Star Maker
Olaf Stapledon
STAR MAKER
Olaf Stapledon
Science Fiction Masterworks Volume 21
eGod
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Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Foreword
CHAPTER ONE -THE EARTH
1. The Starting Point
2. Earth Among the Stars
CHAPTER TWO - INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL
CHAPTER THREE - THE OTHER EARTH
1. On the Other Earth
2. A Busy World
3. Prospects of the Race
CHAPTER FOUR - I TRAVEL AGAIN
CHAPTER FIVE - WORLDS INNUMERABLE
1. The Diversity of Worlds
2. Strange Mankinds
3. Nautiloids
CHAPTER SIX - INTIMATIONS OF THE STAR MAKER
CHAPTER SEVEN - MORE WORLDS
1. A Symbiotic Race
2. Composite Beings
3. Plant Men and Others
CHAPTER EIGHT - CONCERNING THE EXPLORERS
CHAPTER NINE - THE COMMUNITY OF WORLDS
1. Busy Utopias
2. Intermundane Strife
3. A Crisis in Galactic History
4. Triumph in a Sub-galaxy
5. The Tragedy of the Perverts
6. A Galactic Utopia
CHAPTER TEN - A VISION OF THE GALAXY
CHAPTER ELEVEN - STARS AND VERMIN
1. The Many Galaxies
2. Disaster in our Galaxy
3. Stars
4. Galactic Symbiosis
CHAPTER TWELVE - A STUNTED COSMICAL SPIRIT
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - THE BEGINNING AND THE END
1. Back to the Nebulae
2. The Supreme Moment Nears
3. The Supreme Moment and After
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - THE MYTH OF CREATION
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - THE MAKER AND HIS WORKS
1. Immature Creating
2. Mature Creating
3. The Ultimate Cosmos and the Eternal Spirit
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - EPILOGUE: BACK TO EARTH
Time Scales
About the Author
Bibliography
Foreword
Star Maker is the most wonderful novel I have ever read. It retains its wonder on successive readings, and repays study.
To put it at its simplest, the story of the book is the story of a quest, but a quest on a cosmic and superhuman scale. The “I” of the book projects his spirit away from this Earth and “the world’s delirium” into the universe, to encounter other worlds, other beings, other classes of beings, finally to confront the creator of the universe itself, the Star Maker, and be permitted communication with it. Nothing could be simpler—or more ambitious.
In his original preface to Star Maker, the author states that this is not a novel at all. True, it more resembles an attempt to create myth on the grandest possible scale—a myth for our time that will appease both the scientist and the mystic in us. That is to say, a myth for the two hemispheres of mankind’s divided brain. The nobility of this attempt sets Star Maker apart from both the modern novel and science fiction, which it superficially resembles. The intention is to instruct as well as to entertain, to imagine as well as to synthesize.
As we might expect, the author of such an astonishing book is himself something of a mystery. William Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) has been depicted by some critics as a feeble kind of fellow. On the contrary, I believe he was a man of marked character, an athlete in his youth at Oxford, and certainly a brave man to have embarked on an enterprise as considerable as the present book. He may have had his peculiarities, but an ordinary man in the street would hardly create a work like this!
Stapledon was an Englishman whose childhood was divided between England and Egypt, where his father was employed by a shipping line. This pinch of exile probably helped forge the detachment so noticeable in his writing. His first novel (though again the term novel is questionable) was Last and First Men, published in London in 1930.
That book won enthusiastic critical reviews and remains Stapledon’s most famous work. Yet acceptance even of Last and First Men is as uncertain as Stapledon’s reputation—preserved by science fiction readers, those worldly visionaries. It faded from recognition at one time, to be revived only when the present writer persuaded Penguin Books to reissue it with his Introduction in 1963. Covering as it does the next five billion years, Last and First Men is the most thorough and amazing future history ever written. Yet it was to be eclipsed in virtuosity as well as scale seven years later, when Star Maker appeared. Star Maker is grander in theme, more felicitous in style, subtler in approach—not to mention more overwhelming in imaginative power.
As for Stapledon’s courage, at the least he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his service in World War I, when he worked as an ambulance driver in the mud and muck of Flanders. Ambulance driving was an appropriate occupation, well suited to a man of pacifist inclinations who nevertheless felt compelled to play a part in that ghastly struggle in which the Old Centuries were irrevocably severed from the New.
