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Novel Review: Sirius by Olaf Stapledon
Sirius by Olaf Stapledon, 1944, 194pp
TLDR: Sirius is the story of a biologically engineered dog who has human intelligence. Intellectually, he's drawn to the human world, but he can never quite escape the fact that he's a dog, and what's more, the human society in which he lives won't let him forget it, either.
This novel is firmly in the speculative fiction category; Stapledon has put quite a bit of thought into how an intelligent dog might fit in and try to adapt to his situation. It's full of profound reflections on the nature of (Western) human society, of our desire for order, our propensity to other those who are different, and our inability to imagine very far outside of our known world. Our relationship with our 'creator' is also speculated at, and how we might get on if we really did know our creator.
Although the book is full of ideas and profound thoughts, which is exactly what I want from Speculative Fiction, I could never quite shake the feeling that what I was reading was really just an outline for the novel to come. Not because the story itself is incomplete, but become the telling of the story feels incomplete - as if Stapledon had meant to flesh it out more fully, later. The entire novel is narrated by a character who was distant from most of the events, and who wanted to relate those events for posterity, but who wasn't really interested in using all the tools at the writer's disposal (such as dialogue!) As a result, the main characters all seem a bit distant, and there's an awful lot of 'tell' but not much 'show' in the book.
