Sirius by Olaf Stapledon
Sirius, a large, attractive dog with the mind and intelligence of a person, is Thomas Trelone’s great experiment. Plaxy, Trelone’s youngest daughter, and Sirius were both raised and educated in Trelone’s family, making Sirius a genuinely exceptional and gifted individual. He has a close and profound relationship with the Trelones, especially Plaxy, and his inquisitive intellect is open to the full range of human knowledge and experience. The problems and internal turmoil that torment Sirius, however, cannot be resolved because he is not human.
Sirius by Olaf Stapledon
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Stapledon was a genuine academic philosopher who focused on ethics for his dissertation. His explanatory pieces are not well recognized. Nevertheless, he was a significant science fiction author in the 1930s and 1940s.
The story of Sirius is presented from the perspective of Sirius, a dog who has been cognitively altered to have intelligence comparable to that of a human. It tells the tale of his effort to understand himself and the purpose of life. A sad book, that’s. It’s terrible. This is not going to turn out well, as you can already tell. He is out of place in the world. His ongoing conflict with music is one of the best aspects of the novel. It effectively demonstrates how he doesn’t fit in—and this is reflected in numerous other ways throughout the novel. Since Sirius has canine ears, he can hear much more clearly than people. I’m not sure if this is physiologically true for dogs, but at least he is shown in the book as having much better hearing tones. Human music, as a result, usually sounds a little off-key and shaky to him because they can’t quite get it right.
To be more specific, Sirius’ “otherness” is the main problem. He has moods that alternate between those of a domesticated dog who is subservient to humans and humanity, a savage wolf who resents human oppressors, a human who is attempting to relate to others in a humane way, and, more importantly, a combination of all three states, in which he is unable to fit into any of society’s social roles. As Sirius struggles to figure out who he is, who he is intended to be, who he wants to be, and how to be true to himself, he moves back and forth between all of these states.
