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Star Maker (Early Classics of Science Fiction)

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'Star Maker' by Olaf Stapledon is more about philosophy than about science fiction, but it has enough of both to make all kinds of fans happy. The author covers the history of, well, almost everything. He travels through space and time, back and forth, to explore everything from intelligent stars to the alien civilizations that rise ands fall, from simple plant-men to massive utopias. Always, he is also looking for the Star Maker, God, the Great Creator.
He even links this book to his first novel, 'Last And First Man', by talking about some periods in mankind's history, like the war with Mars. This book is all about scale. Yet while I enjoyed this book it didn't feel as well planned, as detailed as 'Last And First Man'. But I'm not sure a book of 272 pages could be said to be lacking in details. Its scope is vast and giving too many details might of limited it, framed it into too small a canvas. Olaf is using wide strokes of his huge brush to build this story.
With a forword by Brain Aldiss and a interesting glossary, I would suggest this book for both sci-fi fans, people looking for God in what seems like a godless universe and also people who just enjoy philosophy.

"Star Maker", by Olaf Stapledon, is an incredible novel by an author whose contributions to science fiction are unique and serve as inspiration to many of the greatest works in the field. It was Stapledon's fourth novel and was first published in 1937. Narrated by the same voice as narrated "Last and First Men" the novel is a sequel of sorts, but at the same time it has a much larger scope and thus there is no noticeable overlap between the two novels. As with "Last and First Men", "Star Maker" is not a conventional novel, so if that is what you are looking for, you should look elsewhere. It is a philosophical journey rather than a conventional story with a traditional plot and characters.

The narrator takes the reader on a journey through the universe and through time, starting on a hill near his home, and ultimately finding the creator of the universe, i.e. the Star Maker. He witnesses the entire life of the universe, and joins with many other minds from other civilizations throughout the galaxy. It is tempting to use phrases like "for its time" when describing this book, but it is a remarkable work for any time. I am sure that some of descriptions of civilizations and their scientific achievements would change if it were written today. However, the statement that the book makes would likely remain the same.

One does not need to read "Last and First Men" (or "Last Men in London" for that matter) to read this novel. The few remarks made in the narration that reference "Last and First Men" will not cause the reader any difficulty. They pass by almost unnoticed, as the reader's focus is on the amazing scope and vision which are contained in this novel. Stapledon's works are not the easiest reads, but they are well worth the effort. The echos of Stapledon's ideas can be read in the works of numerous authors and in some of the greatest works of science fiction.

This book was tied for 13th on the Arkham Survey in 1949 as one of the `Basic SF Titles'. It also was tied for 30th on the 1975 Locus All-Time poll for Novels; and 32nd on the 1998 Locus All-Time Poll for Novels written prior to 1990. This particular edition includes a Foreword by Brian W. Aldiss, and also includes A Note on Magnitude, Time Lines, and a Glossary all created by Olaf Stapledon. This is the 21st of the SF Masterworks paperbacks released by Victor Gollancz Books. If this is an indication of the quality of work they have done throughout the series, then it is a very worthwhile series to own.

On a suburban hill, presumably on the Wirral (with the foundry beyond the estuary being Shotton or Brymbo), a man falls asleep and experiences not some mere vision of the entire cosmos but a conscious participation in the Creator's whole programme of innumerable cosmoi. This is a compulsive and utterly comfortless book. Keep a sense of humour if you are going to read it attentively, as you may need that to stay sane. It starts at a level familiar to science-fiction readers, and the details of the various alien intelligences have the sort of fascination that one gets in, say, Van Vogt (or even the work that immortally began 'Help, we are surrounded by Vugs'). The vision then advances to the collective telepathic minds developed by some of the civilisations, next to the sentient minds (individual and collective) of the stars themselves, then to similar consciousness possessed by whole nebulae, and finally to direct contact with the Creator. This Creator is not some fount of infinite love and goodness as we might understand those concepts. Our values are not his -- 'Sympathy was not ultimate in the temper of the eternal spirit; contemplation was. Love was not absolute; contemplation was.' Countless disasters and unthinkable suffering are all part of the grand design. Hell itself may be deliberately inflicted by the Creator on those he gives no opportunity to avoid it. To me this scenario seems just as likely as any religious theory of ultimate goodness, which may be basically wishful thinking. Grappling with questions like these by reasoning is like wrestling with a jelly in a high wind -- when we think we have made progress it just closes back in on us from behind. And other than reason what do we have? Belief is just belief -- things may be the way we believe or would rather believe, or they may not. 'I know not "seems"' says Hamlet. 'Seems' may be all we've got.

