURES
Chapter 8: SCANDALOUS ADOLESCENCE
Chapter 9: METHODS OF A YOUNG ANTHROPOLOGIST
Chapter 10: THE WORLD'S PLIGHT
Chapter 11: STRANGE ENCOUNTERS
Chapter 12: JOHN IN THE WILDERNESS
Chapter 13: JOHN SEEKS HIS KIND
Chapter 14: ENGINEERING PROBLEMS
Chapter 15: JACQUELINE
Chapter 16: ADLAN
Chapter 17: NG-GUNKO AND LO
Chapter 18: THE SKID'S FIRST VOYAGE
Chapter 19: THE COLONY IS FOUNDED
Chapter 20: THE COLONY IN BEING
Chapter 21: THE BEGINNING OF THE END
Chapter 22: THE END
Sirius
Chapter 1: FIRST MEETING
Chapter 2: THE MAKING OF SIRIUS
Chapter 3: INFANCY
Chapter 4: YOUTH
Chapter 5: SHEEP-DOG APPRENTICE
Chapter 6: BIRTH-PANGS OF A PERSONALITY
Chapter 7: WOLF SIRIUS
Chapter 8: SIRIUS AT CAMBRIDGE
Chapter 9: SIRIUS AND RELIGION
Chapter 10: EXPERIENCES IN LONDON
Chapter 11: MAN AS TYRANT
Chapter 12: FARMER SIRIUS
Chapter 13: THE EFFECTS OF WAR
Chapter 14: TAN-Y-VOEL
Chapter 15: STRANGE TRIANGLE
Chapter 16: PLAXY CONSCRIPTED
Chapter 17: OUTLAW
Star Maker
PREFACE
Chapter 1: THE EARTH
Chapter 2: INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL
Chapter 3: THE OTHER EARTH
Chapter 4: I TRAVEL AGAIN
Chapter 5: WORLDS INNUMERABLE
Chapter 6: INTIMATIONS OF THE STAR MAKER
Chapter 7: MORE WORLDS
Chapter 8: CONCERNING THE EXPLORERS
Chapter 9: THE COMMUNITY OF WORLDS
Chapter 10: A VISION OF THE GALAXY
Chapter 11: STARS AND VERMIN
Chapter 12: A STUNTED COSMICAL SPIRIT
Chapter 13: THE BEGINNING AND THE END
Chapter 14: THE MYTH OF CREATION
Chapter 15: THE MAKER AND HIS WORKS
Chapter 16: EPILOGUE: BACK TO EARTH
Nebula Maker
PREFACE
1. Starlight on a Hill
2. Creation
3. The Cosmos Is Launched
4. The Great Nebulae Appear
5. A Biological Study
6. Outline of a Strange Mentality
7. The Social Nebulae
8. The Martial Groups
9. The First Cosmical War
10. Bright Heart
11. Bright Heart and Fire Bolt
12. Death of Bright Heart
13. Fire Bolt
14. The Last Phase of the Nebular Era
15. Interlude
The Seed and the Flower
Far Future Calling
PERSONS IN THE PLAY
MINOR PARTS
ACTION AND SCENE
THE PLAY
Interplanetary Man
About the Book & Author
§
This Excellent Collection brings together Stapledon's longer, major books and a fine selection of shorter pieces and Science-Fiction Books. This Books created and collected in Olaf Stapledon's Most important Works illuminate the life and work of one of the most individual writers of the XX century - a man who elevated political writing to an art.
William Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) is one of the great figures in the history of British science fiction. The philosophical depth and imaginative breadth of his novels signified an important stage in the development of the genre, inspiring and influencing many subsequent writers.
As a lecturer for the Workers' Educational Association and The University of Liverpool, Stapledon began publishing academic essays in 1908 and took a doctorate in Philosophy in 1925. He was a relative late-comer to fiction but eventually found in this expansive form a means of exploring his complex ideas of 'community' and 'spirit'.
Last and First Men coverIn 1930 he published his first novel, Last and First Men, followed by Odd John (1935), Star Maker (1937) and Sirius (1944). Although Stapledon wrote other works of fiction, these are the novels that made the greatest impact during his lifetime and which continue to receive widespread critical acclaim.
This Collection included:
· The Man Who Became a Tree
· A Modern Magician
· East Is West
· Arms Out of Hand
· A World of Sound
· The Flames
· The Road to the Aide Post
· A Man Divided
· Four Encounters
· Death into Life
· Last and First Men
· Last Men in London
· Odd John
· Sirius
· Star Maker
· Nebula Maker
· The Seed and the Flower
· Far Future Calling
* * *
Who Was Olaf Stapledon?
William Olaf Stapledon (10 May 1886 – 6 September 1950) – Known as Olaf Stapledon – was a British philosopher and author of science fiction.In 2014, he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
Stapledon was born in Seacombe, Wallasey, on the Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire, the only son of William Clibbett Stapledon and Emmeline Miller. The first six years of his life were spent with his parents at Port Said, Egypt. He was educated at Abbotsholme School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he acquired a BA degree in Modern History (Second Class) in 1909, promoted to an MA degree in 1913.After a brief stint as a teacher at Manchester Grammar School he worked in shipping offices in Liverpool and Port Said from 1910 to 1912. From 1912 to 1915 Stapledon worked with the Liverpool branch of the Workers' Educational Association.
During the First World War he served as a conscientious objector.Stapledon became an ambulance driver with the Friends' Ambulance Unit in France and Belgium from July 1915 to January 1919; he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery.His wartime experiences influenced his pacifist beliefs and advocation of a World Government.On 16 July 1919 he married Agnes Zena Miller (1894–1984), an Australian cousin.They had first met in 1903, and later maintained a correspondence throughout the war. They had a daughter, Mary Sydney Stapledon (1920–2008), and a son, John David Stapledon (1923–2014). In 1920 they moved to West Kirby.
