The Mars-Begotten Men of Olaf Stapledon and H.G. Wells

The careers of Wells and Stapledon intersect most clearly in their Martians. Stapledon’s portrayal of the human-Martian confrontation in Last and First Men (LFM, 1930) can be traced back to Wells’s seminal invasion tale, The War of the Worlds (WW, 1898), and forward to Wells’s own Star-Begotten (SB, 1937). Specifically, in LFM Stapledon disrupts the Wellsian power hierarchy (of Martian over man over microbe) by turning his Martians into invading microbes. The disruption leads away from the estranged hostilities of WW toward a union of man and Martian in LFM and SB. In LFM that union is obviously dialectical. In fact, the confrontation between the Second Men and the Martians should be seen as a realization in fiction of Stapledon’s two basic dialectical triads—the Saint, the Skeptic, and the Revolutionary, and moral zeal, disillusion, and ecstasy: the saintly, disiilusioned Second Men must overcome themselves and the zealous revolutionaries, the Martians, in order to survive. Typically, Wells’s last Martian novel, SB, is more discursive and less diagrammatic than LFM. In SB. human characters talk and talk about the possibility of our species being improved by a “sort of Inter-planetary tutor. “ (And in the course of these discussions Wells even mentions Olaf Stapledon and LFM by name.) Both writers use their Martians as foils in the epistemological dilemma of kno wing the Other. In WW we know very little about the aliens, and that only through their actions. Conversely, in LFM we know almost everything there is to know about the invaders. The dilemma in LFM, then, is figuring out how the Second Men and the Martians will come to know each other. Our positions as readers — informed in LFM,confused in WW —sharply distinguish the experiences of the two texts. Nonetheless, in both tales, seeking knowledge of the Other brings unexpected knowledge of the Self. In SB. however, the only real knowledge sought is also the only real knowledge given: self-knowlege comes first. There the Martians are only an idea — and an ideal. (RS)

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