- Bailey, 1976. Some comments on science fiction
- Cole 1973. The Evolutionary Fantasy
- Bailey 1973. Shaw's Life Force and Science Fiction
Bailey, J. O. 1973. Shaw's Life Force and Science Fiction. The Shaw Review 16(2): 48-58. [JSTOR]
Shaw developed his concept of the Life Force and creative evolution by pondering theories set forth by Buffon (1707-1788), Lamarck (1744-1829), and Samuel Butler, as opposed to those of Darwin and Huxley, illustrated in the fiction of Wells. Butler argued for his concept of purposive evolution in Life and Habit (1877) and Luck, or Cunning? (1887). Before writing these book-length essays, however, he had published the science fiction called Erewhon (1872), which derides Darwinism and sets forth a theory that anticipates Shaw's Life Force. (Bailey 1973: 48)
- Butler, Samuel 1910. Life and Habit. London: A. C. Fifield. [Internet Archive]
Whether or not "coherent and consistent," Shaw attacked two Victorian othodoxies, (1) the Darwinian conception of evolution as chance mutation and survival of the fittest, and (2) the creeds of the churches that a personal God observes, rewards, and punishes human behavior. He opposed to these othodoxies his religion of a Life Force that strives within man to evolve a godlike race. (Bailey 1973: 49)
Familiar themes from both Spinoza and Stapledon.
The Life Force, defined in Man and Superman and Methuselah, is suggested in other plays and prefaces. Agnostic toward othodox creeds, Shaw conceived an evolving deity immanent throughout a developing universe. Unlike the unconscious Immanent Will of Schopenhauer and Hardy, the Life Force intends in its experiments to develop contemplative intelligence in mankind. (Bailey 1973: 49)
Organic life developing towards greater mentality.
Shaw called Methuselah "a second legend of Creative Evolution." Part II presents Franklyn Barnabas, a "Clerical Gentleman," and his brother Conrad, a Professor of Biology, thus uniting religion and science in the dream of lengthening human life to three hundred years. Part V, "As Far as Thought Can Reach," dramatizes the product of this evolution in the Ancients, who have nearly reached godhead: they are immortal except as they may have a fatal accident. Their lives, to travellers from the land of the shortlivers, seem dull, but the Ancients find in meditation a passionate happiness. Then beyond the life of the body is a "vortex." A She-Ancient says, "The day will come when there will be no people, only thought." (Bailey 1973: 50)
The "Ancients" from Stargate come to mind.
Methuselah seems the first serious utopia to postulate the possibility of eternal life on Earth. But nearly every utopian fiction pictures a life-span beyond threescore and ten and extends youthful vitality far beyond the present draft age. The Vril-ya of The Coming Race live normally a hundred to a hundred and fifty years, during which "the vigour of middle life was preserved even after the term of a century was passed" (Ch. XXVI). In Bellamy's Looking Backward (1887), men "usually live to be eighty-five or ninety, and at forty-five [...] are physically and mentally younger [...] than you were at thirty-five" (Ch. XVIII). Smith, the traveller in Hudson's A Crystal Age (1887), supposes Yoletta is sixteen or eighteen, but finds that she is in her thirties; her father is a hundred and ninety-eight and hale. The narrator of Morris's News from Nowhere (1891) guesses that a woman is twenty, but finds she is forty-two (Ch. III). A man of ninety "looked dry and sturdy like a piece of old oak" (Ch. VIII). (Bailey 1973: 5)
Sounds like the Victorian equivalent of the "She only looks 12, she's actually 700 years old" trope in anime.
Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) treats features of [|] both The Time Machine and Methuselah, plus more recent concepts of space-time, biology, and astronomy. (Bailey 1973: 55-56)
Noted. Back to Methuselah is a theatre play, tho.
The novel records the history of man through eighteen species, to the "End of Man," two thousand million years in the future, thus outdistancing both Wells and Shaw. This history is "an authentic message from one fo the Last Men" (Preface), transmitted by telepathy across time-space. It is partly Darwinian, picturing ages of struggle, disasters, and adjustments to changes in nature, Earth, and the solar system, but it seems to owe much to Shaw also. In Methuselah, the Ancients make steady progress toward a utopia in which men meditate the purpose of the Life Force and almost fulfill it. Stapledon's history ends with a similar upward thrust in the godlike wisdom of the Eighteenth Men. (Bailey 1973: 56)
That they do. The Eighteenth Men's cosmology is a wonderful read.
