Backlisted - Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

Writer and critic Matthew De Abaitua joins Andy, Una and Nicky to discuss Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (1930), the astounding first novel by Olaf Stapledon. The book is one of the founding texts of science fiction, a fact that has both assured its reputation and arguably restricted its readership, a conundrum we discuss during the show; certainly, few novels are so vast in scope or present the reader with such leaps of the imagination. Whatever you think you know about genre tropes, futurology and how best to tell a story, prepare to have your preconceptions shot out of the pod bay doors, pal. Comparisons between Last and First Men and 2001: A Space Odyssey are justifiable, not least because Kubrick's film was adapted from a story by Arthur C. Clarke, an author who said of Stapledon's novel, "no other book had a greater influence on my life". Why isn't such a 'corking good writer' (C.S. Lewis), feted in his time by Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf and Winston Churchill, more widely known today? And would it be correct to identify Olaf Stapledon, who projected his consciousness across the universe from his back garden on the Wirral, as the original Cosmic Scouser? Listen to find out.  *Stapledon's archive is held at the Science Fiction Hub at Liverpool University - some of which you can view here. *For £150 off any Serious Readers HD Light and free UK delivery use the discount code: BACK at seriousreaders.com/backlisted * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes and original writing, become a patron at www.patreon.com/backlisted Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. The novel featured on today's show is Lodeled. and First Men by Olaf Stapledon, first published in 1930 by Matthew and Coe in the UK, and the following year by Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith in the US. I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and Inventry, an unreliable guide to my record collection.

I'm Dr. Una McCormack, award-winning author of Scientific Romances, an Associate Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge. scientific romances you've changed I like that we try and change it a little bit every time now but that's good so it's not speculative fiction now what's happened in have you got a good romance coming oh no see scientists ah well we'll expand upon this

I love a planetary meat cute I love that I'm Nicky Birch the producer and editor of Backlisted Backlisted has been running for 10 years now we may have mentioned that before and over that time we've built up a loyal community of listeners, patrons and guests. Plus, of course, a library of some 250 shows

containing everything from We Have Always Lived in the Castle to Nico's songs they never play on the radio. And we always really value your support for the podcast. You can listen to episodes from that whole decade. If you follow backlisted on whatever podcast app you choose, you get to browse the back catalogue and you find amazing reading recommendations

of all kinds of books from all sorts of people. And plus, following the podcast helps make it more noticeable to potential new listeners. In other words, please subscribe to Backlisted. Thank you, Una. Thank you, Nikki. Now, joining us on today's show to discuss Last and First Men by Olaf Stapleton is a guest who is new to Backlisted,

the writer and lecturer Matthew Deiabatua, Matthew, hello. How are you? My heart's going like a jack rabbit, I am as placid as a lake. Matthew DeBatech's debut science fiction novel The Red Men was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clark Award and adapted into a short film Dr. Easy by director Shinola for warp films and film four.

His science fiction novels If Then and The Destructives complete a trilogy about AI and consciousness. His memoir, Self and I, a memoir of literary ambition was shortlisted for the New Angle Prize for Literature and his social history, the art of camping, the history and practice of sleeping under the stars, was one of the economist books of the year.

His speculative documentary on machine learning and animal communication, The Doolittle Machine, was broadcast on Radio 4. And recently, he's given keynotes on the role of science fiction in technological innovation at Surm, the German Innovation Agency Sprint, the US Office for Naval Research and the new technology challenge event,

the Serendipity Collective. And for his sins, he is head of the Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. Matthew, what a life you've lived? When do you get the time? Lordy. Yeah, it seems very calm down here.

That's very compressed. There's a lot of sitting around. reading science fiction as well. I quote you and have indeed quoted you on this podcast, Matthew, on several occasions over the years, because we once did an event together at the Stoke Newton Literary Festival where I asked you if you enjoyed going out and doing events, such as the one we were doing at that time.

And you said, well, it's the difference, isn't it, between the writer and the author. The writer is the person who saves at home and does the writing, and the author is the idiot who goes out and does this. And I think about that all the time. It's such a good way of explaining to people the different skills that are required to go and write the book and promote the book of two different things. Baring that in mind, Matthew, on your wiki page, it actually makes a point of noting that as part of the publicity drive for the art of camping in 2011, you erected a tent with Evan Davis. I did. I did on the today program. And I got in it. And it's quite hard being interviewed

whilst directing a tent because it does require a degree of cognition, right, that could be required to holding a conversation on the today program at the same time. And I was wearing high-wasted vintage trousers and braces because I had a kind of costume for promoting it. And that was by far the least embarrassing thing I did to promote that book. I did over 20 festivals for that, including some festivals I should never have been booked for. Go on. Names.

There was a festival in Brighton that, well, the compare the man who introduced me was called Ben Dover. I see. Yeah, okay. and who I could gather from his speech was quite active in pornography and he introduced me as he goes to the audience who I have to say to a man and woman

we're off there naught on Ket's Moved and he says to me here's Matthew de blah blah blah you see he's to talk about camping and I sort of took the stage and watched like the audience trying to crawl out and I said you know don't worry it only lasts for 15 minutes unless you're on ketamine in which

case this is going to last for six or seven hours yeah they people in various stages it's very just you know erotic undress that they were in albeit a bit careworn after two days of a festival in brighton lingerie you know just tend to look a little bit dusty were you wearing your braces still on your highway to the grass I was wearing me braces I had me full costume I've brought me family I pulled up, and I was just like, I took one look, I said kids in the car. Yeah, so I did a lot of that,

a lot of the author, the author, not so much of the writer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now when, I say similar when people meet, because people always say about how disappointing it is to meet authors compared to their books now. So, you know, the book is like a compression of two years of my best moments. Whereas now you're meeting me and I'm just like,

I want to drink and, you know, I want to chat. I'm thinking about my kids being an unsuitable arena. You know, it's like you're getting the uncompressed, you know, the undiluted person when you meet the author. That was a good answer to a very basic question. Thank you, Matthew. You are good at being an author and a writer. Thank you so much.

Now, we should introduce the book that we're here to discuss. Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon presents a possible future of humanity from our own present and primitive homo sapiens to the post-human, far-future inhabitants of distant Neptune. It's a visionary and transcendent novel which seems to anticipate and contain many of the ideas used by later writers of science fiction.