Stapledon was awarded a PhD degree in philosophy from the University of Liverpool in 1925 and used his doctoral thesis as the basis for his first published prose book, A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929).However, he soon turned to fiction in the hope of presenting his ideas to a wider public. The relative success of Last and First Men (1930) prompted him to become a full-time writer. He wrote a sequel, Last Men in London, and followed it up with many more books of both fiction and philosophy.
For the duration of the Second World War Stapledon abandoned his pacifism and supported the war effort.In 1940 the Stapledon family built and moved into a new house on Simon's Field, in Caldy, in Wirral. During the war Stapledon become a public advocate of J.B. Priestley and Richard Acland's left-wing Common Wealth Party,as well as the British internationalist group Federal Union.
After 1945 Stapledon travelled widely on lecture tours, visiting the Netherlands, Sweden and France, and in 1948 he spoke at the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wrocław, Poland. He attended the Conference for World Peace held in New York City in 1949, the only Briton to be granted a visa to do so. In 1950 he became involved with the anti-apartheid movement. After a week of lectures in Paris, he cancelled a projected trip to Yugoslavia and returned to his home in Caldy, where he died very suddenly of a heart attack.
Stapledon was cremated at Landican Crematorium. His widow and their children scattered his ashes on the sandy cliffs overlooking the Dee Estuary, a favourite spot of his that features in more than one of his books. Stapledon Wood, on the south-east side of Caldy Hill, is named after him.
Olaf StapledonCollection
“The Complete Works”
by
Olaf Stapledon
Dedication
To
Harvey Satty
Enthusiast for and scholar of Olaf Stapledon
The Man Who Became a Tree
§
THE DAY WAS A SCORCHER. THE SHADE OF A GREAT SOLITARY BEECH TREE,
LORD OF ITS FIELD, INVITED THE MAN TO REST.
He had been walking for some hours, and he felt ready for his sandwiches.
Sitting on the russet carpet of leaf mold and beech-mast, with his back against the great trunk, he looked up into the lucid, dappled green above him. Small birds appeared and disappeared among the branches, aerial mice. He laid a hand on a projecting root beside him. It was molded like muscle, a giant limb that gave the great trunk its grip upon the ground.
He took out of his pocket his little parcel of food. There were sandwiches of cheese and lettuce, cucumber and tomato, and a slab of fruitcake. Devouring the green stuff, he had a sudden, mildly disturbing fantasy that he was eating the flesh of his distant cousins. He smiled, and continued to relish his food.
The thought of cannibalism still haunted him when he had finished his cake and was lighting his pipe. The act seemed to him a cannibalistic burnt offering to the inhuman God.
He watched the smoke floating up toward the green ceiling. A squirrel, presumably an invader from the neighboring woods, finding its retreat cut off by the great human beast, began chattering and scolding, and scuttering from branch to branch overhead. Finally it ran out along a far-reaching bough and a precarious branchlet that bent under its weight. Thence it dropped groundward at the tree’s perimeter, to bound hurriedly toward the wood. Somewhere a woodpecker was tapping. When the man tapped the ash from his finished pipe, the bird desisted.
The man luxuriously stretched himself out full-length on the brown carpet and gazed upward. Minute patches of blue sky were little more than stars in the green heaven. Lazily he brushed away the gnats that hung in a tenuous cloud above his face. Then he thrust his fingers deeply into the leaf mold, pretending that they were roots. Profound peacefulness seemed to bathe his happily tired limbs. How much better to be here than sitting on an office stool or threading one’s way along crowded streets! This, he felt, was how he was meant to live, alone, unmoving, drinking in at every pore the quiet influence of nature, much as the tree was drinking sunlight through its leaves.
What would it be like, he wondered, to be a tree? Drowsily he tried to figure out the possible features of a tree’s consciousness, if indeed a tree was conscious at all. It might perhaps have sensations all over its vast and intricate surface. When the wind rocked it, it might feel its internal stresses. Of visual perception of form, it presumably knew nothing. And could it in any sense have desires, purposes, thoughts?
Musing thus, the man fell asleep at the foot of the tree. He did not know that he was asleep, for he went on thinking about the tree, forgetting his human status. Little by little, however, he realized that something queer was happening to him.
Strange sensations began intruding upon him. At first they were intermittent and incoherent, but presently they flooded him with novel experience, and gradually formed a coherent pattern. He realized that the quality of these sensations was not, after all, so very strange. He recognized pressures and warmths. But these familiar qualities were all a bit odd, and they grouped themselves into configurations wholly novel to him and inconsistent with the familiar configurations of his own body. These last he still vaguely felt, when he made an effort to attend to them. He knew that he was still lying on his back. He felt the soft gritty earth about his fingers and the gnats stinging his face. But in addition there was this other, separate system of sensations, and it was becoming increasingly obtrusive.
Little by little he became able to interpret the new experience under the influence (as he now realized) of his participation not only in the present but also in the past of the tree. Humanly, the whole life of the tree was entirely novel to him; yet arboreally, so to speak, it was familiar and intelligible to him through his present sharing in the tree’s past. Thus a mass of mild strains, rhythmically occurring, was at once recognized as located in the tree’s tossing and quivering topmost branchlets and foliage. There occurred warmth and light. Yes, he was intensely aware of light; though only as a diffuse radiance that afforded him nothing of spatial form save a vague perception of the general direction from which the sunlight impinged upon his leaves.
