Is it credible that our world should have two futures? I have seen them. Two entirely distinct futures lie before mankind, one dark, one bright; one the defeat of all man's hopes, the betrayal of all his ideals, the other their hard-won triumph.

Stapledon published this short novel in 1942, in Britain, when indeed a choice between futures was clear, but his story imagines a much further future, where the world's story splits into two incompatible streams. As in Last and First Men and Star Maker, the book presents the vision of our contemporary observer, watching, by means he doesn't understand, the progress of events over centuries, as the light and the darkness contend:

On the one side was the sluggish reptilian will for ease and sleep and death, rising sometimes to active hate and destructveness; on the other side the still blindfold and blundering will for the lucid and coherent spirit. Each generation, it seemed, set out with courage and hope, and with some real aptitude for the life of love and wisdom, but also with the fatal human frailty, and in cirumstances hostile to the generous development of the spirit.

Stapledon gives no more precise a definition of his light and darkness, but goodwill, intelligence, love and charity are counterposed to greed, agression, dominance, and murder. These factors are expressed in the movements of nations and great classes of people. In the dark timeline, the world is gathered into two great empires, Russia and China. Standing between them, the sole nation supporting the light is Tibet, where people combine science and ancient wisdom to become "servants of the light."

The empires cannot allow Tibet to stand. In the dark timeline, they bomb the country into oblivion. China then destroys Russia and institutes a world empire based on cruelty. Eventually civilization collapses and the last humans are eaten by rats. In the light timeline, Tibet survives, sends agents out into the world, gains converts to the light, holds its own in battle, and gradually wins over the rest of humanity. The world becomes progressively, if falteringly, utopian. Happily, the book devotes more space to this better timeline. The story becomes dominated by the observer's difficulty in comprehending the concerns of more highly evolved people.

There's not a single named character in the book; there are one or two unnamed ones who get a page each. The pageant of abstract social transformations becomes a bit sleep-inducing. Stapledon is way too interested in eugenics; an initial world crisis is a decline in average intelligence as the "dullards" out-reproduce their more-intelligent peers. A glimpse of the conventional wisdom of Stapledon's era. On the other hand, he writes a fair amount on the good timeline's insistence on including every human in the great project of enlightenment; everyone is educated to the limit of his capacity. 1940s SF was interested in the exceptional and the heroic; the handicapped did not often appear. This book is a nice change from that.

Another crisis that the enlightened future must face is an increase in volcanism, which becomes a major setback. My impression of the earth science of Stapledon's age is that it stressed gradualism; the author was ahead of his time, both here and in Last and First Men, which is also punctuated by calamities.

This is perhaps Stapledon's seventh most significant book, and I can't really recommend or rate it highly. Both prose and story are pretty clunky. So why reread it now? It's timely - have you seen the news? And I'm a sucker for idealistic prose, like the constitution of the Federation of Mankind:

We, inhabitants of every land, intelligences of the planet Earth, having overthrown a world-wide tyranny, having abolished a world-wide darkness of the spirit, now, through our chose representatives, pledge ourselves to the light. We acknowledge that the high goal of all the lives of men is to awaken themselves and one another to love and wisdom and creative power, in service to the spirit. (...) For this end we declare that in future no powerful individual or class or nation shall have the means, economic or military, to control the lives of men for private gain.

And the Tibetans won in the enlightened timeline because they were hopeful. ( )

I picked this up specifically for the retro-Hugo read for this year.

I had no idea what I was setting myself up for, never having read Olaf Stapledon but having heard of him.

At first, I began complaining about the utter lack of even a basic storytelling premise that included things like actual CHARACTERS, but soon I fell into the writing because Stapledon's world-building chops are pretty amazing.

Imagine picking up The Silmarillion for your first taste of JRRT. Practically all of it is distant exposition and broad sweeps of history. The entire Lord of the Rings takes about 30 pages and it's only a footnote.

Now make a future history and write it like old-school utopian novels and less like SF, showing us the Darkness which is the end of humanity in a vast dystopia across a vast stretch of years, and then switching tracks again and showing us the Light which is an outright Utopia.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, I'm reading Hobbs and Moore with a decidedly SF bent and focus on the rise or fall of Tibet, world-government or world empires. One ends with us being enlightened and the other ends with us being eaten by rats.

The amount of thought and exploration in this novel is frankly mind-blowing. It throws everything at us but carefully neglects any kind of traditional storytelling or characters.

Correction. The whole book is framed from a far distant future historian pouring over the past through multiple timelines and seeing all the "what could have been"s. But that's just it.

This novel might as well be an academic tome. :)

I like that kind of thing, mind you. It's rich as hell and if you don't mind anything BUT exposition, it's extremely rewarding. Jaw-dropping, even. Stapledon predicts the future in an absolutely grand style and doesn't pretend he'll get everything right. He just runs with it.

I want to say KUDOS for his courage and worldbuilding and OMG this should have been turned into a series of 15 traditional SF novels with an interweaving theme. Hell, when I was first reading it, I kept saying to myself... this is no more than 2-star novel. As he continued to build his tower of Babel and his Utopia, however, I had to readjust my thinking completely:

This is NOT an SF. This is an old-school Utopia/Dystopia. :)

That being said, so far it's my favorite contender for this year's Retro Hugo award. (Every year the Hugos award a Best Novel for another year before the Hugos even began. I love the love expressed here. Some rare books of SF should NEVER be forgotten.) ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3009482.html

I'd read Star Maker and Last and First Men by the same author; Darkness and the Light is on the same lines, but not as good. It's a story of two parallel future histories of humanity, which bifurcate at a decision point where a movement of spiritual and political awakening in Tibet either is crushed, in the timeline that leads to the human race being defeated by rats, or leads the world to new levels of civilisation, in the timeline that ends with humanity's transcendence. You can't accuse Stapledon of having small ideas; however, this is not really a novel, in that I don't think there is a single named character or a line of actual dialogue. There are six better-known Stapledon books (the two above-named, also Odd John, Sirius, Last Men in London and Nebula Maker) and there are good reasons why this is not in the top half dozen. ( )