Covering 2,000 million years of history and imagining 18 different evolutionary routes which mankind might take, it's a book the scope of which is vastest, than any other, except Stapleton's own later Starmaker. Listeners, I asked Una to write her own capsule a summary of this novel yesterday because it made me scratch my head a bit to try and... Matthew, I'm going to ask you immediately before I tell people about Olof's a little about Olof Stapleton. If you were to, you know, it's a serious question.

If somebody's never heard of Last and First Men, and you've got a paragraph to tell them what to expect, what would you say the book is about, or how is it structured, or why should they read it? It's like reading a condensed best bits of all of science fiction. So many of the ideas are taken up by other science fiction writers and expanded from Planet the Apes to the destruction of the moon. which is a key part of Neil Stevenson's Seveneves. Freeman Dyson's sphere is drawn from Stapleton. Borghese was inspired by it in terms of invention of the multiverse, which Stapleton's asides can be built into entire careers for science fiction writers. Yeah.

And indeed, Oona used the phrase there, primitive homo sapiens. Many listeners will be familiar with David Bow song, all you pretty things featuring the phrase got to make way for the homo superior. Homo superior, a phrase coined by our author today, Olaf Stapleton, in which book in Odd John? Is that right?

He uses it in Odd John. I'm not sure if he coined it if it was contemporaneous. But certainly Odd John, The X-Men by Stanley, I think, has a certain resemblance to Odd John. I think that Stanley said he hadn't necessarily read it, but it's indicative. Stapleton's work will have entered in the bloodstream of science fiction.

It would have been much imitated, copied, reproduced in science fiction magazines. So, yeah, the odd John really prefigures the X-Men quite considerably. Well, I think that's one of the reasons I was so, Matthew, when you brought up the idea of talking about this book and this author, it's one of the reasons I was so interested in it, because, as you suggest, his DNA seems to be the basis on which much science fiction, is built, but as we'll see, you know, there are pluses and minuses to that in terms of how he's remembered. So let me just say a bit about the author himself. OLAF Stapleton was born on the Wirral Peninsula across the Mersey from Liverpool on the 10th of May 1886. Throughout his early childhood, he lived in Portside, Egypt. During World War I, he served as a conscientious objector

becoming an ambulance driver in France and Belgium from July 1915 onwards. He was awarded the Quida Gare for bravery. Stapleton was a lifelong socialist and pacifist. In 1925 he was awarded a PhD in philosophy from the University of Liverpool and he used his doctoral thesis as the basis for his first published book, A Modern Theory of Ethics. However, he soon turned to fiction in the hope of presenting his ideas to a wider public.

Novels such as Last and First Men, Starmaker, Odd John and Sirius, were highly acclaimed by writers as various as G. Wells, Georges Luis Borges, J.B. Priestley, Bertrand Russell, Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf, H.P. Lovecraft and Winston Churchill. C.S. Lewis penned his so-called Cosmic Trilogy, partly in response to what he saw as Stapleton's amorality, while simultaneously praising Stapleton's imaginative facility and describing him as, quote, a corking good writer. So why isn't this corking good writer fated by the great and the good of his era, more widely known today, Could it be that despite his status as the father of science fiction, science fiction is partly to blame for his comparative obscurity?

And would it be correct to describe Olaf Stapleton, who projected his consciousness across the universe from his back garden on the Wirral as the original cosmic scouter? It's from the Wirral. I just don't think we can call him a scouser, but, you know, fine. That's right, kill my joke for that. What are people from the Wirral called if they're not called Scalcers? Well, I think they would be classed as woollybacks.

Cosmic woollybacks doesn't have the same thing, do it? But everyone is a woollyback is not a Scalcer. No, you're all right. That's true. When we come back, we will poke our heads cautiously round the doors of perception to try and answer these and other questions. Listen patiently. We who are the last men earnestly desire to communicate with you.

I am speaking to you now from a period about 2,000 million terrestrial years in your future. Astronomers have made a startling discovery, which assigns a speedy end to humankind. We can help you. And we can help you. And we need your help. We find ourselves filled in spite of everything with a triumphant love of our fate. That was the trailer for Johann Johansson's recent film adaptation of Last and Burr. Men, narrated by Tilda Swinton.

Matthew, when did you first read Last and First Men and become aware of the work of Olaf Stapleton? I read The Star Maker and I became interested in his war experience, the First World War, and I became interested in the First World War as a science fiction event through his diaries and letters. and the diaries and letters of comparable figures who were philosophers and writers who weren't combatants, who weren't conscientious objectors, but had adopted this third position, stretcher-bearer, or in Stapleton's case, ambulance driver. And when I say the wars like a science fiction event, I felt reading their diaries,

living through it sort of year by year, it was the complete destruction of everyday life and the transfigureness, transfiguration of everyday life and the kind of strangeness that resulted from it. So I became interested in writing a novel in which the First World War parts of it are recreated obsessively in the future, which is my novel if then. And that's why I went deep into Stapleton's accounts of the war and those of other comparable figures. It's a rupture, isn't it? It's kind of a break in time. and an erasure of everything that came before and a kind of sort of hideous birthing of something new, I guess.

And that, yeah, that makes it feel strange and weird. And to begin with, it feels inevitable. Like it feels like the future is being born. And people like Wells, you know, H.G. Wells, he's writing propaganda in 1914 saying, this is a necessary stage in the evolution of the future, the war. It'll get the, you know, the Teutonic spirit out and we'll be able to proceed.

And then as you go on, like 1915, 1916, it becomes apparently there's nothing being created here. It's all destruction. There's a quote from a US ambassador. In 1916, Walter Page, the American ambassador in London, remarked that Europe is a bankrupt slaughterhouse inhabited by unmated women. I wonder that anybody is sane. It's probably the darkest sentence I can think of it.

It gets a complete, like, nice. I'm like, nothing is being done here or achieved here. So I was interested in kind of making the war strange again or restoring that strangeness that must have been like to experience it. So, Matthew, can I just get that clear in my own head then? Did you, had you already read Stapleton's fiction before you became aware of his status, as I suppose we could call it in relation to the war?

Or did you read the fiction as a result of becoming interested in him? Yeah, I'd already read Starmaker as a sort of crash course in science fiction because, you know, you have to read that one. And then in the course of researching this, I sort of realized that he was part of this Friends Ambulance Unit. And there were other interesting people who were part of it, like Lewis Frye Richardson, who invents the equations that power meteorology now.