The quality of aloofness in Stapledon’s character was not of his own choosing; whatever difficulties the quality brought him in ordinary life, it made him the kind of writer he became. Much though he feared that the war would undermine civilization—as it undoubtedly did—he appreciated that it gave him the chance to work as one with his fellows. In his strange successor to Last and First Men, entitled Last Men In London, Stapledon has his protagonist, Paul, say that he entered the war “to accept as far as possible on the one hand the great common agony, and on the other the private loneliness of those who cannot share the deepest passions of their fellows.” Star Maker is also chock-a-bloc with great common agonies and private lonelinesses—often the private lonelinesses of entire solar communities.
Madness, akin to loneliness, is often in Stapledon’s mind. The endless vistas of galaxy after prodigal galaxy threaten the intellect:
As we searched up and down time and space, discovering more and more of the rare grains called planets, we watched race after race struggle to a certain degree of lucid consciousness, only to succumb to some external accident or, more often, to some flaw in its ow
n nature, we were increasingly oppressed by a sense of the futility, the planlessness of the cosmos.
This somber mood, owing much to the pessimism of Schopenhauer and the conviction that God was dead or an illusion, is more characteristic of the higher thinkers of the late nineteenth century than the optimistic technophiles of the twentieth. There are, however, times when we are reminded that Stapledon explored at a very early date the standby of ambitious science fiction writers from E. E. Smith onward, galactic empires at war:
Germinating in regions far apart, these empires easily mastered any sub-utopian worlds that lay within reach. Thus they spread from one planetary system to another, till at last empire made contact with empire.
Then followed wars such as had never before occurred in our galaxy. Fleets of worlds, natural and artificial, manoeuvered among the stars to outwit one another, and destroyed one another with long-range jets of sub-atomic energy. As the tides of battle swung hither and thither through space, whole planetary systems were annihilated. Many a world-spirit found a sudden end. Many a lowly race that had no part in the strife was slaughtered in the celestial warfare that raged around it.
But any similarities between Stapledon’s irresistable sweep of events and conventional science fiction is purely coincidental. Stapledon’s imagination is omnivorous. After discoursing with the minds of great nebulae, the questing spirit goes on to achieve discourse with the Star Maker itself. The finely sustained climax of the book is the Maker’s description of the series of universes with which he is experimenting, of which ours is but one in an almost infinite line. Where does one look in all English prose for a parallel with the magnificent Chapter 15?
An introduction should go no further than this in outlining the many astonishments which the reader is to undergo. But it is worth noting one reason why so many readers are unable to confront Stapledon squarely. He is too challenging for comfort. The scientifically minded mistrust the reverence in the work; the religious shrink from the idea of a creator who neither loves nor has need of love from his creations. To my mind, this intransigent position is in fact the delight of the book, and proves Stapledon’s courage. Like his Star Maker, Stapledon inculcates a similar independence in his readers. He is not asking to be loved. He does not love. His work is there. We accept it as we will.
Because of this admirably Parnassian attitude, Stapledon has influenced few writers directly. To show his influence, a writer must have imbibed him when young and demonstrate in his later writing a sense of cosmic process indifferent to the ambitions of humankind. Arthur C. Clarke has claimed to be influenced by Stapledon, and we may believe him. I also came on his writing early, in the middle of a world war, when that dispassionate voice carried the shock of sanity. (Galaxies Like Grains of Sand is imitation Stapledon.)
The writers who helped form Stapledon’s characteristic utterance are most probably philosophical and political writers. There was also, of course, H. G. Wells, twenty years Stapledon’s senior. Otherwise, one might name Dante and the author of Paradise Lost. But the most obvious influence appears to be Winwood Reade, the once-celebrated author of The Martyrdom of Man, a work published in 1872 and frequently reprinted over the succeeding eighty years. Reade’s work ranges freely over the entire history of mankind, and is at once scientific and political. Wells described it as “an extraordinarily inspiring presentation of human history as one consistent process.” It would be this view of life as a process that appealed to Stapledon, as it did to Wells.