Back on his suburban hill in 1937, the anonymous visionary contemplates the 'reality' around him. Like many agonising intellectuals of the time, Stapledon partly fell for the monstrous con of Soviet communism. He had no grasp of Realpolitik whatsoever, and Muggeridge's account of the edifice of corruption, chicanery and strategic lying that took in Shaw and other big brains is recommended to any who have not read it. Others of Stapledon's perceptions ring partly 'true' -- '...a world wherein, none being tormented, none turns desperate' is probably a bit much to hope for, given human perversity, but we all know the lengths people will go to when they have 'beliefs', which flourish where there is injustice and oppression.

Can you face this book? In recommending it I am quite aware of the disorientation and unhappiness it may create in some. In others, if it undermines the high ground occupied by those deceptive and destructive phantoms, deeply held beliefs, it may do some 'good'. The bigger questions stay just as they were, of course.

The other day I finished re-reading a book I first read nearly 20 years ago, Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker. I am just as amazed at its imaginative scope as I was 20 years ago. Re-reading it now I recognise many of my basic ideas, probably derived from a first reading of the book: the value of community; the idea of sentience applied to other life forms; the 'livingness' of all creation; the idea of harmony as essential to an approach to 'god'.

Stapledon's book has been compared to Dante's. I find the language beautiful, the thought intricate and marvelously well-constructed: at once a deeply felt work of spiritual vision, a work of incredible imaginative scope, a detailed reasoning of the possible construction of reality, a work of fiction that carries the reader along despite its complexity, and a work of poetry.

Star Maker was written in 1937. It caused a sensation at the time (H G Wells was still alive, a potent example of philosopher-opinion shaper-novelist). After a few years it was forgotten, until in the 60s academics took up 'popular culture' and a canon was constructed for science fiction. Neither Wells nor Stapledon would have been interested in science fiction...

Stapledon uses the dream metaphor, just as ambiguously as Dante. Dante in the middle of his life finds himself in a dark wood (a metaphor which becomes 'real' to form the poem). Stapledon lies on a hill top, thinking of mortality and looking at the stars. He falls asleep and dreams/has a vision/is transported through the solar system. Travelling from star to star he finds another earth, where similar but distinct beings to humans go through many of the struggles, disasters and triumphs which have marked human history. So Swift might have written, though Stapledon is philosophically detached.

Soon he is caught up in a spiritual union with a member of this other species and finds he is part of a group mind, in itself more than its two components can contribute to it.This new 'I' voyages further and finds many other species in the galaxy with some of whom the group 'I' melds to form a greater, more perceptive 'I' which is able to see and understand much more. Soon not merely a world mind, not merely a galactic mind but a cosmical mind is possible. This new mind becomes aware of the mode of being of suns and the galactic clouds themselves. The cosmical mind has inkings of the nature of the Star Maker, and through these inklings conceives of other creations and of their possible nature. The act of creation gives it some idea of the nature of the Star Maker, seen as an evolving being for whom creation and all possible cosmos is merely a stage.

Star Maker combines two modes used in other books by Stapledon, most notably Last and First Men. One is the concept of the group mind with powers of perception and realisation much greater than any single being. The other is that of scope, whereby what is seen is gradually revealed in a larger and yet larger context. Stapledon often uses this scale, playing up and down it as it were to create points by making a rapid change of perspective. And yet...as modern astronomy and nuclear physics confirm, the further one sees the more one realises how much more is unseen. The end of all this realisation is to see that the most that is possible of a cosmically united mind is to accept one's part in the life of the Star Maker. Acceptance becomes joy. By realising to the extent of one's power the possibilities inherent in community, in living and striving for a whole greater than one's own needs, one can align oneself in the activities of 'god' as he ceaselessly (to us) creates himself.

Stapledon realises that much of this can become perverted and gives space to analyses of this. He also attempts to deal with the primary conflict caused by our perception of evil. His answer is that evil is a relative value (as when good comes of evil - temporal scale, or when evil to some results in good to the whole - spacial scale). He also sees evil as part of creation, serving some unknown purpose. The Star Maker is beyond good and evil, one of the many ways he is unknowable.

The book stimulates while it satisfies. Both a completed work of art, formally unified, it is also an exploration of concepts which can never be known. Its scope is such that it powerfully urges its readers to continue that exploration.

Star Maker -- totally ignored by literature, hard to find, hard to read when you've found it, and completely unforgettable once you have succeeded.

Like another reviewer on these pages, I first heard of this book after reading Brian Aldiss's epic critical history of science fiction. Trillion Year Spree, and I eventually tracked it down in a secondhand book store.

Star Maker is less a novel than a vision of the physical and spiritual history of the cosmos, conceived on a scale that few other writers would dare even contemplate, let alone attempt -- even today. Aldiss and others criticize Stapledon for the inhumanity of his stories, but I disagree -- the grandeur of the themes of cosmic disharmony, strife and unity point up our everyday human concerns to an almost painfully intense, poignant degree. If Stapledon feels pain at the wanton destruction of entire star systems, then so do we: without this humanity, we would not share the narrator's horror at the dismissive attitude of the Creator to the sufferings of his creations. Without this humanity, the book would have been a failure, when what we see before us is a hugely involving and mind-altering experience.