And actually was, you know, alongside Stapledon in the Friends Ambulance Unit. And Frye Richardson was desperately trying to write an equation would predict the end of the war while they were part of it, right? Which you can dig out of the British libraries in there. So there were all these kind of interesting people who were in this kind of part of the war but not part of the war.

Also the French philosopher-priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who cited a lot in early kind of post-humanism as the person who coins the noosphere. He was doing stretcher-bearing for the French army and his accounts of the war are somehow similar in which there's a very, a real overlap between Teilhard de Chardin and Stapledon, which there's a sense that we're evolving toward God rather than like God exists as a prior thing and then everything flows from that.

The sense that we're building up and progressing towards a God. And I just saw in their experience of the war how they could possibly sustain or this faith in the face of all, this destruction. In the faith in evolution, in progress, in human, if not perfection, then a move towards improving conditions for human beings while simultaneously being confronted with carnage on a daily basis. Which is key to understanding the structure of last and first man, which is this, there's not, progress is not a given, that there's going to be rises, they're going to be falls,

there's going to be hubris, there's going to be civilisations to destroy themselves. And he gives, that's what drives the narrative through these, these generations, these different species of men, what it is that brings their civilization down in the same way that the First World War felt like the complete destruction of civilizations. Eunich, you've read Stapleton, haven't you? You'd read him before Matthew suggested for this episode. I came to Starmaker first, precisely because it's the book that gets pressed on you, and people say, look, really you have to read this. This is science fiction. This is everything is here. It's just an extraordinary book. And then I came to Last and First

Men out of interest in seeing where those ideas had emerged from. When Matthew suggested we do Last and First Men, I was able to buy copies of that book, Starmaker and Sirius in HMV, where slightly incredibly, there were more Olaf Stapled than novels in HMV than in Water Stones, because clearly somebody at that publisher has done a kind of, you know, a deal as part of their science fiction offer. But they are widely available still. They are in print, which hasn't always been the case. Now look, you both write and read science fiction. And one of the things I'm keen to dig into in this episode is when Stapleton was writing his novels, particularly in the 1930s, was there anything called science fiction when Stapleton was writing these novels?

These aren't genre. That's why I'm trying to say. We are discussing them in terms of genre. That is the slot into which he gets placed in HMV. But he was not writing in that way, nor was he received in that way. His background is philosophy. And I wonder how you feel about... his workers not influencing sci-fi, Matthew.

You said brilliantly, he's in the DNA of sci-fi. Okay, but that's an accident. So how has that happened? Why has that happened? So to answer your first question, I mean, science fiction is a term, you know, it's coined in the, I think in the 20s around the magazines, the pulp in America.

And they do reprint earlier works, scientific romances, as they would have been called in the first part of the 20th century. Romance here, not standing for a love story, but standing for a work of the imagination, a fancy, right, but with the scientific basis, hence a scientific romance. And so people, writers like H.G. Wells, was sort of included in those pulp and other comparable writers from that kind of pre-science fiction before it becomes more. firmly codified as a commercial genre that would have been intermingled in with those publications. Staple than himself, you know, he'd read a little bit of Wells. He hadn't read a lot of Wells.

He'd read War of the Worlds, the Star. And he corresponds with Wells. Wells is really in the bloodstream of every progressive thinker in the first 30 years. He's unignorable. His science fiction has largely dwindled away in terms of what he's writing.

He just write a book called The Star Begetta, which I think is the last one he does, which comes out at the same time to Star Maker. But on the whole, Wells is writing pretty much retrospectively unloved literary realism that exemplifies his philosophical thoughts, right? Not particularly. Look back with any fondness, certainly not compared to his amazing early run of science fiction where he knocks out the time machine, war of the world's invisible man, Islander Dr. Moreau in a kind of compressed period of absolute genius.

as to why Stapledon isn't the path that science fiction goes down I think for anyone when people read this book they'll discover why which is there's no characters and there's no conventional plot I think there's at the best there's a kind of unnamed the odd unnamed prophet or archetype so it doesn't have a lot of the traditional storytelling qualities of the novel as a form or the short stories form. Bofus and the Starmakers stand together because they dismiss character entirely to tell a kind of

what Stapled and was described as a myth, really, a myth of the future. And that's a path, I just think, a really commercial genre like science fiction with its roots in Gothic just wasn't going to go down something because difficult and as intellectual as this. And at the same time as the genre kind of, like you say, as it codifies into something. something commercial and something that's more conventional in form, it loses the respect

of the kind of literary establishments. And that kind of readership that would pick up and read Stably, I mean, Virginia Woolf, yeah, is not going to read what's coming out in those pulks and what's being published by those mass market paperback houses. So there's this kind of bifurcation that kind of sets in from the 20s, but then chiefly, I'd say sort of from the 50s onwards. The one of the thing I would say that Stapleton evokes consistently is sense of the transcendent. And authors who follow on from him like Arthur C. Clarke, they all reach for that transcendent as well.

But they do so wonder not great depictions of character. God knows Arthur C. Clark's not a great literary artist of character. But they would build towards that transcendence in a way that would feel more conventional storytelling. Stapleton is part of a milieu in the 30s, which is influenced, as you say, Matthew, by the First World War, presumably is influenced again by H.G. Wells, but also Wells and writers of that era channeling the advances in science that were part of the intellectual climate. In other words, what I'm saying is these are writers of ideas the ones I listed in the

opening who read Stapleton and Stapleton would be in that category. It's kind of a category that doesn't exist anymore. I'm not sure it had a name then, but the imagination and the intellect were harnessed together and they could express themselves

in stream of consciousness or they could express themselves in what we now know as science fiction. As Una, as you said, that bifurcation. There's a really interesting little essay by Doris Lessing republished in the back of the HMV edition of Last and First Men. That's brilliant. Somebody went into buying Funko Pop and came out with a Doris Lessing essay. But anyway, where she says she felt fortunate to have stumbled on the book as a relatively young person, a bit like Brian Aldis said he did.

a teenager when he read it. And before that bifurcation had occurred, she said, Una. In other words, your imagination was open to ideas to the cosmic in a way that it wouldn't have been, perhaps, a couple of decades later. And the genre itself is still fluid. It's still in a state of perhaps not fixity, so that if you were coming to science fiction, 50 years later, you would be handed a very well-structured set of genre conventions, I think. Yeah.