Concentrating his human attention on this or that feature of his arboreal experience, he was able to distinguish the large and mild strains and swayings of his upper branches and the internal compressions of his monumental trunk. On one side of his foothold on the ground, he felt an unusual slight pressure on his submerged roots. This his human intelligence inferred to be the weight of his prostrate human body. His attention was presently drawn to an exasperating irritation on one of his branches. Probably some wood lice, or other vermin, were at work under the bark. Humanly, he had a great desire to scratch the irritated member, but this was of course impossible. There were other such irritations here and there on his branches. One of these was quickly brought to an end by some rough but welcome external agency. Perhaps a woodpecker had devoured the vermin.
After a while, an increased agitation of his leaves was followed by a sudden end of warmth and a great reduction of light. Humanly he inferred that the wind had risen, and that the sun had been obscured by cloud. Then a few random chilly blows upon his windward leaves told him that it was beginning to rain. Presently the whole population of his leaves was receiving a downpour of these little blows, and an invigorating coolness was spreading over all his surface.
Humanly he decided that he had better rise and put on his mackintosh; but to his surprise he found that he had forgotten how to move. And more surprisingly, he did not care. Vaguely he felt the big drops falling on his face, but it was increasingly difficult to attend to his already remote human existence. Soon he ignored it entirely, for he was wholly concerned with the experiences of the tree. The wind had now risen to gale force, and his great branches were violently tossing. Even the mighty shaft of his trunk was laboring. And in his anchoring roots he felt considerable strain. He noted now a confusion of new sensations throughout his branches, a steady tremor in his leaves and twigs which his human intelligence attributed to the vibrations set up in them by the impact of rain and wind. In fact, in a strange arboreal way he was hearing the uproar of the storm. Meanwhile, leaves and twigs, and even a small branch, were torn from him causing a prickling irritation that rose here and there to mild pain. One more considerable branch broke under the strain and crashed to the ground. Sharp pain reverberated through all his members, and in his roots he felt the thud of the fallen branch upon the topsoil.
Torrential rain battered on his leaves. With a great effort he attended to his prone human body at the tree’s foot, and noted that his clothes were drenched, and water was trickling over his chest and belly. Yet this seemed to him a matter of no moment. It was far more important for him to explore his new life as a tree. Anyhow, he could not do anything about his poor old human body, since he had forgotten how to move its limbs.
The storm must have continued into the night, for after a while he became aware that the diffused light that had bathed his leaves had completely vanished. Instead, his uppermost foliage suffered the continuous chilly bombardment of raindrops. And now at last the water was beginning to penetrate through the topsoil to his uppermost rootlets. Gradually it seeped deeper and deeper, till all his roots were greedily, laughingly (so he put it to himself) drinking and devouring. Strange, the bewildering richness that this novel experience afforded his human mentality! He was guzzling a variegated banquet; tasting and savoring every morsel. The earth was in some regions sweet, in others sour; or salt, or bitter; in others he relished a complex of these familiar tastes, together with strange gustatory experiences that he could not name. In fact the whole soil was tingling with a bewildering wealth of new tastes and odors. In one small region, where (he surmised) some beast had dropped its dung, he noted an extravagantly luscious patch that flushed his rootlets with feverish vitality.
Before the storm had ceased, faint light once more bathed his chilled leaves. Much later, the light blazed, and warmth returned. Reawakened by the lush sap, his leaves now devoured the sunlight. This was an experience wholly strange to his human consciousness, though familiar to him through his participation in the past of the tree. No words could be found to describe this novel ecstasy. Nearest to it, he told himself, was the tingling fieriness of some strong mellow wine. But it had also a quality which was akin to religious feeling, a fervor less obvious in the human palate’s contact with alcohol, a depth of “meeting” and satisfaction unknown in any human experience save in the highest reaches of personal love, and perhaps (so he surmised) in the mystical ecstasy.
A thought had long been mildly reiterating itself in the man’s tree-imprisoned mind and now was becoming insistent. Though he had sampled so much of the tree’s experience, he had as yet discovered nothing of its self-consciousness. Was it, he wondered, or was it not, at all aware of itself as a single conscious individual? In one respect he seemed to know far more of the tree than he had ever known of his human body; for he was minutely aware of the tree’s fundamental physiological processes, its whole vegetative life; whereas the detail of his human physiological happenings had, of course, been too deep for consciousness. Could it be that the tree’s awareness was wholly upon that fundamental plane? To this question he could at present find no answer.
Musing thus about the differences between tree and man, he remembered that his own human body was lying neglected at the tree’s foot. With difficulty he directed his attention to it. He found that it was in a sorry state. Drenched and chilled, it was also ragingly hot. In fact it was in a high fever. Its breathing was labored and painful. Its overstrained heart raced and pounded. Moreover, its grave sickness at once reacted on his mind. He began to fall into delirium. Distressing fantasies and hallucinations of his human life flooded in upon him. In a moment of clarity he realized that he must at once withdraw his attention from this dying animal that was formerly himself and take refuge once more in the experience of the tree. Delirium was already surging back upon him, but with a desperate act of concentrated attention, he was just able to struggle out of it into the calm being of the tree.
Strangely, he felt no regret at losing forever his footing in humanity. That fretful mode of existence had always irked him. Throughout his human years he had always held himself aloof from his fellow men. He had always been by disposition a solitary. He had carefully avoided forming any lasting ties with man or woman. He was an inveterate escapist. Now at last he had escaped forever.
