Name: Alastair Temple's review of Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
Item: Star Maker
Rating: 3.5
Author: Alastair Temple

Olaf Stapledon

Star Maker

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.

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Strange, that it seems more, not less, urgent to play some part in this struggle, this brief effort of animalcules striving to win for their race some increase of lucidity before the ultimate darkness.

The real itself, surely, had impelled me to conceive that image, false in every theme and facet, yet in spirit true.

How could the Star Maker, even in his immaturity, condemn his creatures to agony for the weakness that he himself had allotted to them? How could such a vindictive deity command worship?

I was struck dumb with shame. For suddenly it was clear to me that virtue in the creator is not the same as virtue in the creature. For the creator, if he should love his creature, would be loving only a part of himself; but the creature, praising the creator, praises an infinity beyond himself.

I saw that the virtue of the creature was to love and to worship, but the virtue of the creator was to create, and to be the infinite, the unrealizable and incomprehensible goal of worshipping creatures.

Interestingly, a ‘brooding spirit’ appears also in Paradise Lost: “And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer; Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure; Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first; Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread; Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss; And mad'st it pregnant.

It seemed to me that I had reached back through time to the moment of creation. I watched the birth of the cosmos. The spirit brooded.

and for a brief moment, which was indeed the supreme moment of the cosmos, I faced the Star Maker.

For they were ruled by two longings, both of which were essentially religious. They desired, or rather they had a blind urge toward union with one another, and they had a blind passionate urge to be gathered up once more into the source whence they had come.

‘When the cosmos wakes, if ever she does, she will find herself not the single beloved of her maker, but merely a little bubble adrift on the boundless and bottomless ocean of being.’

Henceforth the highest level of persistent individuality was not a world but a system of scores or hundreds of worlds.

It must be remembered that a fully awakened world had no need to think in terms of such short periods as a human lifetime. Though its individuals might die, the minded world was in a very important sense immortal. It was accustomed to lay its plans to cover periods of many million years.

And ‘social service’ was apt to be interpreted very broadly. It seemed to permit many lives to be given over wholly to freakish and irresponsible self-expression. The community could well afford a vast amount of such wastage for the sake of the few invaluable jewels of originality which occasionally emerged from it.

Yet increasingly, as a man may feel the psychical reality of a physically perceived beloved or a perceived enemy, we felt in the physical presence of the cosmos the psychical presence of that which we had named the Star Maker.

Some philosophically minded reader may ask, ‘Do you mean that the many experiencing individuals became a single individual, having a single stream of experience? Or do you mean that there remained many experiencing individuals, having numerically distinct but exactly similar experiences?’ The answer is that I do not know. But this I know. I, the Englishman, and similarly each of my colleagues, gradually ‘woke’ into possession of each other’s experience, and also into more lucid intelligence. Whether, as experients, we remained many or became one, I do not know. But I suspect that the question is one of those which can never be truly answered because in the last analysis it is meaningless.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.’

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.

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.

Mike Pearce

'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.

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.."

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Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon

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