William Olaf Stapledon

Odd John William Olaf Stapledon

The novel explores the theme of the Übermensch (superman) in the character of John Wainwright, whose supernormal human mentality inevitably leads to conflict with normal human society and to the destruction of the utopian colony founded by John and other superhumans. WHEN I told John that I intended to write his biography, he laughed. "My dear man!" he said, "But of course it was inevitable." The word "man" on John's lips was often equivalent to "fool.""Well," I protested, "a cat may look at a king."He replied, "Yes, but can it really see the king? Can you, puss, really see me?"This from a queer child to a full-grown man. John was right. Though I had known him since he was a baby, and was in a sense intimate with him, I knew almost nothing of the inner, the real John. To this day I know little but the amazing facts of his career. I know that he never walked till he was six, that before he was ten he committed several burglaries and killed a policeman, that at eighteen, when he still looked a young boy, he founded his preposterous colony in the South Seas, and that at twenty-three, in appearance but little altered, he outwitted the six warships that six Great Powers had sent to seize him. I know also how John and all his followers died.