After many years of reading SF and other branches of literature, I have found no other book that can inspire a real sense of existential terror than this -- but also a kind of equanimity. Whatever our worries, they hardly rate a mote in the eye of Brahma.

Perhaps Douglas Adams was thinking of Stapledon when he invented, in the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, an instrument of psychological torture called the Total Perspective Vortex, in which the victim is given a brief glimpse of the entire unimaginable vastness of creation, together with a small plastic button reading 'You Are Here'? Star Maker is the literary equivalent of the vortex.

What Aldiss calls Stapledon's 'ontological prose poem' is not for everyone, but for those sympathetic to its austere charms, the effects will be both profound and long-lasting.

Olaf Stapledon was a Philosopher who dabbled in science fiction. He wrote several science fiction stories and books, which attempted to project future trends of his time very far into the future. One book, First and Last Men, tracks human evolution over billions of years and ends when the last human dies in Neptune, long after the Sun is dead.

The Star Maker however, is by far his finest novel. It begins when the narrator becomes aware of a strange ability he seems to have to detach himself from his body and its ordinary existence and soar into space. The mind of the narrator then proceeds to investigate the cosmos, moving from the Earth to the galaxy and finally to the entire universe and its creator.

The Star Maker attempts to predict the future and in some cases, runs as a paralell story to The first and Last Men. The scope of the Star Maker however is truely cosmic, spanning aeons of time and billions of light years of space. Almost as a side show we experience alien life forms, Dyson Spheres (stated as light traps), bizarre worlds, sentient stars, galactic clusters but the novel soars to ever more dizzying heights until the very end is reached when the universal mind reaches to the mind of the 'Star Maker' himself, who effectively is God as traditionally understood. But even the cosmic mind reels as it sees the Star Maker has only made this universe as a sort of experimental toy; rather as Liebniz imagined God to have all possible worlds present at once in his mind and actively selects and creates universes (though in contrast to Liebniz this universe is not the Star-Maker's finest creation) the Star Maker creates ever more complicated and sophisticated universes from the infinite set of possible universes, populating them with creatures whose nature ever further eludes comprehension.

The story ends with a bit of an anticlimax, but with the apparent conclusion what is most precious is each other - somewhat akin to the conclusion of Ellie Arroway after meeting intelligent aliens in Carl Sagan's story 'Cosmos.'

Brian Aldiss wrote in his history of science fiction that The Star Maker stands on its own class, a work of genius whose volume is deafening. In my view this judgement is perfectly correct. Stapleton's range and scope of vision have been rivalled by few in science fiction, perhaps except by writers such as Arthur C Clarke, Frank Herbert, or Vernor Vinge. Many of his guesses now turn out to have been right, though some do look a bit dated in light of what science has discovered. He also brings many interesting but abstract philosophical ideas to light in a concrete form, such as possible and actual words, the existence and nature of God, the existence of life elsewhere in the cosmos, whether or not life in the universe is telelogical, and also somewhat anticipated later speculations amoung science fiction writers and scientists that in the far distant future all intelligent life in the universe will merge into a cosmic conciousness which will make the entire cosmos alive, and sentient of itself.

While this novel now sometimes shows its age, it well deserves to be considered a great classic of science fiction whose influence continues to this day, alongside great writers such as Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells and Arthur C. Clarke.

well.. for me this is probably the most amazing piece of fiction ever written.. i ended up reading it after getting into the cosmic visions of both h.p. lovecraft and william hope hodgson, plus the recommendation of c.s. lewis, arthur c. clarke, jorge luis borges and winston churchill (among others).. im sure it won't appeal to alot of people (one reviewer said it was completely boring and nothing at all happens in it) but it is more of an exploration of the nature of the universe and existence than a novel per se.. speaking of which i've recently been reading some of the process metaphysics of a.n. whitehead & charles hartshorne because its pretty obvious the 'star maker' him/her/itself was inspired by said philosophy.. he/she/it is the 'di-polar' god who grows with each successive 'cosmic epoch' by learning from the experiences of the creatures he/she/it creates in any of the given universe (my favourite of which in the book was the pythagorean-esque musical cosmos).. needless to say i don't agree with this view of deity ['pan-en-theism'] (c.s. lewis was also appalled by it and wrote his cosmic trilogy partly as a response) - to which i would recommend jay richards' recent book 'the untamed God' as a top draw defence of 'classical theism' which dialogues with process thought.. i'd also highly recommend stapledon's last & first men - a somewhat depressing account of the entire history of the human race from the 20th century on (which is relegated to a paragraph in star maker!)..