And you can see, you can see Stapleton right the way through Shikasta and books like that, I think, that Lessing Quintet. Una, does that make it a difficult read? Like, if it's somebody who's just going to pick it up off the back of this program, what are they going to find when they open the book? Is it a straightforward easy read or is it a very complicated read? Well, I think it demands concentration. It demands setting aside perhaps some of your expectations of what you might be getting from a book. This is not a Rachel Cusk novel. We might say. In what way? Go on. Well, for many of the things that Matthew has said already that it doesn't follow the conventional

forms that you might expect of focus on individual psychology or the kind of progress or deconstruction of a certain kind of plotting or scene setting. No, it's not the post-Flobeir bourgeois novel of

sentiment, is it? Exactly that. And also, I think the other thing Mattie might want to talk a little about this is that I think the first four chapters are quite quite a hard sell yeah okay before we get onto that thorny topic yeah we we want Nikki wants to bring people in come inside the tent everyone there's some there's some cosmic happenings going on campers in here we're all camp right we're all camping right now it's yes we'll come in so um Matthew I know you want to talk a little bit about the opening of the

the book and perhaps issue some kind of a health warning I think it would be really useful if you were to just read us a little bit of the prose because what I think is interesting about the way we've been talking about it is it does sound quite forbidding and yet when you hear it or you read it it's written with real clarity it's not you say it's not like a rachel cask well one way in which it's not like rachel cask is it is trying to clarify an idea in an immediately understandable way. I think the trailer for the film that we heard maybe gives a sort of sense of what the language is like

and how luminous, and we'll get to this, how musical it is. Okay, so I'm going to read a bit from quite later in the book. It's from the Fifth Men section, Man Remakes Himself. and this is about the Fifth Men's view of the cosmos, in which art is fundamental. Since art seemed to the Fifth Men to be in some sense basic to the cosmos, they were naturally very much preoccupied with artistic creation. Consequently, all those who were not social or economic organisers

or scientific researchers or pure philosophers were by profession creative artists or handicraftsmen, That is to say, they were engaged in the production of material objects of various kinds who form should be aesthetically significant to the perceiver. In some cases, a material object was a pattern of spoken words, in others pure music, in others moving coloured shapes, in others a complex of steel cubes and bars, in others some translation of the human figure into a particular medium and so on. But also the aesthetic impulse expressed itself in the production by hand of a numerous,

common utensils, indulging sometimes in lavish decoration, trusting at other times to the beauty of function. Every medium of art that has ever been employed was employed by the fifth men, and innumerable new vehicles were also used. They prized on the whole more highly those kinds of art which were not static, but involved time as well as space, for as a race they were peculiarly fascinated by time. These innumerable artists held that they were doing something of great importance. The cosmos was to be regarded as an aesthetic unity in four dimensions and of inconceivable complexity. Human works of pure art were thought of as instruments through which man might behold and admire some aspect of the cosmic beauty. They were said to focus together features the cosmos too vast and elusive for man otherwise to apprehend. their form. The work of art was sometimes likened to a compendious mathematical formula expressive

of some immense and apparently chaotic field of facts. But in the case of art, it was said, the unity which the artistic object elicited was one in which factors of vital nature and of mind itself were essential members. Available in HMV right now. Pick it up to Fonko Pups, Pratt. Amazing. Thank you so much. Amazing. And also, Matthew, you read that with a real soulfulness,

which suits the material incredibly well. One of the things I found, Una, about reading this book is we described it yesterday, didn't we, as a bit of a long baguette. You sort of have to chew your way. along it. But as you go, different bits taste different and different bits are chewier than others and different, you know, civilisations rise, civilizations fall. The thing that struck me from what Matthew was reading there was he's this incredible

eye in the sky that Stapleton uses. Yeah. But to see the rise and fall of a generation of human beings evolving or changing in certain ways for millions of years at a time, it's incredibly clever. And yet at the same time, I feel that he's imagined what those works of art, if not in perhaps not in sort of very, very concrete or fine detail, he has a sense of what those works of arts might be like, what they might look. look like. Matty had that wonderful line about whole careers from one line in Stapleton. It's like whole artistic movements

are just passed through. He's imagining the contours of what an entire field or discipline of art might be just within the kind of... Like I say, while he might not have the fine-grained detail of the artefact, the pot or the piece of music or the instrument, there's a

sense of what that movement would be as a coherent whole and how it might connect to the worldview the vision of the people from which it emerges and that's an incredible feat of imagination. I can't think of anything like it. Tolkien, perhaps, and LaGuin maybe in something like Changing Plains,

a kind of vision of difference in its wholeness. Matthew, given the era in which he's writing, to what extent do you think Stapleton is dealing in archetypes? Well, you know, after the First World War, the really influential book on the psychology of post-First World War is the Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fasel. And Fussell writes and he says, you know, after the war, there is this interest in myth and there is this interest in rights and you could say in archetypes in the sort of deep patterns of culture. Yeah. And, you know, so Stapledon's own stated aim. to write an essay in myth creation,

which is how he describes this novel. It's very much part of that. And I became also really interested in, how that kind of mythic perception influenced how people represented the war of the time. You know, they would see the war itself, you know, it's pouring a huge amount of blood into the earth. It's an incredible magical right,

terrible fertility right, to bury bury the bodies of young men in the earth, to draw lines in the earth and say, beyond this line is the future. So in its stark, terrible nature, it does resemble kind of an archetypal or mythic landscape. Right. Yeah, yeah. But what I mean as well, let me push you on that a bit.

Okay, so he is channeling an interest in archetypes that we would expect to find in this era of history. Also, because of how he's creating whole civilizations, is he forging his own archetypes? You know, I think this is part of the visionary nature of the novel. It's, it's, he manages to take things which seem kind of absurd. There's a, is it the second men? One wave of the second men develop in a particular physical way, which means they have particularly large hands or something.

But then he uses that as a detail on which to build a civilisation, which simultaneously seemed to me when I was reading it absurd. And, well, if you're going to follow that idea through, entirely consistent as a piece of imaginative writing. And what's more absurd than, you know, a bunch of one-time monkeys climbing down from a tree and, you know, starting to shove things in bags and make beer, that's, you know, in its own way, we are very absurd, aren't we?

It's just that we happen to be this shaped. Yeah, I mean, that's part of the effect of this novel. It makes everything that seems given to you suddenly seem contingent and it could be another way. Plastic. You know, when you were talking, like in Starmaker, I think there's a species who have their taste organs in their genitals, you know, and he's extrapolating.

