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( ( ( 161 ( and Discord (1944) mentions its likeness to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).1 The scientist-creature dyad in Sirius is without question an item of standard science fiction (sf) equipment picked up from the sf stockroom, where the grand original of this pair of commonplace figures is to be found in Shelley’s Frankenstein. The resemblances of Stapledon’s Thomas Trelone and Sirius to Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein and his nameless creature are manifold. Matching Victor Frankenstein’s ambition to become the founder of “a new species” that would “bless [him] as its creator and source” (Shelley 1976, 55), Thomas Trelone’s “dearest dream” is to create a new order of human beings by stimulating fetuses to “super-normal brain growth” (Stapledon 1972, 273). Albeit in significantly different ways and degrees, both scientists shroud theirexperiments in secrecy. Both scientists operate in and around universities , and in both novels the themes of education and of the professional career prove crucial. Both experiments become unwittingly entwined in provoking ill-founded accusations of criminalityagainst innocent victims. Sirius himself, like Frankenstein’s creature, is a one-of-a-kind success who laments his loneliness and upbraids his scientist-creator for making only one of him. Both experimental creatures come to consider themselves outcasts and enemies of humankind. Finally, both turn violent and engage in a series of increasingly horrific killings. These similarities, and a set of no less important differences generated alongside them, constitute what Mikhail Bakhtin would call Sirius’s “addressivity ” toward Frankenstein, that is, its engagement of the prior text 10 The Mad Scientist, the Failed Experiment, and the Queer Family of Man Sirius, Frankenstein, and the SF Stockroom JoHn rieder In the antique system of rhetoric topics is the stockroom —Ernest Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages Many a critical essay on Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius: A Fantasy of Love 162 ) ) ) ParaBles of remediation in dialogic relations that become internalized elements of its own composition (Bakhtin 1986, 87–95). These dialogic relations negotiate several different registers of repetition and variation. First, the historical climate of reaction against the French Revolution within which Shelley composed Frankenstein affords a dark political backdrop to the manifold social injustices in Shelley’s tale that becomes even darker with Stapledon ’s references to World War II and German fascism in Sirius. In addition , since Victor Frankenstein finds his materials in “the dissecting room and slaughter-house” (1976, 56), the ethics of animal experimentation and debates over vivisection constitute another referential strand connecting Frankenstein to Sirius, this one crucially mediated by H. G.Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau (1897).2 On a second register, a crucially important ideological dialogue between the two texts emerges from their shared engagement of the myth of creation in Genesis and its treatment in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). The ideological dialogue of the later text with the earlier one also includes its typification of humankind and the human condition in the representation of Sirius as a “disunited being” (Stapledon 1972, 176), recalling the widespread interpretation of Frankenstein and his creature as doppelgangers, on the one hand, and Stapledon’s earnest interrogation throughout the novel of mind-body dualism, on the other. Third, alongside these referential and ideological ramifications, Sirius’s allusiveness proliferates the generic conventions that might be called upon to understand the novel. Thus, Sirius’s dialogue with Frankenstein entangles the reader in the conventions of the Gothic novel (i.e., Frankenstein itself), the writings of Shelley’s poetic contemporaries (P. B. Shelley, Byron, Coleridge , Wordsworth), myth and epic (Genesis and Milton), and in the history of science fiction itself via intermediary texts such as The Island of Dr. Moreau or, apropos of the doppelganger and the disunited being, R. L. Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). My project in this chapter is to trace the complex entanglement of literary allusions, referential contexts, ideological resonances, and generic codes in Stapledon’s elaboration of the scientist-creature dyad and the dialogue with Frankenstein that it entails. I assume that the pleasures of reading sf derive in no small part from awareness of this sort of elaboration of the genre’s topoi, which is to say that in sf, as in the medieval literary topoi analyzed in Ernst R.Curtius’s great European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, the conscious invocation of predecessor texts not only constitutes an aesthetic challenge and delight but also weaves a kind of asso- [3...

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