When I picked up the habit of taking long walks I also tried out listening to audiobooks. Since I don't physically have the books I felt they better belonged on a separate page.
Author: Olaf Stapledon
First Read: 2021/06/20
Note: I have no photos of these books since I listened to them as audio books. Perhaps some day I will pick them up, but I have to admit I rarely visit the science fiction section of bookstores anymore.
Over the past few years, I've been seeking to find hints of what the people of the past thought the future might look like. These works of speculative fiction became science fiction in the 19th and 20th century. While H.G. Wells or Verne come to mind, the legacy of Olaf Stapledon took a bit longer to reach me, perhaps due to the sheer density of his work. Regardless, these works are masterful, if not as works of pleasure-reading, then as testaments to the immense worlds that can be conjured up by the human mind.
I listened to the audiobook version of these novels(?) over the course of a few months. I sometimes dreaded picking up where I started or found I was simply falling asleep while listening. Long, intensely boring diatribes on political intrigue with thinly veiled allusions to inter-war European unrest and race conflict would be broken up by intensely delightful scenes of alien or unfathomably future human life.
Perhaps the closest comparison in pop culture that I can come to with Stapledon's work is that it reads like if a philosophy professor who was utterly devoid of any humor made a book summarizing a game of Stellaris, zooming further and further out. It's like the polar opposite of Douglas Adams' approach to science fiction and perhaps why it hasn't captured the popular imagination nearly as well. That being said, this was all written decades before Star Trek, Dune, or even Asimov's great works. Stapledon touches on harnessing atomic energy, mobile phones, and multiverse theory years before much of the world knew of the theory of relativity.
It's Stapledon's attention to physics, as well as his strong pacifistic and communistic ideologies that steer the novels away from being fantasy. They are more like philosophical parables. Stapledon claims Last and First Men and the Starmaker came to him from, respectively, a remote human descendent and a dream. To a reader familiar with psychotropic substances, Stapledon isn't dreaming, he's tripping balls.
Yet, these strange and beautiful speculative beings, these deep insights and ponderings about the connectedness of the universe, the reality beyond our reality, and the incomprehensible, unloving and unlovable creator are all described between sections of the most droll socio-political commentary. Like the reader for the Last and First Men specifically mentions in the introduction that modern readers might want to skip to Chapter 4 to miss the long-winded tirade about speculations of the near future of Western Civilization that look quite silly in retrospect. But I've got to say, the concept that our first great downfall would be caused by everyone competing to out-barnstorm one another in personal airplanes is a pretty decent caricature of the American Way.
Would I recommend Stapledon's works to a fan of science fiction? Almost certainly not. It drags on much worse than even Gulliver's Travels does in its satire. But I would certainly recommend it to someone who is perhaps seeking something upon which to meditate on. For someone who finds it a good use of time pondering what it means to be alive or just how absurdly large the universe is, this is a fantastic read. Wholly deserving the respect it has gained among a certain type of reader, I don't imagine I will recall much except a few poignant passages in the books.
Author: JChen Qiufan
First Read: 2021/02/20
Waste Tide was to be the first real audio book I would listen as well as the first of the genre of Chinese science fiction of the 21st century I would experience. The majority of the time that I spent listening to the book I was walking late at night through downtown Oakland and Chinatown. While the settings were brilliantly established, I found the characters were positively childish. Though, any time I walk downtown, especially on a rainy day, I can't help but think of the story.