I know many men like that. There were some of those in Brighton, weren't there? The other thing, I think, in terms of you were talking about the myth, I think that the influence, I think Doris Lessing might bring this up, is the influence of archaeology and at this period, and the discovery of deep time, the certain key archaeological discoveries that increase our awareness of the civilizations that have risen and fall in the past,

and societies, civilizations we might once have considered to be biblical. We now start to discover historical remnants of it, and therefore we know that this civilization rising and falling has been going on. And these archaeological discoveries, this expansion of the human history, is something that it's in the air when he's writing. And that to hold Troy in your head as the kind of the founding myth of Western civilization, and the Iliad or the Odyssey, and then to discover the actual physical artefacts of Troy,

which are small and it's not a great area. And to try and connect those two things together, I think that echoes through the book. Well, we were talking Matthew's brilliant definition of the difference between the writer and the author. That was happening 100 years ago. Stapleton wrote a piece for The Listener magazine in 1930 to promote his new book.

And it dovetails exactly with what we've, just been talking about. So I'm going to just read you a little bit of that. Is this him as the author? Yeah. This is him. Someone said to him, Olaf, it would be terribly good if you could just knock out a thousand words on about your book for the listener magazine. He's got, can do it. Whilst putting up a tent. Can do. Yes. Anyway, this is the remaking of man by Olaf Stapleton published in the listener magazine in 1930. I'll just read you a couple of paragraphs. The recent publication of last and first, men has already brought Mr Stapleton into prominence as a historian of the future.

Human nature is like our English climate. No one can be sure what it will do at a particular time and place, but we all know that it will be mostly dull or bad and that it cannot be altered. That at least is the common view. Yet both the climate and human nature change. There have been ice ages. There have been ape men. No doubt our own inborn nature is much like that of the earliest true men. But man has only been man for about a million years, and his future may be very much longer.

The perfected men who are to come will probably regard us as a quaint prehistoric monkey, dignified by a mere spark of humanity. Now, remaking man may very easily turn out to be mere monkeying with man. There are two kinds of monkeying. Either you may know what improvements you want and not know how to produce them, or you may know the technique without knowing what it is you really want to do. In the case of man, both these dangers are very great. The problem of technique we must leave to the scientists,

bearing in mind, however, the kind of alterations, which may be possible sooner or later. The question for us here is whether human nature ought to be changed at all and if so, in what direction. I, for one, am sure that our present human nature needs altering, and the general direction of desirable changes

I would summarise in this way. They should afford me a richer, wider, deeper, more subtle, more accurate experience of this amazing world. they should help me to see more clearly what is really desirable. Finally, they should enable me in every kind of situation to take all relevant facts into account and behave always with supreme tact, intelligence, insight, foresight, so that always the best possible results may follow. That I should be thus remade, or you, is impossible.

But do we not desire that a race of beings far happier and more vital than ourselves should someday occur? You know, that's not bad. It's all right. A life in the day of Olaf Stapleton or some my favourite podcasts or whatever. That's what you get now. You only see journalism like that in Teen Vogue these days, I think. Do you think that's harder than having to erect a tent at a festival in Brighton, Matthew, that piece of writing? What would you prefer?

I can't even begin to compare the act, although I will say this about Stapleton, right? And he was intensely domestic as well. So his movements are always from, he is very domestic, he's a runner, he's jogger, he likes the outdoors, he's got his kids, he's with his wife, apart from one dalliance, you know, his whole life. Agnes. And then at the same time, within that domestic frame, he is having these incredible thoughts about the crystal, terrible clarity of starlight and what that casts upon our lives. So he's always all sort of domestic and cosmic at the same time, which is really a description of a great camping trip as well. We mentioned that the first few chapters of Last and First Men,

are, well, Matthew, do you want to try and, when you sent us an email about it, you said, you know, you might just want to skip the first few chapters. Yeah, that's right. That's not an original idea. I mean, my introduction has a forward by the science fiction writer Gregory Bedford, and he suggests skipping them as well. Why? I'll tell you why.

The first man, which is Balkan Europe, Europe's downfall, and then the rise of America and China. and an Americanized planet is kind of how it ends up. You can skip all those and start on with the fall of the first man, the first Dark Age, and this is why, right? Those first four chapters are what I would call like extrapolated history, so that are extrapolative logic. Stapleton's gone, well, okay, this is the state of the world now,

and if this happens and this, they're quite low-hanging fruit of extrapolation in the same way that, like, if I say, you know, we're going to go to Mars and we're going to have, self-driving cars and it's all kind of low-hanging fruit kind of obvious stuff and it kind of that's what those chapters cover HG Wells love that stuff because he was very concerned about intervening in the world and intervening in events now and he saw that as part of that also I mean some of the events depicted by Stapled and there don't really fit with modern mores I will you know give you your content note on that but then once now you get

past that period and you go into more metaphoric just crazier logical leaps more strangeness and that's really where his you know it comes to the fore that's where the thing takes off and because it's not a plot and it's not characters you know it sounds kind of almost heretical just to dump the first four chapters but I've actually for American earlessness you know there will be an MIT press edition of this book next year with an introduction by me and you know we're going to bridge it we are going to cut out those sections for reasons of let's produce a more compact dare one say commercially viable book but also I think that not a great deal is lost from their removal I'd just like to offer a counterpoint

to that which is saying I really enjoyed the American bit near the beginning of this book because because because it seemed incredibly relevant to the era we happen to be living through right now Probably didn't 20 years ago, or it did, I don't know, but it really felt almost on the nose now. But I agree with Matthew that the, I think what's remarkable about last and first men is obscured by the sense in those first few chapters that you know what you're going to get,

that it is a kind of, it's almost like, isn't it, it's playing to the contemporary audience, to reassure them slightly, whereas it's not reassuring to us. It's kind of like disappointing to us. And the cosmic journey really only starts once you get that stuff out the way. Really, once he's free as a writer to put his imaginative and philosophical gifts to full use rather than writing something slightly droll. Yeah, that's the note.

And it's an object lesson in what and how science fiction can get things completely disastrously wrong and then you know a few chapters on be completely and transcendently beautiful I think is it it must be a source of some frustration to um practitioners of the craft of writing science fiction that people do get terribly hung up on uh whether or not someone was accurate in their their vision don't they people do not you you don't jet the Matthew and Oona. But, you know, I remember when I was a kid, in the run up to 1984,

so much of the discussion was about, well, what did all will get right and what did all get wrong? Well, you know, it's always 1984. Certainly somewhere. Yeah, and a lot of it tends to surround kind of technological innovation, I think, which science fiction is often disastrously bad at predicting.

