Olaf Stapledon

Star Maker

里森

ONE NIGHT WHEN I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill.

There, under that roof, our own two lives, recalcitrant sometimes to one another, were all the while thankfully one, one larger, more conscious life than either alone.

How could I describe our relationship even to myself without either disparaging it or insulting it with the tawdry decoration of sentimentality?

And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of stars.

No visiting angel, or explorer from another planet, could have guessed that this bland orb teemed with vermin, with world-mastering, self-torturing, incipiently angelic beasts.

Was man indeed, as he sometimes desired to be, the growing point of the cosmical spirit, in its temporal aspect at least? Or was he one of many million growing points? Or was mankind of no more importance in the universal view than rats in a cathedral? And again, was man’s true function power, or wisdom, or love, or worship, or all of these? Or was the idea of function, of purpose, meaningless in relation to the cosmos?

I reminded myself that stars with planets must be as rare in the galaxy as gems among the grains of sand on the sea-shore.

During my last years on the Other Earth a system was invented by which a man could retire to bed for life and spend all his time receiving radio programmes. His nourishment and all his bodily functions were attended to by doctors and nurses attached to the Broadcasting Authority. In place of exercise he received periodic massage.

Ideology as a substitute for religion following the death of God

in the two great Communist countries the officially organized ‘irreligion’ was becoming a religion in all but name. It had its institutions, its priesthood, its ritual, its morality, its system of absolution, its metaphysical doctrines, which, though devoutly materialistic, were none the less superstitious. And the flavour of deity had been displaced by the flavour of the proletariat.

On my native planet, whenever I had been dismayed by the suffering and the futility of individuals, I had taken comfort in the thought that at least the massed effect of all our blind striving must be the slow but glorious awakening of the human spirit.

Cf. Voltaire’s Candide and the Panglossian best of all possible worlds

Oh, Star Maker, even if you destroy me, I must praise you. Even if you torture my dearest. Even if you torment and waste all your lovely worlds, the little figments of your imagination, yet I must praise you. For if you do so, it must be right. In me it would be wrong, but in you it must be right.’

Mythological truth as something beyond consensually validatable propositions about the nature of the world, as in Peterson’s Maps of Meaning

But of the less human worlds, and the many fantastic kinds of beings which we encountered up and down the galaxy and throughout the whole cosmos, and even beyond it, I shall perforce make statements which, literally regarded, must be almost wholly false. I can only hope that they have the kind of truth that we sometimes find in myths.

Telephone, radio, and television enabled tribes as large as our smaller cities to maintain a sufficient degree of personal intercourse among their members.

In its purest and most developed form, of course, the religion of self is almost identical with the religion of love at its best. To love is to will the self-fulfilment of the beloved, and to find, in the very activity of loving, an incidental but vitalizing increase of oneself.

The precept, ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself,’ breeds in us most often the disposition to see one’s neighbour merely as a poor imitation of oneself, and to hate him if he proves different.

Even in the most primitive ages of every normal intelligent world there existed in some minds the impulse to seek and to praise some universal thing.

So perfectly did the race fit its unchanging environment that intelligence and acuity were already ceasing to be precious, and might soon begin to fade.

For each one of these mobile minded clouds of little birds was in fact an individual approximately of our own spiritual order, indeed a very human thing, torn between the beast and the angel, capable of ecstasies of love and hate toward other such bird-clouds, capable of wisdom and folly, and the whole gamut of human passions from swinishness to ecstatic contemplation.

the realization of the enemy as being not monstrous but essentially humane, was enough to annihilate the will to fight.

'A prodigious novel ... Stapledon's literary imagination was boundless' Jorge Luis Borges A lasting influence on successive generations of science fiction writers and on the physicist Freeman Dyson, this poetic, philosophical tale of one man's unexpected voyage through the universe is imbued with a sense of mystery and vast cosmic loneliness. 'The most wonderful novel I have ever read ... Star Maker remains light years ahead' Brian Aldiss 'Probably the most powerful work of imagination ever written' Arthur C. Clarke 'A unique genius' Doris Lessing 'One of the most creative thinkers of our time' Greg Bear

Interesting, very definitely unique, but also possibly now feeling dated in style and language. Worthwhile persisting with, but be prepared for it to take a while to get through.

Alastair Temple

One moment a man sits on a suburban hill, gazing curiously at the stars. The next, he is whirling through the firmament, and perhaps the most remarkable of all science fiction journeys has begun. Even Stapledon's other great work, LAST AND FIRST MEN, pales in ambition next to STAR MAKER, which presents nothing less than an entire imagined history of life in the universe, encompassing billions of years.

Justin Jerome Price

In many ways, Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon is not a science fiction novel. Not in the traditional sense anyway. This is not to say that the story does not partake in science fiction tropes. In fact, the story has codified many conventions and tropes that many stories of the genre employ to this day. A prototype of the dyson sphere--a superstructure surrounding a star designed to harvest solar energy--makes an appearance in this book. Concepts such as life extension through genetic modification, colonizing new worlds, exploring cultures much different and foreign than one’s own--many of these concepts appear within this novel and arguably sets the stage for many other science fiction stories and series. And yet this story does not seek to be a traditional science fiction story. In many ways, the novel seeks to transcend this simple categorization and seeks to be an attempt at mythmaking. And while in the author’s glossary he does admit that this story is a crude form of myth, it is not from a lack of imagination or scope that this story is crude. The story seeks to answer several big questions regarding the purpose of humanity, if there is life on other planets and what form of intelligence it would take, and if there is a God or Star Maker as the story begins to refer to such a being that we would consider God from the beginning of the story. Due to this broad scope, the plot does suffer from both a lack of focus and poor pacing. Furthermore, while the book is very imaginative in scope, this also hurts the story in terms of being able to convey what is happening in the story. This story, in many ways, requires the reader to have a strong suspension of disbelief or be familiar with the concept of process theology and certain eschatological positions concerning the soul reuniting with the Creator to fully appreciate the story. Still, I did find myself fully engrossed by this story. While the story does bite off more than it could possibly chew, I do find the concepts it raise regarding the universal struggle of society to overcome its baser instincts in regards to xenophobia and classism, the idea of different societies from different species joining together an enthralling and very pertinent for today’s society.

Driven out into the night by the bitterness of his life, an Englishman finds himself contemplating the night sky - its immensity, its mystery. Without explanation, he suddenly finds himself floating out into its depths. There he explores strange worlds, links with other conscious beings, and witnesses the birth and death of civilizations. As the scope of his experiences expands, the universe itself is revealed to him - its startling origins, its potential fate, and our place within its vastness... One of greatest and most influential science fiction novels ever written, Olaf Stapledon's philosophical masterwork is the ultimate exploration of the cosmos.

The spatially largest thing I have read outside of creation myths (and definitely less dry than the Enūma Eliš). Also, a short book.

Spaceghost 

William Olaf Stapledon

"STAR MAKER", regarded as one of the true classics of science fiction, Star Maker is a poetic and deeply philosophical work. The story details the mental journey of an unnamed narrator who is transported not only to other worlds but also other galaxies and parallel universes, until he eventually becomes part of the "COSMIC MIND.." Book, First published in 1937, Olaf Stapledon's descriptions of alien life are a political commentary on human life in the turbulent inter-war years. The book challenges preconceived notions of intelligence and awareness, and ultimately argues for a broadened perspective that would free us from culturally ingrained thought and our inevitable anthropomorphism. This is the first scholarly edition of a book that influenced such writers as C.S. LEWIS and ARTHUR C. CLARKE and which JORGE LUIS BORGES called "a prodigious novel.."

Star Maker

Reviews

Highlights