What is remarkable about Stapledon's The Star Maker is the year in which it was written: 1937, only eight years after Edwin Hubble had announced his discoveries concerning redshift, when other scientists were still confirming Hubble's results. Keep in mind that this is a period thirty years before Big Bang theory, when most astronomers were largely unaware of an entire universe beyond our own galaxy.

Modern science fiction itself was still being invented and the term science fiction had only been in use for less than a decade prior to this novel's publication. Writers of scientific romances were still alive and working.

In this light Stapledon's ideas are astounding, and they still hold up today. Even within the genre that would become hard SF, this particular realm of storytelling remained mostly unaddressed until Asimov wrote The Last Question, first published in 1959.

Say what you will about Stapledon's outdated writing style, this novel is properly referred to as "an early classic of science fiction". An entire generation of authors now considered giants in the field site Stapledon as a strong influence. This book belongs in every serious SF reader's collection.

Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon

As if Last and First Men were not enough, Stapledon takes on the history of an entire galactic civilization in Star Maker (published 1938). The book -- again, not so much a novel as a sort of narrative history -- begins with the narrator fleeing a domestic argument and walking to the top of a hill to gaze at the stars. He finds himself "astrally projecting" and soon discovers another world, populated by roughly humanoid creatures. After telepathically joining with a sympathetic native, he explores the world and its troubled civilizations.

After disaster and folly doom the planet, the narrator and his guide find themselves whisked to another troubled world, and another, and so on, each populated by stranger and stranger creatures with more and more esoteric mental and spiritual natures. Star Maker soon turns from the fate of individual worlds to the big picture; the two-billion year long history of humanity rates about two paragraphs. In a series of dazzling chapters Stapledon describes the construction of artificial worlds, space travel by wandering space colonies, and spectacular interstellar wars. Strife and religious bigotry lead to genocide through rtificially induced novas; lesser races fall prey to technologically advanced but spiritually misguided "pervert" races. After several millenia, a true galactic civilization arises and begins organizing itself into a Galactic Mind to root out the deepest questions of existence. This final quest -- to confront the Prime Mover behind the existence of the universe and reality -- requires a rather long time; at one point further progess seems threatened by the heat death of the universe.

What the Cosmic Mind -- the combined mentalities of all living creatures since the birth of the galaxies -- eventually
discovers is bleak and terrible and wondrous.

Reading Star Maker is an exhausting and humbling experience. Stapledon rattles off ideas and concepts that didn't make it into mainstream SF until the last decade or so. It is mighty difficult to be impressed by mainstream science fiction after reading this book.

I have no idea how I missed this book after all these years. Perhaps it is best that I found it now and not earlier, for it is the supreme example of speculative thinking about the future in my experience. I can't think of another book in the science fiction genre that I could compare it to, for nothing else comes close.

This is the story of a man who takes an evening walk out upon the hills behind his home, only to be seized and swept away by a cosmic vision that seems to span the aeons. At first, he seems to be a single, disembodied point of consciousness with the ability to move at will among the stars. Then, he is drawn to a world of man-like creatures where he comes to enter into telepathic union with one of the natives. He and his host come to explore the entire history of this world before shoving off, together, to explore the other inhabited worlds of the galaxy. They are joined, one by one, by other simular explorers as they come to wander an incredible diversity of inhabited worlds. Slowly, they come to see the larger story of the galaxy, and then the entire cosmos. They see world after world unite into various forms of utopian "world minds." Then they see these world minds reach across the galaxy to colonise other worlds, and to make contact with other intelligent species. Finally, after aeons of conflict and struggle, all the galaxy is united into one great telepathically linked Galactic Union. Yet even this is but the beginning, for the next step is to make contact with the other galaxies- and with the stars and nebula themselves (for it turns out that the great cosmic bodies of the universe are themselves intelligent.) And when this is accomplished, all three great living super species press on into the higher dimensions of existance to make contact with the Creator himself- the Star Maker....

I understand that Stapledon spent part of his youth in Egypt, that would partially explain the ease at which he spans great extents of time, as well as, the rise and fall of great civilizations. Of course, he was also educated at Oxford, which would explain the simularities to Neoplatonism. At any rate, like the narrator, it is hard to believe that Stapledon didn't experience a vision of Cosmic Consciousness himself to inspire such a magnificently complex and profound work.

Oh yes, this book is not written like a conventional novel. In fact, there is not a line of conventional dialog in it. It is instead, an extremely concentrated journal of idea after significant idea. As for the ideas, not only does the science hold up remarkably well for a book written in 1937, but if you read closely you find hints of the big bang, the holographic universe, morphogenic fields, the multiverse, cybernetic reality, etc., etc., etc. It reads rather like the journal of a classically educated Englishman of before the war. No, check that, it reads like journal of a classically educated genius....