Sirius

"Stapledon was actually an academic philosopher—he wrote his PhD on ethics. He’s not well known for his expository essays. But he was an important science fiction writer in the ’30s and ’40s. Sirius is told from the point of view of a dog, Sirius, who has been cognitively enhanced to have human-like intelligence. It’s the story of his struggle to find meaning in the world and make sense of his life. It’s a sad book. It’s tragic. You can tell from the beginning, this is not going to work out well. He doesn’t fit in the world. One of the most wonderful parts of the book is his continuing confrontation with music. It illustrates nicely—and this plays out in lots of different ways in the book—how he doesn’t fit. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Sirius has dog ears, so he can hear much more accurately than humans can. I don’t know if this is physiologically true about dogs or not, but at least he’s portrayed in the novel as being able to hear tones much more precisely. As a consequence human music to him is always a bit off key and wobbly because they’re not quite nailing it. Well, it’s got to be tuned. In the 1940s instruments needed to be tuned by humans rather than computers. Sirius spends time creating elaborate music and even a musical notation that no dog could possibly appreciate because it’s far too complex and intellectual for a normal dog. And no human could possibly appreciate it either. Howling is part of the aesthetic. It is not going to make sense to humans. He’s trying to find meaning through artistic expression, but he’s got no audience other than himself. How is he going to make music just for himself? There’s a loneliness in that. Sirius the dog is not satisfied with that inescapable loneliness. Maybe some people would be completely satisfied with that. Right. In Egan’s Diaspora , Yatima is perfectly happy to just go figure out math on her own. At that point in the story she’s living in a solitary universe, almost. So maybe you don’t necessarily need that audience. But Sirius the dog felt like he needed more. Another example of yearning for connection in Sirius is the dog’s attitude to sex and love. He has this sexual attraction to female dogs, based primarily on the sense of smell. He tries to describe to humans what it’s like to be sexually attracted to a dog on the basis of smell and of course no one understands. At the same time, he describes other dogs as being nine-tenths asleep because they don’t have human-like cognitive capacities. So he can’t love them in the rich way that he loves Plaxy, a human woman he’s attached to. So he has this rich emotional attachment to a human that can’t be sexually consummated; and he’s got this sexual attraction to dogs that can’t be emotionally consummated. So he’s constantly feeling misplaced. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes, absolutely. Once you have the idea of the story, this just plays out. It almost writes itself—the natural consequences, or at least the plausible consequences of this scenario. His doggish perspective, for example on war— Sirius was written during World War Two and is partly set during the war—illuminates the human condition, too. Sirius stands outside of humanity to some extent and judges us. Yes, I write science fiction. I’ve published several science fiction stories. Oh, no, I think of it as doing philosophy through science fiction. I’m not sure I’ve convinced my colleagues of that, but that’s what I think. For me, absolutely, it’s a way of exploring philosophical issues."