The days succeeded one another. Summer became autumn. The increasing chill and darkness gave him discomfort in his leaves. But little by little their sensitivity was dulled, until at last, one by one, these withered flakes of his arboreal body were parted from him. With the fall of his leaves and the retraction of his sap, he lost the greater part of his experienced world. The cold, which had been painful, was now a drowsy numbness. He must have fallen into a kind of hibernating sleep; for when, quite suddenly, he woke, it was to find not only a deadly chill throughout his members (save his well-blanketed roots) but also an unendurable and distortingly heavy weight on all his branches. He inferred that it was a weight of snow. One of his branches broke under the strain, and his whole frame shuddered in agony. The raw stump, exposed to the frosty wind, at first suffered intensely. But mercifully he soon sank back into his winter sleep.
Spring brought new experiences. The increasing warmth and light drew the sap tinglingly from his roots up through his trunk and branches. And with the rising sap came a rejuvenescence of his whole body, and a quickening of experience. The bursting of the buds, he found, was a complex experience of mild and then excruciating irritation, followed by ecstatic satisfaction as the tender leaves unfolded.
Soon followed that even more exquisite event, the sexual flowering. This, he surmised, a woman, with her monthly rhythm, might enter into more naturally than any man. It gave him an overwhelming excitement of tumescence, and a yearning that put the whole giant body, even to the farthest rootlets, into a fever.
And now at last he was aware of the tree as a single yearning self, with attention concentrated in its flowers, in violent desire and expectation. The ripe pistils and stamens swooned with the caressing of the innumerable feet and proboscises of insects, those go-betweens of arboreal love. The stamens withered, but the ovaries, fertilized and swelling, afforded a profound and placid maternal joy. As the weeks passed, and the seeds matured, satisfaction increased. When they were fully ripened, they fell, and his whole arboreal being heaved, as it were, a sigh of achievement and release.
Thus at last the cycle of the year was completed. Once more, the boisterous autumn, the sleep of winter, the tense awakening of spring.
Year piled upon year. He noted that, for the tree, time passed far more quickly than for the human consciousness. The tree’s life was less crowded with events than a man’s. In a way it was emptier, though everything in it was more thoroughly savored. And because its years were less close-packed with happenings, they passed as swiftly as human months. And so the man could almost perceive, not merely infer, the growing of the tree. Annually it put out new twigs and exploring rootlets. Annually the great tree grew ever greater.
But at last old age brought the beginnings of serious rot into its timber. Whole branches died and fell.
With the passage of the years, the trapped human consciousness became more and more identified with the arboreal consciousness. Yet it retained its human intelligence and continued to observe the tree’s experience analytically.
It was in the tree’s old age that the man first detected another universe of arboreal experience, that had been going on all the while, though beyond his human ken. He took long to grasp the significance of it, but in the end participation in the tree’s past enabled him to recognize that this individual beech tree was psychologically rooted in the life of the whole neighboring woodland and even the far-distant forests. His human consciousness was with difficulty reaching out to that vast region. But this was not all. It became clear to him that, besides the experience of tree-life in springtime, an equally vast experience of autumnal trees was being laid before him. A tropical and a subarctic arboreal experience was also going on. In fact he was vaguely participating in the common awareness of all trees, nay, all terrestrial vegetation.
To say this, is simple; but its actual significance for the individual human mind in the individual tree was reached only laboriously and painfully. Like a newborn infant, the man had to begin orienting himself in a new universe. For it was not merely that he was flooded by an overwhelming bulk of new experience of the same order as the individual tree’s experience. It was not only that more light and warmth and rain and cold and strain and root-probings confronted him, from all the forests and prairies and jungles of the world. Fortunately he was aware only of random and fluctuating traces of this vast vegetable life. Had the whole volume of it constantly invaded him, he would surely have gone mad. But samples, so to speak, floated before his exploring attention, and by means of them he built up an outline sketch of the whole life of terrestrial vegetation.
But this, as I say, was not the whole or the most significant part of his new experience. Something far more fundamental was happening to him, something which to his insulated and precise human apprehension was extremely difficult to grasp. In his human life he had been a curious but never a very comprehending reader of the mystics. There had been moments when he himself had seemed to be almost on the threshold of some kind of mystical experience, but he had never been able to set foot upon that threshold, let alone to cross it. He now felt that his deep participation in this great tree’s life had opened up to him a sphere far vaster than his unaided human consciousness could ever penetrate, and far vaster also than the life merely of all vegetation. It had led him (so he put it to himself) into the presence of God. It was as though the plants, with their less individualized consciousness, were constantly open to the divine; as though, one and all, they were not really individuals at all, but rather (so he figuratively expressed it to himself) limbs and sense organs of God. But that strange “openness to the divine,” in which all vegetation easily shared, was far too difficult for his analytic human intelligence to grasp. He had indeed at last, with the tree’s help, set foot upon the threshold, but beyond it he could not penetrate.
When at last foresters came, and with saw and axe cut through the aging trunk, the man’s mind was at least partially attuned to the deeper reality. The sharp pain, though painful, was yet acceptable.
END OF THE BOOK
A Modern Magician
§
THEY CONFRONTED EACH OTHER ACROSS A TEA TABLE IN A COTTAGE GARDEN.
Helen was leaning back, coldly studying Jim’s face. It was an oddly childish, almost fetal face, with its big brow, snub nose, and pouting lips. Childish, yes; but in the round dark eyes there was a gleam of madness. She had to admit that she was in a way drawn to this odd young man, partly perhaps by his very childishness and his awkward innocent attempts at lovemaking; but partly by that sinister gleam.
Jim was leaning forward, talking hard. He had been talking for a long time, but she was no longer listening. She was deciding that though she was drawn to him she also disliked him. Why had she come out with him again? He was weedy and self-centered. Yet she had come.