Men of the present species, after four centuries of atomic wars, achieve a World Financial Directorate. Man's religion of Gordelpus ("God help us"?), a worship of the "Divine Energy" (the Life Force?), combines science and mysticism. After four thousand years, comfort undermines energy, and the world plunges into a Dark Age for a hundred thousand years, with a brief renaissance that lasts for fifteen thousand before a collapse into a second Dark Age of ten million years, followed by a World War that leaves only thirty-five human beings alive. (Bailey 1973: 56)
Taara avita.
Ten million years later accumulated biological variations result in a new species, the Second Men, longlivers. Mothers carry the foetus for three years and suckle the child for five; puberty begins at twenty, maturity at fifty, and senility at about a hundred and fifty. The Second Men, devoted to philosophy and religion, suggest Shaw's Ancients. They "were determined to produce a race endowed with much greater longevity. [...] They even conceived that the ideal community should be knit into one mind by each unique individual's direct telepathic apprehension of the experience of all his fellows" (pp. 149-150). (Bailey 1973: 56)
Could be, idk.
Any Eighteenth Man can communicate with any other by telepathy. In this way, an individual can share the life of all men in all times. He "savours in a single intuition all bodily contacts" and "comprehends in a single vision all visual fields" (p. 323).
The Eighteenth Men thus approach the "vortex" of Shaw's Life Force: "For, if ever the cosmic ideal should be realized [...] then in that time The awakened Soul of All will embrace within itself all spirits whatever throughout the whole of time's wide circuit" (pp. 334-335). (Bailey 1973: 57)
Something approaching God - all souls throughout time and space united in a totality, "knowing all things and rejoicing in all things" (Stapledon 1937: 272).
Bailey, J. O. 1976. Some comments on science fiction. The Journal of General Education 28(1): 75-82. [JSTOR]
The formula stories that developed in the 1930s had the general plot of interplanetary travel, discovery of a gold-and-jewelled society of human beings, towered cities, a beautiful queen with whom the traveller had a love affair, an antagonistic high priest, warfare with death-rays, victory, and the hero's marriage to the queen. Everything in this formula is absurd. (Bailey 1976: 76)
Sounds like the Futurama episode "My Three Suns" (S01E07).
So many stories display patterns of repetition that I should point out one such pattern. Fitz-James o'Brien published "The Diamond Lens" in 1858. The hero invented a microscope to look inside the atom. In an atom of water, he saw a beautiful girl and fell in love with her. The author did not know what to do about that, and so ended the romance by having the water evaporate. The hero ended up in a madhouse. I thought that reasonable. (Bailey 1976: 76)
lol
Some such purpose has been a feature of science fiction from the beginning. Much of it has been serious speculation about scientific facts surmised but not known at the time of the writing. Johann Kepler's Somnium of 1634 took Duracotus and his mother to the moon by witchcraft, but when they got there, the story described the moon in terms of the latest speculations, given in detail. They found some water and air on the moon, enough to keep them alive. Kepler argued seriously that some water and air exist there; he presented pictures of the moon, its geology, climatology, and biology, in accordance with the observations and the natural laws then known. (Bailey 1976: 77)
May explain why some very seriously people have entertained this notion. E.g. "That there may be inhabitants in the moon, although no one has ever observed them, must certainly be admitted" (Kant 1855: 308).
Such mingled ancestry, books ranging from tales of terror to practicable utopias, helped lay the foundation for the earnest, thrilling science fiction of Olaf Stapledon, whose Last and First Men (1930) told the story of mankind from the present to the eighteenth and last human species, two thousand million years in the future. (Bailey 1976: 77-78)
Earnest?
Stapledon wrote that he undertook to invent "a story which may seem a possible, or at least not wholly impossible, account of the future of man." It was a book with a purpose far beyond that of entertainment - yet not without kicks that were to me more exciting than the contrived manipulations of other stories. Stapledon stated a belief with which I agree, that "controlled imagination in this sphere [that is, science fiction as prophecy] can be a very valuable exercise for minds bewildered about the present and its potentialities." He attempted, he said, "to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and to mould our hearts to entertain new values." This book did more than tinker with machines and present a future made up of grotesque scraps. What Stapledon meant by "controlled imagination" was clear in the story he told, of evolution projected (unless you think the word "extrapolated" more "operative") into the distant future. There are marvels, yes. Toward the end of time, men live for a quarter of a million terrestial years, spending an adolescence of a thousand years in the Lond of the Young, going through all the experiences of the race. All men are easily brought into telepathic unity to think as a single mind, each to share all the memory, temperament, and past experience of every other. That is, Stapledon wrote fiction to present a well-informed philosophic picture of a possible human future. (Bailey 1976: 78)
Heavy emphasis on the philosophic.
