Brian
Aldiss designates Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818) the first science fiction novel.
The story of human creating human and the discordant relationship that
results, H.G. Wells took its inspiration and wrote the The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896).
A similar premise (human attempting to endow animal with human
intelligence and appearance), Wells nevertheless took time to examine the
animal side in balance with the human.
The third link in this chain of humanity’s god quest (unnatural means of
endowing sentience in living flesh) came after a much shorter interval: Olaf
Stapledon’s Sirius (1944).
But Sirius is also part of the natural
evolution of the writer’s own oeuvre. Like Last
and First Men’s follow up Last Men in
London, Stapledon saw fit to rework the ideas of his novel Odd John, publishing Sirius nine years after. Continuing with the theme of
super-intelligence, Stapledon threw the gauntlet down to himself by shifting
premise from super-human intelligence to super-dog intelligence, aka human
intelligence. While superficially
seeming a cheesy idea, Stapledon unpacks the idea with his trademark attention
to detail. Few science fiction writers
these days who look into every nook and cranny of the wild ideas their brains
conjure, Stapledon opens the concept of Sirius
from nothing, scrutinizes it closely, develops every inch within natural
frames, then closes it in literary fashion.