Something he was saying recaptured her attention. He seemed to be annoyed that she had not been listening. He was all worked up about something. She heard him say, “I know you despise me, but you’re making a big mistake. I tell you I have powers. I didn’t intend to let you into my secret, yet; but, damn it, I will. I’m finding out a lot about the power of mind over matter. I can control matter at a distance, just by willing it. I’m going to be a sort of modern magician. I’ve even killed things by just willing it.”
Helen, who was a medical student, prided herself on her shrewd materialism. She laughed contemptuously.
His face flushed with anger, and he said, “Oh very well! I’ll have to show you.”
On a bush a robin was singing. The young man’s gaze left the girl’s face and settled intently on the robin. “Watch that bird,” he said. His voice was almost a whisper. Presently the bird stopped singing, and after looking miserable for a while, with its head hunched into its body, it dropped from the tree without opening its wings. It lay on the grass with its legs in the air, dead.
Jim let out a constricted squawk of triumph, staring at his victim. Then he turned his eyes on Helen. Mopping his pasty face with his handkerchief, he said, “That was a good turn. I’ve never tried it on a bird before, only on flies and beetles and a frog.”
The girl stared at him silently, anxious not to seem startled. He set about telling her his secret. She was not bored any more.
He told her that a couple of years earlier he had begun to be interested in “all this paranormal stuff.” He had been to seances and read about psychical research. He wouldn’t have bothered if he hadn’t suspected he had strange powers himself. He was never really interested in spooks and thought transference and so on. What fascinated him was the possibility that a mind might be able to affect matter directly. “Psychokinesis,” they called this power; and they knew very little about it. But he didn’t care a damn about the theoretical puzzles. All he wanted was power. He told Helen about the queer experiments that had been done in America with dice. You threw the dice time after time, and you willed them to settle with the two sixes uppermost. Generally they didn’t; but when you had done a great many experiments you totted up the results and found that there had been more sixes than should have turned up by sheer chance. It certainly looked as though the mind really had some slight influence. This opened up terrific possibilities.
He began to do little experiments on his own, guided by the findings of the researchers, but also by some of his own ideas. The power was fantastically slight, so you had to test it out in situations where the tiniest influence would have detectable results, just tipping the scales.
He didn’t have much success with the dice, because (as he explained) he never knew precisely what he had to do. The dice tumbled out too quickly for him. And so he only had the slight effect that the Americans had reported. So he had to think up new tricks that would give him a better opening. He had had a scientific training, so he decided to try to influence chemical reactions and simple physical processes. He did many experiments and learned a lot. He prevented a spot of water from rusting a knife. He stopped a crystal of salt from dissolving in water. He formed a minute crystal of ice in a drop of water and finally froze the whole drop by simply “willing away” all the heat, in fact by stopping all the molecular movement.
He told Helen of his first success at killing, a literally microscopic success. He brewed some very stagnant water and put a drop on a slide. Then through the microscope he watched the swarm of microorganisms milling about. Mostly they were like stumpy sausages, swimming with wavy tails. They were of many sizes. He thought of them as elephants, cows, sheep, rabbits. His idea was that he might be able to stop the chemical action in one of these little creatures and so kill it. He had read up a lot about their inner workings, and he knew what key process he could best tackle. Well, the damned things kept shifting about so fast he couldn’t concentrate on any one of them for long enough. He kept losing his victim in the crowd. However, at last one of the “rabbits” swam into a less populous part of the slide, and he fixed his attention on it long enough to do the trick. He willed the crucial chemical process to stop, and it did stop. The creature stopped moving and stayed still indefinitely. It was almost certainly dead. His success, he said, made him “feel like God.”
Later he learned to kill flies and beetles by freezing their brains. Then he tried a frog, but had no success. He didn’t know enough physiology to find a minute key process to check. However, he read up a lot of stuff, and at last he succeeded. He simply stopped the nerve current in certain fibers in the spinal cord that controlled the heartbeat. It was this method also that he had used on the robin.
“That’s just the beginning,” he said. “Soon I shall have the world at my feet. And if you join up with me, it will be at your feet too.”
Throughout this monologue the girl had listened intently, torn between revulsion and fascination. There was a kind of bad smell about it all, but one couldn’t afford to be too squeamish in these days. Besides, there was probably nothing in morality, anyhow. All the same, Jim was playing with fire. Strange, though, how he seemed to have grown up while he was talking. Somehow he didn’t look gawky and babyish anymore. His excitement, and her knowledge that his power was real, had made him look thrillingly sinister. But she decided to be cautious and aloof.
When at last Jim was silent, she staged a concealed yawn and said, “You’re clever, aren’t you! That was a good trick you did, though a horrid one. If you go much further, you’ll end on the gallows.”
He snorted and said, “It’s not like you to be a coward.”
The taunt stung her. Indignantly she answered, “Don’t be ridiculous! Why should I join with you, as you call it, merely because you can kill a bird by some low trick or other?”
In Jim’s life there had been certain events which he had not mentioned. They seemed to him irrelevant to the matter in hand, but they were not really so at all. He had always been a weakling. His father, a professional footballer, despised him and blamed the frail mother. The couple had lived a cat-and-dog life almost since their honeymoon. At school Jim had been thoroughly bullied; and in consequence he had conceived a deep hatred of the strong and at the same time an obsessive yearning to be strong himself. He was a bright lad and had secured a scholarship at a provincial university. As an undergraduate, he kept to himself, worked hard for a scientific degree, and aimed at a career of research in atomic physics. Already his dominant passion was physical power, so he chose its most spectacular field. But somehow his plans went awry. In spite of his reasonably good academic qualifications, he found himself stuck in a low-grade job in an industrial lab, a job which he had taken on as a stopgap till he could capture a post in one of the great institutions devoted to atomic physics. In this backwater, his naturally sour disposition became embittered. He felt he was not getting a fair chance. Inferior men were outstripping him. Fate was against him. In fact he developed something like a persecution mania. But the truth was that he was a bad cooperator. He never developed the team spirit which is so necessary in the immensely complex work of fundamental physical research. Also, he had no genuine interest in physical theory and was impatient of the necessity of advanced theoretical study. What he wanted was power, power for himself as an individual. He recognized that modern research was a cooperative affair and that in it, though one might gain dazzling prestige, one would not gain any physical power as an individual. Psychokinesis, on the other hand, might perhaps give him his heart’s desire. His interest rapidly shifted to the more promising field. Henceforth his work in the lab was a mere means of earning a livelihood.