Like, what's just around the corner? Matthew writes a very different type of science fiction for me. The kind of space opera I write, I think, can be quite vulnerable to this, actually. If you go and look back at a sort of 60 Star Trek, you go, oh, that's absolutely of that moment. Yeah. The internet has not touched these stories. Have you ever predicted anything, any technological innovation owner in your books that have wildly off the mark? No, no, no.

I just predict human folly, Nikki. And there's always a market for that. There is indeed. Yeah, I've got a terrifying track record. Go on. Tell us one of your failed technologies. Well, no, a lot of them are real. Well, the Red Men in my novel, which was published in 2007,

are simulated versions of people created by AI. That you pay a subscription to maintain, and they do your work for you. It was your fault. God, some tech, bro, read that novel and now look where we are. Yeah, in 2015, I give presentations to the UK government about the problems of deep fakes and the likelihood of AI being used to create fake history that would then alter the history. Even like the last week I was in an event out in Abu Dhabian,

if somebody was wearing a little, little thing, the little device that recorded everything they said, that an AI would then create a Preci, and in my novel the Destructives, I have the same device. but it's a monolith and the destructives, which is published in 2018 or whatever, the idea that I knew that we'd obviously be used to create records of our entire lives and then analysed by them and used to train them. So unfortunately, I've got a bit of a track record.

You've got the all-seeing eye. What's coming next, Matthew? Well, I think that the key to prediction is that science fiction obviously can't be predictive because prediction's impossible and complex, but you just have to extrapolate from human nature, really. And that's what gives you your predictive qualities. I mean, tomorrow I'll be to my students, you know, talking about J.G. Ballard and there's somebody who, you know, didn't predict technology of his life, but he got the psychology of the future. That's what he predicted accurately, you know, the collision of sex and technology and celebrity. And he identifies that as key. And that's what he's extrapolating for. Okay. And so what if we're reading Stapleton, a hundred years on from when he was formulating his ideas, not technical.

technologically, what did he get right? But what aspects, like you're talking about Ballard there, about human nature, what aspects of human nature do you think he is particularly strong at evoking now? What's an interesting question? Because there aren't obvious characters who would act as a kind of focus around that,

or a focalizer around that question. What I would say is, there's a phrase towards the end of his life, he uses the dark, bright, I think, to kind of, he's kind of trying to describe the transcendental nature of everything. I think earlier I described like the crystal, there's a kind of crystal light or he was talking about,

it's kind of simultaneously super cold and indifferent, but also some source of hope. And I think it's those two concepts being fused at all time, the kind of terrible darkness, but you need that to see the brightness. that the hope and the melancholy always being fused together and I think that's something that readers

will always return to it and people will always exemplify and be enthralled to. It's the one bright star shining in the sort of empty cosmos, I think. Una, I found one of the things about this as we already described it, this baguette of a novel.

I found some bits of it quite dull and then some bits of it very gripping and it kind of ebbs and flows funnily enough like music. It reminded me of music in terms of its movements and its rhythm and its longer.

You know, it has periods where he's deliberately holding down the narrative beat, actually, for one of a better term. It seems so obvious. But, you know, he's deliberately holding it down and Matthew I wonder whether you could say something about that you know a lot of readers want to be gripped

and I always view I always say well you the book isn't going to grip you you grip the book and this seems a very good example of that to me you've got to find the rhythm of that book for yourself or did you not have that experience with it you know I recognise what you're saying and it's it's very hard for one of if you said to me what are the third men doing what are the fifth what the fourth men doing it's quite hard for me to recreate it because there aren't those points in a conventional narrative yeah you just have to go with it it's a bit like experimental jazz there's bits that are scrunky I told you because Nick Scouser I said it yeah it's not difficult the level of sentence at the sentence No, agreed.

You're sometimes trying to make this into conventional patterns and there's a different pattern of patterning at work and you have to sort of give yourself up to that patterning which is you're describing as more akin to music and it's more akin to philosophy

you know he's trying to explore different things from a philosophical perspective and you have to do that with a Virginia Wolf novel don't you? It's maybe analogous to reading something like the waves I was just thinking the waves Exactly, yeah, I agree completely.

Also the bit into the lighthouse where there's no characters. There's a middle section where there's just the lighthouse and time passes, but there's no people there present. And it kind of resembles that. It's worth saying, actually, we were talking earlier about Stapledon in terms of, you know, where you'd situate him. He was very aware of the Bloomsbury group, and he was very, he saw real flaws in their approach and things they were missing out on

that he felt that literature should address. And you could, I mean, if you want to, situating we talked a bit where he belongs in science fiction you could just say belongs in modernism really right absolutely yeah and modernism encompasses science fiction you can take modernism all the way up to you know ballard publishing william burroughs uh as a science fiction writer but also kind of as a modernist of making that claim for him in the 60s that's a big enough tent that i think encompasses staple and certainly encompasses his you know his relationship with a tent or influence upon wolf a tent interesting choice

It's, yeah, an interesting choice of words, the tent, the canopy of stars. Yeah, the Dragon's Den. The, can I just read you? Imagine you're working for Methuen in 1929. They didn't have marketing departments, then the lucky bastards. You're in the equivalent of the marketing department, and you're given the manuscript of Last and First Man, and you're asked to come up with a sales pitch. So I'm going to ask Nicky, Matthew, Una, settle down as I give you the original jacket copy for Last and First Men by O'Lef Stapleton from the first edition.

Let me say immediately that they've actually got two bits of text on this jacket, the first of which is on the spine. So it's got last and first men, four words stacked up, W. Olaf Stapleton. And then it says, underneath that is a little paragraph that says, In this brilliant romance, a man living on Neptune, 2,000 million years hence, tells the story of humanity from our day to his. So that's on the spine. Right? Very, very tiny little words, surely.

Matthew looks intrigued and he's thinking, what? What's this book? And he takes it off the shelf. and he opens the book up and there on the inside flap of the jacket, it says this. A quote-unquote man living 2,000 million years hence tells the story of humanity from our day to his. An age of national wars is followed by a world state, but not before human mentality is undermined. By an unholy union of debased science and insincere religion, our civilisation is ruined. Subsequently, through ages of alternate darkness and brilliance,

successive races and successive human species have strange adventures and strive towards they know not what great goal. At length, the last men, having created a philosophic utopian, face the prospect of annihilation in a great astronomical event. Do you return the book to the shelf or take it to the tail? As you said, does it say underneath that, it's a great big baguette of a novel, Andy Meath. It does. It also says available in his master's voice record shops.

