The love me, love my doberman kind of thing. He tells this story of his love for Plaxy and her love for a dog. His name is Robert and he's as ordinary as his name. 'Plaxy and I had been lovers rather uneasy lovers, for she would never speak freely about her past. In love, the same as film noir, if the past isn't shared, something isn't right. Pillow talk that is only about the present should be a warning flag. If you're a dog-lover yourself, consider putting it on your list. But it's a surprisingly moving story, and Sirius is one of the great fictional dogs of literature. Stapledon did not have an optimistic take on things, and if you've read any of his other books then you've no doubt already guessed that this one is going to be tragic. What kind of life would it have? How would it relate to other dogs, and to people? But suppose, instead, that human scientists managed to produce an Überhund, a dog with human-like intelligence. It's unfortunately impossible to imagine what a Superman would be like, since we are only human this is the insoluble problem at the heart of Odd John. And in Sirius, a book that deserves to be better known, he turns it round. Odd John is a more standard guy-with-amazing-powers story, though a considerably more intelligent one than average. In his most famous works, Last and First Men and the sequel Star Maker, we see the future evolution of the human race, and later on the evolution of all life in the Universe, towards its godlike conclusion. Most of Stapledon's books explore the Superman theme in one form or another.

A professor of philosophy by day, I'm guessing that his conception of the Übermensch probably started off at the Nietzsche end but his science-fiction, which is the only thing that people now remember him for, also contains elements vaguely reminding you of the Son of Krypton. A strange example of the cross-over between these two streams was Olaf Stapledon. After a while, the emphasis shifted the Nazis gave the word unpleasant associations, though Professors Siegel and Shuster luckily managed to save it from oblivion with their discovery that the Übermensch would carry a cape and wear his underpants on the outside, an important point that had somehow escaped Nietzsche's attention. (George Bernard Shaw is a prominent example). During the early decades of the 20th century, many intellectuals devoted attention to the idea of what a 'Superman' would look like.

Odd john stapledon