After the conversation in the cottage garden he concentrated more eagerly than ever on his venture. He must gain even more spectacular powers to impress Helen. He had decided that for him, at any rate, the promising line was to develop his skill at interfering with small physical and chemical processes, in lifeless and in living things. He learned how to prevent a struck match from lighting. He tried to bypass the whole of atomic research by applying his power of psychokinesis to the release of energy pent up in the atom. But in this exciting venture he had no success at all, perhaps because in spite of his training, he had not sufficient theoretical knowledge of physics, nor access to the right kind of apparatus for setting up the experiment. On the biological side he succeeded in killing a small dog by the same process as he had applied to the robin. He was confident that with practice he would soon be able to kill a man.
He had one alarming experience. He decided to try to stop the sparking of his motorcycle engine. He started up the bike on its stand and set about “willing” the spark to fail. He concentrated his attention on the points of the sparking plug and the leaping spark and “willed” the space between the points to become impenetrable, an insulator. This experiment, of course, involved a far greater interference with physical processes than freezing a nerve fiber or even preventing a match from lighting. Sweat poured from him as he struggled with his task. At last the engine began to misfire. But something queer happened to himself. He had a moment of horrible vertigo and nausea and then he lost consciousness. When he recovered, the engine was once more running normally.
This mishap was a challenge. He had never been seriously interested in the mere theoretical side of his experiments for its own sake, but now he had perforce to ask himself what exactly was happening when by an “act of will” he interfered with a physical process. The obvious explanation was that in some way the physical energy that should have crossed the gap between the points had been directed into his own body; in fact that he had suffered the electric shock that he would have had if he had touched the points. It may be doubted whether the true explanation was as simple as this, for his symptoms were not those of electric shock. It might be nearer the truth to say that the inhibition of so much physical energy caused some sort of profound psychical disturbance in him; or else, to put the matter very crudely, that the physical energy was in some way converted into psychical energy in him. This theory is borne out by the fact that, when he recovered consciousness, he was in a state of great excitement and mental vigor, as though he had taken some stimulating drug.
Whatever the truth of the matter, he adopted the simpler theory and set about sidetracking the intruding energy so as to protect himself. After much anxious experimentation, he found that he could do so by concentrating his attention both on the sparking plug and on some other living organism, which then “drew off the electricity” and suffered accordingly. A sparrow sufficed. It died of the shock, while he himself remained conscious long enough to stop the engine. On another occasion he used his neighbor’s dog as a “lightning conductor.” The animal collapsed, but soon recovered consciousness and careened about the garden barking hilariously.
His next experiment was more exciting, and much, much more reprehensible. He went into the country and took up a position on a knoll, whence he could see a fairly long stretch of road. Presently a car came into sight. He concentrated his attention on the sparking plugs and “willed” the electrical energy to escape into the driver. The car slowed down, vacillated between the two sides of the road, and came to a standstill across the fairway. He could see the driver slumped over the steering wheel. There was no one else in the car. Greatly excited, Jim waited to see what would happen. Presently another car came in the opposite direction, hooted violently, and drew up with screeching brakes. The driver emerged, went to the derelict car, opened a door, and was confronted by the unconscious occupant. While the horrified newcomer was wondering what to do, the other recovered consciousness. There was an anxious conversation, and finally both cars went their separate ways.
Jim now felt ready to impress his girlfriend. Since the killing of the robin, they had occasionally met, and in his awkward and adolescent way he had tried to make love to her. She had always discouraged him; but she was obviously more interested in him since the robin incident. Though she sometimes affected to despise him, he felt that she was secretly drawn to him.
But one day he had an unpleasant surprise. He had boarded a bus to take him home from his work. He climbed the stairs and settled into a seat. Suddenly he noticed Helen sitting a few seats ahead with a curly-headed young man in a sportscoat. The couple were deep in conversation with their heads bent together. The girl’s hair brushed his cheek. Presently she laughed, with a ring of happiness such as he had never before heard from her. She turned her face toward her companion. It was aglow with vitality, and love. Or so it seemed to the jealous lover three seats behind.
Irrational fury swept over him. He was so ignorant of the ways of girls, and so indignant that “his girl” (for so he regarded her) should take notice of another man, that jealousy wholly possessed him, to the exclusion of all other considerations. He could think of nothing but destroying his rival. His gaze seized upon the nape of the hated neck before him. He passionately conjured up images of the hidden vertebrae and the enclosed bundle of nerve fibers. The nerve current must cease; must, must cease. Presently the curly head sank on Helen’s shoulder, and then the whole body fell forward.
The murderer hurriedly rose from his seat and turned his back on the incipient commotion. He left the bus, as though ignorant of the disaster.
Continuing his journey on foot, he was still so excited that he had no thought but exultation over his triumph. But gradually his frenzy subsided, and he faced the fact that he was a murderer. Urgently he reminded himself that after all there was no point in feeling guilty, since morality was a mere superstition. But alas, he did feel guilty, horribly guilty; the more so since he had no fear of being caught.