Scriky experimental jazz. That's you doing it. I would be quite excited by the spine and then put off by, the back, you know, I feel like less is more, perhaps. I think it leans interestingly into those early chapters, doesn't it? There's a, yeah, that's the preoccupation perhaps in 1929. Yeah, they're quite concerned with the utility of the imagination rather than the pleasures. So the first bit of the book is considered useful, kind of stuff you might need to know.

If one of the worst extrapolations, Italy and France, go to war together. Devastating conflicts, but excellent cuisine. It does lead into that. And it misses a lot of the pleasures. It makes it all sound a bit like the guy who ever wrote that, didn't really read it. Or had read beyond chapter six. Yeah. I'm not even sure the fifth man is on Neptune, actually.

If your job is to sum up this book in one paragraph, which we've already tried to do, That's as bold an effort as any. We've already tried to. You outsourced that task to be. And I turned that round in a matter of hours, Mr Miller. I would like to hear some more from the book. Ouna, do you want to read us a different section, please? I can, yes.

So I've picked a section from the end because I think it's very beautiful. And I think people already may have gathered how this book ends. so and it's not a book that kind of deals in spoilers in really they've had almost a hundred years yeah to read it exactly they could cope with it I picked it because it's I think it's very beautiful because I think it touches on that sort of melancholy but a sort of appreciation of the beauty of things that Matthew was talking about and I think it has some reflections that you might come to this Andy if we get a chance about the musicality and the centrality of music as an image. So we're right at the end of the book and

this perfected utopia of 18th men. Our star is exploding and they're going to, they're all going to die and it's going to happen more quickly than they can manage to save anyone. So they're facing the extinction of humanity and reflecting on that. coming to turns with that in very different ways. Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a first spirit whom a star conceived and a star kills. He's greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality,

in him there is achievement, small but actual. Too soon, seemingly, he comes to his end. but when he is done he will not be nothing, not as though he has never been, for he is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. Man was winged hopefully. He had in him to go further than this short flight, now ending. He proposed even that he should become the flower of all things and that he should learn to be the all-knowing, the all-admiring.

Instead, he is to be destroyed. He's only a fledgling, called. in a bushfire. He's very small, very simple, very little capable of insight. His knowledge of the great orb of things is a fledgling's knowledge. His admiration is a nestling's admiration for the things kindly to his own small nature. He delights only in food and the food announcing call. The music of the spheres passes over him, through him, and is not heard. Yet it has used him, and now it uses his destruction. Great and terrible and very beautiful is the whole. And for man, the best is that the hole should use him. But does it really use him? Is the beauty of the whole really enhanced by our

agony? And is the whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? Throughout all his existence, man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it, yet he can never be sure that he's truly heard it, not even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness. But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things.

It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts and peace, thankful for the past and for our own courage. For we shall make, after all, a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man. Whoa, bravo. Very good. You know, I'm going to read another little bit immediately about music to counterpoint that.

And while you were reading beautifully, Una, while you were reading, it made me think, okay, Stapleton is Marla. This book is like a Marla symphony. it has all sorts of music folded into it and you never quite the themes repeat but they come in all sorts of register and here is a section from earlier in the book where when I read it for the first time when we were talking about different influences it was very hard for me not to quote unquote hear this in the voice of Peter Jones, aka the original book from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. So I'll just read you a little bit of this because what's so interesting is the the dying fall that you just gave us is a reprise of the lighter version here.

The Prophet was born in a Highland village where, the native faith in music was intense, though quite unformulated. In time he learnt to raise his peasant audiences to the most extravagant joy and the most delicious sorrow. Then at last he began to think and to expound his thoughts with the authority of a great bard. Easily he persuaded men that music was the reality and all else illusion, that the living spirit of the universe was pure music, and that each individual animal and man, though he had a body that must die and vanish forever, had also a soul that was music and eternal. A melody, he said, is the most fleeting of things. It happens and ceases. The great silence devours it and seemingly

annihilates it. Passage is essential to its being. Yet though for a melody, to halt is to die a violent death. All music, the prophet affirmed, also has eternal life. After silence it may occur again with all its freshness and aliveness. Time cannot age it, for its home is in a country outside time, and that country, thus the young musician earnestly preached, is also the homeland of every man and woman, nay, of every living thing that has any gift of music. Those who seek immortality must strive to awaken their trounced souls into melody and harmony, and according to their degree of musical originality and proficiency, will be their standing in the eternal life. Thus was founded the Holy Empire of Music, which gave order and purpose to the species

for a thousand years. I think that's like a little schizo there in the middle, And then that's picked up again in that great fugue at the end. It's wonderful. What a wonderful book. This is what I hope would happen during this episode, which is I liked the book at the beginning and now I really like it. Thank you so much to both of you for like bringing this thing alive. I have a question for the science fiction experts in the room.

Where does this book stand in like the canon of science. science fiction. I mean, you sort of said it is and it isn't science fiction. But that's actually a great, that's a great question. To what extent, and well, this is a good place for us to kind of end this discussion. To what extent is this book compromised by its current status as an important work of science fiction? Well, it's published, the edition we're waving around is the science fiction masterworks. edition published by Galance so yes you say it's it's first of all that's where it's positioned within the masterworks of science fiction um there would be many different canons and directions

of science fiction that it could have gone down um historic and when you go back and look at it you create all sorts of different canons the writer jonathan letham talks writes an essay called the squandered promise of science fiction which is based in the there was a point in the 1970s where Thomas Pynchon could have won a big science fiction award but Arthur C. Clarke gets it instead and so Pynchon who could easily have belonged to science fiction and therefore being a figure who integrates it with mainstream literary culture it goes off down that different path and I think those kind of bifurcations happen frequently and stapled in is one we could say you know there could be an alternate history of science fiction in which stapled in is

preeminent and wells is secondary and this is the path that you follow but there are all sorts of alternate canons within it and we do discover those retrospectively you know we certainly uno and i would put you know leguin sir leguin like a much very powerful position octavia butler these kind of authors who are now so much more present in the culture but if we were doing this program 25 years ago you know we'd have been talking azimov and people like that it's interesting we've featured should, LaGuin recently and Octavia Butler last year, and certainly Octavia Butler, I find fascinating because even in the lifetime of this podcast, I've watched her reputation change even in the last 10 years. She's moved out of science fiction to some extent into, I don't know what we said

young adult in some way or the mainstream, whatever. I think that's really interesting, Matthew, you, but again, I want to, yes, science fiction could have gone in different directions. There will be listeners to this right now, who I think would really appreciate this book, who will be thinking to themselves, but I don't read science fiction. Putting aside their personal prejudices, what is the thing that, the question to you, Una, as well, What is the thing that they should feel, they shouldn't be anxious about? You know, they can enjoy this book without having ever picked up Asimov or Kim Stanley Robinson or, you know, anyone from the genre. Sometimes that's sort of, you don't feel afraid to read a book because you've read something that feels similar.

