Customer Reviews

Nebula Maker

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This novella-length meditation is even less of a novel than Stapledon's mind-blowing future histories, _Last and First Men_ and _Star Maker_.

It's more of a set of philisophical essays, examining different world views from the same Way Cosmic perspective as _Star Maker_. (Stapledon _was_ a philosopher first and a novelist second. He'd be deeply puzzled by being remembered as an SF author.) It can even be looked at as a rough draft of that work.

Completists may want to look for copies in used book stores. I don't think it's worth a special search unless you're a fanatic.

Stefan Jones

This is a draft for what eventually became Star Maker. The Creator is the same being -- his interest is in seeing how his creations work out, not a benevolent concern for their welfare as perceived by them. The universe described is a draft too --the Creator learns from results and tries other models. We find that out in Star Maker. Here Stapledon 'restricts' himself to the saga of the nebulae, intelligent beings in their own right, who eventually decay into the galaxies. Their development and behaviour is largely an ineradicable proclivity to fight and destroy one another and they end up 'tricked and led astray by the misuse of knowledge, squandering their wealth of power and their strength of spirit on false goals.' This theme is transferred in Star Maker to the planetary civilisations. Their story being open-ended, one wonders whether the Creator considers the nebulae-model to be at least a partial success, as he is letting it be re-enacted.

In the last resort, for all the mind-numbing vastness of his concept, Stapledon can't get away from the little planet he lives on and the behaviour-patterns of its inhabitants as seen in the baleful context of the 1930's. Two of his nebulae actually have names, which is one more than I can find in Star Maker, and you might say they almost amount to 'characters', which would make two more than in Star Maker. One I take to be based on Ghandi, the other may be recognisable to those better read in the history of revolutions than I am. All they achieve is palliation of the general disaster, and the author finishes 'oppressed with human pity and human indignation against the author of a creature at once so full of promise and so futile'. So do I. If you can believe in a more comfortable theology, I hope for all our sakes you are right. At least Stapledon's ideas are only fantasy.