As the days passed, Jim alternated between what he regarded as “irrational” guilt and intoxicating triumph. The world was indeed at his feet. But he must play his cards carefully. Unfortunately his guilt gave him no peace. He could not sleep properly; and when he did sleep, he had terrifying dreams. By day his experiments were hampered by the fantasy that he had sold his soul to the devil. This notion infuriated him with its very silliness. Yet he could not rid himself of it. He began drinking rather heavily. But he soon found that alcohol reduced his psychokinetic power, so he firmly broke himself of the habit.
Another possible form of relief from his obsessive guilt was sex. But somehow he could not bring himself to face Helen. He was irrationally afraid of her. Yet she must be quite ignorant that he had killed her lover.
At last he met her accidentally in the street. There was no possibility of avoiding her. She was rather wan, he thought, but she smiled at him and actually suggested a talk over a cup of coffee. He was torn between fear and desire, but presently they were seated in a cafe. After some trivial remarks, she said,
“Please comfort me! I have had a terrible shock quite recently. I was on the top of a bus with my brother who has been in Africa for three years. While we were talking, he collapsed and died almost instantly. He seemed perfectly fit. They say it was some new virus in the spinal cord.” She noticed that Jim’s face had turned deadly pale. “What’s the matter?” she cried. “Are you going to die on me too?”
He pulled himself together and assured her that sheer sympathy for her had made him feel faint. He loved her so much. How could he help being upset by her misfortune? To his relief Helen was completely taken in by this explanation. She gave him, for the first time, the glowing smile he had formerly seen her turn upon her brother.
Encouraged, he pressed home his advantage. He said he did so want to comfort her. They must meet again soon. And if she was at all interested in his experiments, he would show her something really exciting some time. They arranged a trip in the country the following Sunday. He privately decided to repeat for her benefit his trick with a passing car.
Sunday was a bright summer day. Sitting together in an empty railway carriage, they talked a good deal about her brother. He was rather bored, but he expressed ardent sympathy. She said she never imagined he had such a warm heart. He took her arm. Their faces drew close together, and they looked into each other’s eyes. She felt an overwhelming tenderness for this strange, rather grotesque though boyish face, wherein, she told herself, the innocence of childhood was blended with an adult consciousness of power. She felt the underlying grimness, and she welcomed it. Jim, for his part, was realizing that she was very desirable. The warm glow of health had returned to her face. (Or was it a glow of love?) The full, sweet lips, the kindly, observant gray eyes, filled him not only with physical desire but a swooning gentleness that was new to him. The recollection of his guilt and present deception tormented him. An expression of misery came over his face. He let go her arm and bowed forward with his head in his hands. Perplexed and compassionate, she put an arm round his shoulders, and kissed his hair. Suddenly he burst into tears and buried his head on her breast. She hugged him and crooned over him as though he were her child. She begged him to tell her what was the matter, but he could only blubber, “Oh, I’m horrible! I’m not good enough for you.”
Later in the day, however, he had quite recovered his spirits, and they walked arm in arm through the woods. He told her of his recent successes, culminating with the car incident. She was impressed and amused, but also morally shocked by the irresponsibility of risking a fatal accident merely to test his powers. At the same time she was obviously fascinated by the fanaticism that drove him to such lengths. He was flattered by her interest, and intoxicated by her tenderness and her physical proximity. For they were now resting on the little knoll where he intended to do his trick with the car, and he was lying with his head in her lap, gazing up at her face, where all the love that his life had missed seemed to be gathered. He realized that he was playing the part of an infant rather than a lover. But she seemed to need him to do so, and he was happy in his role. But soon sexual desire began to reassert itself and with it masculine self-respect. He conceived an uncontrollable lust to demonstrate his godlike nature by some formidable display of his powers. He became the primitive savage who must kill an enemy in the presence of the beloved.
Looking up through Helen’s fluttering hair, he saw a small object moving. For a moment he took it for a gnat, then realized that it was a distant airplane approaching.
“Watch that plane,” he said; and she was startled by the abruptness of his voice. She looked up, and down again at him. His face was contorted with effort. His eyes glared, his nostrils dilated. She had an impulse to fling him from her, so brutal he looked. But fascination triumphed. “Keep your eyes on the plane,” he commanded. She looked up, then down, then up again. She knew she ought to break the devilish spell. (There was something called morality, but a delusion, probably.) Fascination had triumphed.
Presently the advancing plane’s four engines hesitated, and ceased one by one to fire. The plane glided for a while, but soon gave evidence of being out of control. It vacillated, staggered, and then was in a nose dive, spiraling. Helen screamed, but did nothing. The plane disappeared behind a distant wood. After a few seconds there was a muffled crash, and smoke began to rise from behind the wood, a leaning black plume.
Jim raised himself from Helen’s lap, and turning, pressed her backward to the ground. “That’s how I love you,” he whispered fiercely. Then he furiously kissed her lips, her neck.
She made a violent effort to pull herself together and resist the impulse of self-abandonment to this lunatic. She struggled to free herself from his grip; and presently the two stood facing each other, panting. “You’re mad,” she cried. “Think what you have done! You have killed people just to show how clever you are. And then you make love to me.” She covered her face with her hands and sobbed.
He was still in a state of crazy exaltation, and he laughed. Then he taunted her. “Call yourself a realist! You’re squeamish. Well, now you know what I am really like; and what I can do. And see! You’re mine. I can kill you at any moment, wherever you are. I shall do whatever I like with you. And if you try to stop me, you’ll go the way of the robin and—the man on the bus.” Her hands dropped from her tear-stained face. She stared at him in mingled horror—and tenderness. She said quietly, “You’re quite mad, you poor boy. And you seemed so gentle. Oh, my dear, what can I do about you?”