and I think the closest to Stapledon that people might have read, although I wouldn't say they were similar in Outlook, would be some of C.S. Lewis's non-Narnia novels. That perhaps would be the closest that people may. Maybe something like the Cosmic Trilogy that we talked about. Or something like Screw Tape, actually. Those sorts of, there is a lot of play

in some of Stapleton's other work. So that I think would be closest. And they are in dialogue, I think, very much so. Lewis writes those novels in response to Stapledon. So that might be, that's one way perhaps. So that's something I have read. So I'm more familiar perhaps with the mode in which it's written or the ideas with which it's grappling. I'll pitch in William Golding. In fact, Una, we did a show together on the inheritors and we view quite correctly identified that as containing many science fiction tropes.

And indeed yesterday, we were talking about Golding as a science fiction writer who chooses not to be put in the bracket of science fiction. Yeah, consciously erases it, I think. If you read and enjoy those early Goldings, the spire, particularly, in terms of the extension of time beyond some reasonable measure. Doris Lessing as well, right? Another obvious one, yeah. And Lessing's novel, the first.

fifth child, I think owes a great deal to Odjohn, a sort of a child whose ability sort of outstrip the capacity that people around him to cope with it. I was going to say the Silmarillion. Yeah. All the time I was reading this bloody book, I was thinking of the Silmarillion. As we've been doing this podcast, I have been making extensive notes for an essay. I will never write on the similarities between Tolkien and Stapledon. So I'm just putting that one out there.

You will, Una. You will. You will. I think what are the key differences, like, between science fiction and what's convention called literary fiction, turns around the issue of character. So in science fiction, you often can't have really rich, detailed, psychological representations of character because it adds peculiarity to an already peculiar conceit. So when, you know, Wells originally writes time machine, we have no character names. They're defined just by their profession. So if you're asking me about, can this be domesticated into literary fiction,

the absence of character is the challenge around that. But equally, it would be the way the science fiction represents a character that will put people off it conventionally. So they can rest assured there aren't any characters here. There aren't any poorly sketched, two-dimensional engineers that will put you off this book. It is all transcendence all the way down. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah. If you've got through Paradise Lost, you can get through StarMaker. Yeah, and it is actually described as a, like, Paradise Lost as if written by, you know, a contemporary. That is one of the reviews that Stapled and was most passionate about, most enjoyed. I love making a show with people who, when you ask them to make a book accessible, say, oh, it's like Paradise Lost. Anyway, right, that's, sorry, Matthew, that's where we've got to wind it up. Sorry, I'll pack up my tent and go. Bravo, sir. Bravo.

Many thanks to Matthew for helping us navigate the outer limits of the stapledonian cosmos. And to our producer, Nikki Birch, for picking up the signals we've been beaming back for the last hour and converting them into podcast. If you want show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this episode and the previous 252, please visit our website at Backlist. If you want to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows, visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose backlisted as your bookshop. And if you think we're not chummy and gangy enough,

we even have our own back channel, Uber backlisted area on Patreon, where you would really support us if you subscribe to our patron at patreon. At patreon.com forward slash backlisted. And when you subscribe at the lock listener, level. You get two extra podcasts every month. Plus, you get to read Andy's fantastic writing project inventory, and you can join our club of dedicated listeners and readers like ourselves. Thanks, Matthew, thanks, thanks, thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

His posthumously published The Opening of the Eyes, which is sort of found in his effects by his widow Agnes. But it includes a section that I found quite compelling, and I discovered this in my recent research. And it sort of touches upon some of the, I guess, the tone of Una's reading at the end of Last and First Man. He has a friend. His biographer suggests she's Lillian Bose Leon,

cousin to the Queen Mother. But she's not named in the text. In her early 50s, you know, she's in great deal of pain. She's very ill. She's an amputee. She's in a wheelchair. And she's a great friend of Stapletons.

And she's a poet and she's dying. And he goes to see her. And he offers to speak to, her as if he's god and she they there's about four pages of them talking and her asking questions of him as if he's god about what's happened to her and him answering and it's incredibly powerful when you also have stapled and you know we'll die quite soon afterwards from a heart attack and i just found it quite i'd never heard of it before and i found it really astonishing and And there's a transcendence through his work that finds its completion in him,

adopting the voice of God, but also kind of getting it slightly wrong. So he's speaking to her, and she's dying, and he says, Then I, God says through me, I gave you a rare talent, you've used it well, but now, so that you may serve me still more truly, I am tempering you with great suffering. This new and grievous experience that I'm giving you is a window opened for you. what you see through it, your poetry must tell. He actually is saying this to her.

And she replies, just to quote a part of it, God, you are not only hurting me beyond what I have strength to bear. You're crushing out my little talent. I look through your terrible window, but I am too tired to see anything but darkness. And this phrase, the window, recurs throughout State Budden's life. So when he's an ambulance driver in his diary,

he sees some terrible things towards the end and he actually describes like it it's like his window is smashed through he's been seeing life through it and being able to cope and then just towards the end it's too much and the window is sort of something reaches right through and gets to the heart of him yeah so this is a it's a dark it's a dark point of ending and he offers various consolation and she kind of pushes back at it and you can see him grappling with this dark brightness he's trying to play a god in which he's she's sort of admitting all the pain in her life. But he's trying to say, you're part basically of an artistic creation or an aesthetic universe. So what you're going through will just be part of this great weave

of this creation of humanity. Even when the stars are extinguished, we will at least have been a work of art. But the darkness is, we don't know if it's a work of art that anything is witnessing.