The Dynasts is not science fiction, but the concept has appeared over and over in this fiction. While Hardy was still alive, in 1921, George Bernard Shaw wrote Back to methuselah, in which a series of biological mutations took place, lengthening human life by stages, first to 300 years and finally to immortality until some accident might destroy life. The Ancients, as the final mutants were called, after a few years of romancing, recapitulating the human experience, retired into philosophic meditation that provided the loftiest happiness. A few years later, in Last and First Men, Stapledon told the history of humanity through eighteen species, the last of which had so mastered the mysteries of space-time and universal telepathy that the human race was in essence God, feeling universal compassion. (Bailey 1976: 79)
Putting it somewhat bluntly.
Such societies have been pictured, but the subject is not exhausted. Telepathy is a commonplace in science fiction. What would really happen, utopia or chaos, if it became a fact? Why, you couldn't even tell a polite fib about how you enjoyed a party. (Bailey 1976: 82)
Telepaths would probably not throw boring parties. (Phatic telepathy?)
Cole, Susan Ablon 1973. The Evolutionary Fantasy: Shaw and Utopian Fiction. The Shaw Review 16(2): 89-97. [JSTOR]
The autonomous, industrialized societies of the late nineteenth century had to be ordered and restructured into a coherent and unified world state and anarchy, disruption and injustice eliminated by a complex and controlled system of government. The very word, "system," is particularly expressive of this period; the utopias sought systems to create just and efficient societies. Well's A Modern Utopia (1905) and Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) are excellent examples of this category of utopian vision, the principal virtue of which is that it has eliminated the chaos, uncertainties and dangers of the old world. Such utopias are predicated on the idea that the basic needs of man do not extend far beyond economic security and material comfort and on the belief that man requires a considerable amount of organization and regulation in order to live comfortably and peaceably in a society. (Cole 1973: 89)
These, as Stapledon pointed out, presume "a fixed human nature" (Stapledon 1937: 12).
The second direction pursued by authors of utopias stresses the spiritual or mental development of man, and these may be called [|] "evolutionary utopias." In these utopias, the ideal societies began to be proposed within a new sense of time as dynamic. They were to be merely stages in a continuing process of human and social growth, an ideal expressed, but not yet realized in the technological utopia. The evolutionary utopias tend to extend into the distant future and to envision society as somehow going through and coming out the other side of the technological revolution. Their concern is not with the restructuring of society, but with the evolution of man himself into a state of being that no longer requires formal social structure. Man's body undergoes sufficient improvement to make it no longer an object for his concern. He either no longer requires complex technological processes to sustain his life and therefore reverts to a simpler, more primitive life-style, or he has gained sufficient technological knowledge to run the machinery necessary to his survival with little or no effort. Consequently, man's energies are freed to enable him to develop in directions relatively unexplored in the history of mankind. In many of these utopias, although the bodi is improved in many ways through evolution, usually become more powerful, handsomer and longer-lived, it is also frequently viewed almost as a vestigal organ, and one finds that its functions become progressively fewer, while man lives more in his creative and intellectual faculties. (Cole 1973: 89-90)
A noticeable bias towards the intellectual.
There is a connection then between Shaw's attempt to create myth and the unique vertical structure of his work. Interestingly, one finds the same association of intention and structure in the later twentieth-century fictional attempt at a vertical utopia, Stapledon's Last and First Men. (Cole 1973: 92)
A what now.
Back to Methuselah then is unlike earlier utopias in that it has not been structured upon the personal drama of a single protagonist, nor does it reveal a detailed vision of a specific possibility of human society. Rather it is a dramatic portrayal of an idea, and it is, therefore, the clarification of this idea, rather than the characters and their adventures, that regulates the dramatic structure of the work. (Cole 1973: 92)
The central idea in Stapledon being, I guess, the end of humanity.
In refusing to exclude mind from the evolutionary process, Butler is arguing for the principle of "design" as against "descent." Clearly however, Butler would not accept the idea of external design, of a force outside the organism shaping its evolutionary development. But he found in Lamarck the concept of organism designing itself, and it is from this idea that Creative Evolution derives. For above all else, Creative Evolution means that living organisms must and do possess "an innate tendency to perfectibility," the "x" factor, as Eric Bentley describes it, not to be discovered in a laboratory, that wills [|] to live and hence to change, to grow and to become. It is this "x" factor that Shaw refers to when he speaks of the Life Force and of the will. (Cole 1973: 93-94)
Conatus?
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