There was a long silence. Then suddenly Jim collapsed on the ground, blubbering like a child. She stood over him in perplexity.
While she was wondering what to do, and blaming herself for not breaking the spell before it was too late, he was in an agony of self-loathing. Then he started to use his technique upon himself, so that no more harm should be done. It was more difficult than he expected; for as soon as he began to lose consciousness he also lost his grip on the operation. But he made a desperate effort of will. When Helen, noticing his stillness, knelt down by him, he was dead.
END OF THE BOOK
East Is West
§
I LEFT MY LODGINGS IN WEST KIRBY IN THE MIDDLE OF the morning and walked along the Estuary shore, arriving at my favorite bathing place when the tide was only a few yards from the foot of the clay cliffs. The sand, as usual on a fine Sunday, was crowded with parties, bathing and sun-bathing. I undressed and swam out till the coast was but a strip between sea and sky. At my farthest point I floated for a long while, the sun pouring through my closed eyelids. I began to feel giddy and slightly sick, so I hurried back to land.
During the rather lengthy swim I was surprised to see that the shore and the cliff-top, which I thought had been crowded, were in fact deserted. The one heap of clothes which I could detect, and which I therefore took to be my own, perplexed me by its color. I was still more perplexed when I walked out of the water to it and found that apparently someone had removed my own flannels and had substituted a queer fancy dress of “Chinesy,” pajama-like trousers and jacket, both made of richly ornamented blue brocade. Even the towel was decorated with a Chinese or Japanese pattern; but in one corner it was marked with my own name. After a vain search for my proper clothes, I dried myself, and began experimenting with the fancy dress, shivering, and cursing the practical joker.
A bright silver coin, about the size of a florin, fell out of one of the pockets. Picking it up, I was surprised by its odd look. Closer inspection surprised me still more, for it bore on one side a grim but not unhandsome female profile, surrounded by the legend, “Godiva Dei Gra. Brit, et Gall. Reg.” On the obverse was a seemingly archaic version of the royal arms, which included the French lilies but omitted the Irish harp. Round the edge I read “One Florin 1934.” There were also some Japanese characters, which, to my amazement, I read. They signified, “Kingdom of Britain. Two Shillings.” Other coins in the pockets proved to be of the same fantastic type. There was also a letter, in its torn envelope, inscribed in Japanese characters. I recognized the name at once as the Japanese transcription of my own. The address was that of a well-known shipping firm in Liverpool. Well-known? Collecting my wits, I realized that, familiar as it seemed, I really knew nothing about it.
By this time I was thoroughly alarmed about the state of my mind. How came it that I could read Japanese? Whence these clothes? What had become of the holiday crowd?
Since the letter was addressed to me, I read it. The writer accepted an invitation to visit me for a few days with his wife. After referring to various shipping matters, which came to me with a distressing blend of familiarity and novelty, he signed himself, if I remember rightly, “Azuki Kawamura.”
Sick with cold and fright, I put on the clothes, and could not help noting that every movement executed itself with the ease of well-established habit, not with the clumsiness of one struggling with fancy dress.
I hurried along the shore toward West Kirby. With a fresh shock I discovered that the distant buildings looked all wrong. It was comforting to see that Hilbre Island at least was more or less as it should be, and that the contours of the Welsh hills across the Estuary left nothing to be desired. The black-headed gulls were indistinguishable from those of my normal experience. Half a dozen shell-duck, floating on the receding tide, were correctly attired.
Two figures approached me. What would they think of my fancy dress? But apparently it was not fancy dress; it was the orthodox costume of a gentleman. As the couple advanced, it revealed itself as a man and a girl, walking arm in arm. A few paces from me, they unlinked. He touched his cap, she curtsied. Indifferently, almost contemptuously, I acknowledged their salute. We passed.
I had been surprised to see that their dress was neither that of modern Europe nor yet Eastern like my own. It suggested a very inaccurate and ragged version of the costume of Elizabethan England as worn by the humbler sort. But he smoked a cigarette, and she bore aloft a faded Japanese sunshade.
Arriving at the town, I found that it was not West Kirby at all, not the West Kirby that I knew. The natural setting of the place was normal, but man’s works were completely unrecognizable. With perfect assurance I walked along the entirely unfamiliar marine parade. The houses were mostly half-timbered. Some were even thatched. But others showed unmistakably the influence of Japanese or Chinese culture. There was a “pagoda-ish” look about them. One or two were tall ferro-concrete buildings, whose vast window-space made them appear like crystal palaces. Even these betrayed in their decoration an Asiatic inspiration. It was almost as though China or Japan had been the effective center of “Americanization.”
The parade was thronged with people of all ages and both sexes, dressed mostly in semi-Asiatic style. In some cases a native English costume had been overlaid with foreign additions, here a Chinese dragoned scarf, there a colored sunshade. The best dressed women wore what I should describe as silk kimonos; but many of these garments were sleeveless, and none reached to the ankles. They displayed silk stockings of a type that in my own world would be regarded as European and modern, save for their great diversity and brilliance of coloring. One or two of the women, seemingly the bolder, wore very gay silk trousers and sleeveless vests. The loose brocade suits of the men were mostly of more somber color. I was surprised to note that many even of the best dressed promenaders had pock-marked faces. I was surprised, too, at the large number of smartly uniformed men, evidently army officers, in Robin Hood green with wide-brimmed hats. On their hips large-hilted cutlasses and neat pistol holsters combined the medieval and the modern.
