Four Encounters

by Olaf Stapledon

Four Encounters is an unfinished work by the writer and philosopher Olaf Stapledon, written in the late 1940s but only published 26 years after the author's death. It takes place in contemporary (post World War II) Britain, and describes four meetings with various characters who are named for the spiritual quality that best defines a Christian, a scientist, a mystic and a revolutionary. There were originally to have been ten encounters, but Stapledon died before the project was completed.

132 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Excerpted from wikipedia:
William Olaf Stapledon was a British philosopher and author of several influential works of science fiction.

Stapledon's writings directly influenced Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Stanisław Lem, C. S. Lewis and John Maynard Smith and indirectly influenced many others, contributing many ideas to the world of science fiction.

Reviews

[Nihal Vrana · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the weakest Stapledon book I have read thus far. Most probably, the reason is partially because it was a draft and partially writing dialogues is not Stapledon's strongest suit. The concept is great though; I wish we could have read the other encounters also.

[Sol · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of few Stapledon fictions that contains no science-fictional elements, and it tests Stapledon's limits. His strengths are his powerful imagination and moral vision, but at times his character writing manages to be somehow both abstracted and overblown - which he usually elided due to his focus on vast timescales and other-than-human intelligences. Here he only has simple human people, conversing with a nameless narrator who is a barely veiled stand-in for himself. That makes this brief collection seem oddly masturbatory, as it's essentially Stapledon imagining Socratic dialogues for positions opposed to his own ideas. It actually doesn't come off too badly, since he clearly went to some effort to imagine life histories that lead his interlocutors to their positions, and he doesn't convince any of them of the truth of his ideals. He clearly has varying sympathies for the opposed ideals, which lends some variety to the stories. The best is the final one, with a marxist revolutionary, where physical work gives some space to the dialogue.

A common thread between all of the stories is the relation of men and women - the Christian hid from the women in his life, leading to his spiritual revelation about the falsity of his love. The Scientist refuses to allow his female colleague to enter a deeper relationship with him due to his dismissal of people's irrational side, the Mystic abandoned his wife due to his belief that attachment was hindering his growth. Only the revolutionary seems to maintain a healthy relationship with a woman, though they each seem to mistake their love as recognition of revolutionary fervour. In each case the narrator thinks of his relationship to his own wife, contributing to his rejection of his interlocutor's ideas, but he has to carry it a bit further for the revolutionaries, articulating his ideas a bit more deeply than with the others. It's pretty clear that the narrator feels the greatest sympathy for them partly because of this.

Overall, it was one of Stapledon's weaker efforts, but not uninteresting. Supposedly there were intended to be many more conversations, which might've given it a more apparent structure or direction, but Stapledon died before any more were completed. I'd only read this if you were a Stapledon enthusiast.