Star Maker

infobox Book |
name = Star Maker


image_caption = First Edition
author = Olaf Stapledon
illustrator =
cover_artist =
country = United Kingdom
language = English
genre = Science fiction, Novel
publisher = Methuen
release_date = 1937
media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
pages =
isbn = NA

"Star Maker" is an influential science fiction novel by Olaf Stapledon, written in 1937.

Overview

"Star Maker" is a cornerstone work of science fiction. Stapledon undertakes the immense task of describing the entire history of life in the universe. It dwarfs in scale even his 1930 book "Last and First Men", which is a history of the human species over two billion years. It tackles philosophical themes such as the essence of life, of birth, decay and death, and the relationship between creation and creator, and it succeeds in evoking a sense of the sheer scale and complexity of the cosmos. The narrator starts with a concern at the clash of ideas on Earth and finds analogies to both communism and fascism among the aliens he visits.

A pervading theme is that of progressive unity within and between different civilizations. Some of the elements and themes briefly discussed prefigure later fiction concerning genetic engineering and alien life forms. It has long been considered to be one of the finest works of science fiction ever written.

cience in "Star Maker"

The science in "Star Maker" shows its age, but much of the book is much less dated than one could expect for something written in 1937. Astronomical scales would have to be adjusted by a few orders of magnitude, but the overall sense of vastness in time and space is as valid now as then. Stapledon is one of very few authors of science fiction who takes interstellar and galactic distances seriously. Some editions contain a timeline (over billions of years) for the book. It may be instructive to compare these with modern conceptions of orders of magnitude (length) and orders of magnitude (time), in particular 1 E19 s and more as well as the modern view of the ultimate fate of the universe.

Stapledon imagines alien biologies, minds and civilizations radically different from human ones. But unlike Stanisław Lem's "Solaris", all these are supposed to be fundamentally similar in the long run, since all are governed by the same Darwinian and Marxist laws of development. These views, rooted in the late 19th and early 20th century, may appear dated to some modern readers. The eclectic mix of popular science, socialism and religious mysticism is Stapledon's own.

Some of Stapledon's ideas for alien minds, such as collective intelligence, seem far ahead of their time, anticipating recent ideas about swarm intelligence and the general fascination with . He also mentions the idea of virtual reality in the first alien world visited, in the form of an apparatus that directly affects sense centers in the brain. The idea of entire worlds as spacecraft is used several times.

Reputation

The novel is one of the most highly acclaimed in science fiction, but critics of the novel see it as full of interesting ideas but its writing as dull, dry, characterless, difficult, and even scientifically implausible at points. However, its admirers at the time of first publication saw it as one of the most brilliant, inventive, and daring science fiction books. Among its more famous admirers were H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, C. S. Lewis, Jorge Luis Borges and Doris Lessing. Borges wrote a prologue for a 1965 edition and called it “a prodigious novel”. Lessing wrote an afterword for a UK edition. Among SF writers, Arthur C. Clarke has been strongly influenced by Stapledon.

Plot

The book begins with a single human narrator from England who is, via unexplained means, transported out of his body and finds himself able to explore space and other planets. After exploring another planet (the "Other Earth") in some detail, his mind merges with that of one of its inhabitants, and as they travel together, they are joined by still more minds or group-minds. This snowballing process is paralleled by the expansion of the book's scale, describing more and more planets in less and less detail.

The travellers encounter many ideas that are interesting from both science-fictional and philosophical points of view. These include the first known instance of what is now called the Dyson sphere, reference to a scenario closely predicting the later zoo hypothesis or Star Trek's Prime Directive [http://www.spacearchaeology.org/2008/01/zoo-hypothesis-prime-directive.html] , many imaginative descriptions of species, civilizations and methods of warfare, and the idea that the stars and even the pre-galactic nebulae are intelligent beings, operating on vast time scales. A key idea is the formation of collective minds from many telepathically linked individuals, on the level of planets, galaxies, and eventually the cosmos itself.

The climax of the book is the "supreme moment of the cosmos", when the cosmical mind (which includes the narrator) attains momentary contact with the "Star Maker" of the title. The Star Maker is the creator of the universe, but stands in the same relation to it as an artist to his work, and calmly assesses its quality without any feeling for the suffering of its inhabitants. (This cynical point of view vis à vis God was the brain-child of the nineteenth century, not Stapledon's invention.) This element makes the novel one of Stapledon's efforts to write "an essay in myth making".

#The Earth
##The Starting Point
##Earth among the Stars
#Interstellar Travel
#The Other Earth
##On the Other Earth
##A Busy World
##Prospects of the Race
#I Travel Again
#Worlds Innumerable
##The Diversity of Worlds
##Strange Mankinds
##Nautiloids
#Intimations of the Star Maker
#More Worlds
##A Symbiotic Race
##Composite Beings
##Plant Men and Others
#Concerning the Explorers
#The Community of Worlds
##Busy Utopias
##Intermundane Strife
##A Crisis in Galactic History
##Triumph in a Sub-Galaxy
##The Tragedy of the Perverts
##A Galactic Utopia
#A Vision of the Galaxy
#Stars and Vermin
##The Many Galaxies
##Disaster in Our Galaxy
##Stars
##Galactic Symbiosis
#A Stunted Cosmical Spirit
#The Beginning and the End
##Back to the Nebulae
##The Supreme Moment Nears
##The Supreme Moment and After
#The Myth of Creation
#The Maker and his Works
##Immature Creating
##Mature Creating
##The Ultimate Cosmos and the Eternal Spirit
#Epilogue: Back to Earth:Appendix: A Note on Magnitude

References

*A paperback edition has appeared in the SF Masterworks series.

External links

* [http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601841.txt Book transcript by Project Gutenberg of Australia]