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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Homo Superior Disembark in this World.,
By
This review is from: Odd John -- a Story Between Jest and Earnest (Paperback)
Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) is believed to be the generational link between H. G. Wells (with whom he corresponded) and more recent British sci-fi authors as Arthur C. Clark (who recognizes Stapledon's influence on his "Childhood's End").
Born in England, spent his infancy at Port Said, absorbing the influence of the multicultural environment. He was a conscientious-objector but served as ambulance driver in WWI. In 1925 he was awarded with a Ph.D. in Philosophy and this is clearly perceptible in his novels. He had a powerful imagination and humanistic, scientific and philosophical interests that he poured in his four major opus: "Last an First Men" (1930), "Odd John" (1935), "Star Maker" (1937) and "Sirius" (1944). The present story follows the life and deeds of a Super Human. He is the product of an evolutionary jump and graced with super human intelligence. This intelligence needs time to evolve and grow, so John maintain infant characteristic by a longer period than normal. He is in permanent conflict with his surroundings, mastering them is a hard task. In order to receive help he recruits/enthralls a family's friend, who is the narrator in this novel. John grows up and discovers he is not alone; there are other specimens of Homo Superior around the world. He sets out to search and recruit them for a unique project: establishing a Colony of his kind. Stapledon use the different anecdotes to illustrate his cogitations about human kind, religion, politic, justice, ethic and more, many more transcendental subjects. It is thought provoking book, not what you'll expect from an ordinary sci-fi novel, not easy to read either but nevertheless a gripping story. Reviewed by Max Yofre.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unforgettable Odd John,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest (Leather Bound)
I read this classic story about 50 years ago, and I have just read it again, when I found it listed in Amazon. The effect on me is the same: cascading ideas that inspire the thought that Odd John might really be born as we were, when homo sapiens reassembled the primate genes already in the bonobo or the chimpanzee, into something like us. Stapleton's premise is that a bold evolutionary jump, say like that between bonobos and humans will, of course, happen again, and produce homo superior out of the same genes that made homo sapiens.
So in Stapleton'a story, a strange looking child, John, was born to an ordinary family, but he was endowed with intellectual and physical characteristics as advanced from us as we are from are our immediate primate ancestors. This child is only very slightly social, except for his mother, whom he loves. He learns to speak very late, and then learn English perfectly in a few weeks. He is almost incapable of normal movement at first and then becomes kinesthetically gifted in a few weks. He invents new financial concepts and makes millions, and then disovers that there are a few others like him scattered around the world. John forms them into a new progresive, almost hippy-like, group. They purchase an island in the Pacific, where they set a commune with very free interaction. This frightens the rest of the world because of their unique finacial and social ideas. John, the leader, is gifted with special omniscience: when he realizes, that some large nations, are sending miltary forces to destroy his new homo-superior group. John's nation realizes that they have come too far, too soon and destroy themselves. When I read this book, it seemed obvious that the evolutionary processes which made us (now known to be be just the most recent step, about 100,000 years ago in Africa), will inevitably continue and the next step in our line, call him, Odd John, if you wish, is inevitable. Some signs that our species is always experimenting are evident: the physically gifted dancers and athletes, whose bodies do things we will never be able to emulate; the intellectually gifted poets, writers, scientists whose thoughts we can hardly understand or savor. Our genetic heritage is ready to put it all together and give us Odd John. Will we accept him?
4.0 out of 5 stars
Homo-Superior,
By Dave_42 "Dave_42" (Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: ODD JOHN. (Paperback)
Olaf Stapledon's "Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest", published in 1935, is his third novel and it takes the idea of the evolution of homo sapiens into a new race, an idea which he touched on briefly at the end of his second novel "Last Men in London", and this time he devotes the entire work into looking at the interaction between homo sapiens and the new race homo superior. The idea of Supermen was not new, Philip Wylie's "Gladiator" from 1930 is one example which predates "Odd John" and "Last Men in London" for that matter, though Wylie's superman was man-made and not a product of evolution.
What makes Stapledon unique is not the subject matter, but the way he deals with it. The story is told through the eyes of the narrator, an adult human, who is a friend of the Wainwrights. The narrator describes John Wainwright, i.e. Odd John, as a child and through his development growing up and the events that take place. Stapledon's works always have a strong philosophical approach to them, and "Odd John" is no different. He doesn't attempt to show the world through John's eyes, but rather the reaction of a "normal" human to a super-human, and the reaction of humanity to the realization that homo-superiors exist. Stapledon looks at moral and ethical issues of the interaction between the two species. Man kills animals often enough, so if homo-superior considers homo-sapiens animals, would they have any ethical problem with killing them? Would homo-sapiens have any problem defending their existence by murdering off the homo-superiors before they become too strong? There are a couple aspects missing from the philosophical discussions which occur between the narrator and John, and those are the ideas of sentience and intelligence. Clearly John considers homo-sapiens as inferior, but he also recognizes they are sentient and intelligent beings, thus the comparison between the interaction between homo-superior and homo-sapiens, and that between homo-sapiens and animals, isn't really valid. Despite the lack of such a discussion, this is still a very good book, and Stapledon's works are always worth reading, because they are very different from what any other author at the time or since has produced. Even though this novel has traditional characters and scope, unlike his "Last and First Men" and "Star Maker", "Odd John" is still essentially driven by ideas more than characters and plot.
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