Classic sci-fi novel Odd John reads like a proto-X-Men story because that’s what it is. Reputable sources credit author Olaf Stapledon with coining Homo superior, which is of course Magneto’s favorite phrase, safe word, PIN code, and Tinder screen name. His affection for the term is so much that he allows its speech balloon to cover his face when necessary.
Olaf describes his Homo superiors like alien grays with big eyes and oversized heads, so it is a stretch to imagine them in spandex, jumping around the Danger Room. (Visually it would be a Leech/Artie Team Up.)
Likewise, Olaf’s Homo superiors do not have the hope for harmony of a Professor X, nor the aggressive hostility of a Magneto. They know, simply, the two species will not be able to coexist. They accept, with an inherent fatalism, that one will eventually, inevitably, destroy the other, and at the end of the novel, they set up their own Genosha-type stronghold, to avoid (unsuccessfully) their fate.
Odd John (the character) sees with clarity the shortcomings of us basic Homo sapiens and their inevitable results:
It’s only when civilization gives [Homo sapiens] a job that’s too much for his intelligence or too much for his imagination that he fails. And then the failure poisons him through and through. (pg. 56, Dover edition)
You could not write up a better recipe for climate-change denialism. And his later analysis easily foreshadows today’s megaMAGAhate movement:
…there’s this almost universal need to hate something, rationally or irrationally, to find something to unload your own sins on to, and then smash it … they get a much more exalted sort of excitement by hating foreigners. A nation, after all, is just a society for hating foreigners, a sort of super-hate-club. (pg. 62, Dover edition)
That certainly sounds high-minded, especially compared to the dated notions Jack and Stan had regarding consent.
But don’t start building golden idols of Olaf just yet.
Olaf infected his main character with a severe case of colonial fever. He describes the Homo superior from African as “at heart a little savage” who hates European clothes and has to be taught not to pick his nose or relieve himself in inappropriate places. So, even when admitting the genetic superiority of his wards, he can’t help tip into that old British bastard mindset.
So whether Jack and Stan had this book on their shelf, or if they plucked its ideas from the Noosphere, thankfully not all Odd John ideas colonized their uncanny oeuvre, otherwise Ororo Munroe would likely not be the goddess we know today.