The Martyrdom of Man roused great antagonism in its time, in the main because of its attack upon religion. Reade did, indeed, put God in his place, as a passage such as the following suggests:
The arithmetical arrangement of the gods depends entirely upon the intellectual faculties of the people concerned. In the period of thing-worship, as it may be termed, every brook, tree, hill, and star is itself a living creature, benevolent or malignant, asleep or awake. In the next stage every object and phenomenon is inhabited or presided over by a genius or spirit, and with some nations the virtues and the vices are also endowed with personality. As the reasoning powers of men expand their gods diminish in number and rule over larger areas, till finally it is perceived that there is unity in nature, that everything which exists is a part of one harmonious whole. It is then asserted that one being manufactured the world and rules over it supreme. But at first the Great Being is distant and indifferent, “a god sitting outside the universe”; and the old gods become viceroys to whom he has deputed the government of the world. They are afterwards degraded to the rank of messengers or angels, and it is believed that God is everywhere present; that he fills the earth and sky; that from him directly proceeds both the evil and the good. In some systems of belief, however, he is believed to be the author of good alone, and the dominion of evil is assigned to a rebellious angel or a rival god.
This extract is included not only because I hope to find others to share my enthusiasm for Winwood Reade, but because one can see Olaf Stapledon chuckling with appreciation over such downgrading of the deity.
Stapledon takes that thought further. Light years further.
Whatever it may be—novel, myth, prose poem, vision—Star Maker remains light years ahead, something toward which the rest of us are still travelling.
Brian W. Aldiss
CHAPTER 1 - THE EARTH
1. THE STARTING POINT
One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill. Dark heather checked my feet. Below marched the suburban street lamps. Windows, their curtains drawn, were shut eyes, inwardly watching the lives of dreams. Beyond the sea’s level darkness a lighthouse pulsed. Overhead, obscurity.
I distinguished our own house, our islet in the tumultuous and bitter currents of the world. There, for a decade and a half, we two, so different in quality, had grown in and in to one another, for mutual support and nourishment, in intricate symbiosis. There daily we planned our several undertakings, and recounted the day’s oddities and vexations. There letters piled up to be answered, socks to be darned. There the children were born, those sudden new lives. 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.
All this, surely, was good. Yet there was bitterness. And bitterness not only invaded us from the world; it welled up also within our own magic circle. For horror at our futility, at our own unreality, and not only at the world’s delirium, had driven me out on to the hill.
We were always hurrying from one little urgent task to another, but the upshot was insubstantial. Had we, perhaps, misconceived our whole existence? Were we, as it were, living from false premises? And in particular, this partnership of ours, this seemingly so well-based fulcrum for activity in the world, was it after all nothing but a little eddy of complacent and ingrown domesticity, ineffectively whirling on the surface of the great flux, having in itself no depth of being, and no significance? Had we perhaps after all deceived ourselves? Behind those rapt windows did we, like so many others, indeed live only a dream? In a sick world even the hale are sick. And we two, spinning our little life mostly by rote, seldom with clear cognizance, seldom with firm intent, were products of a sick world.
Yet this life of ours was not all sheer and barren fantasy. Was it not spun from the actual fibres of reality, which we gathered in with all the comings and goings through our door, all our traffic with the suburb and the city and with remoter cities, and with the ends of the earth? And were we not spinning together an authentic expression of our own nature? Did not our life issue daily as more or less firm threads of active living, and mesh itself into the growing web, the intricate, ever-proliferating pattern of mankind?
I considered ‘us’ with quiet interest and a kind of amused awe. How could I describe our relationship even to myself without either disparaging it or insulting it with the tawdry decoration of sentimentality? For this our delicate balance of dependence and independence,
this coolly critical, shrewdly ridiculing, but loving mutual contact, was surely a microcosm of true community, was after all in its simple style an actual and living example of that high goal which the world seeks.
The whole world? The whole universe? Overheard, obscurity unveiled a star. One tremulous arrow of light, projected how many thousands of years ago, now stung my nerves with vision, and my heart with fear. For in such a universe as this what significance could there be in our fortuitous, our frail, our evanescent community?
But now irrationally I was seized with a strange worship, not, surely of the star, that mere furnace which mere distance falsely sanctified, but of something other, which the dire contrast of the star and us signified to the heart. Yet what, what could thus be signified? Intellect, peering beyond the star, discovered no Star Maker, but only darkness; no Love, no Power even, but only Nothing. And yet the heart praised.
Impatiently I shook off this folly, and reverted from the inscrutable to the familiar and the concrete. Thrusting aside worship, and fear also and bitterness, I determined to examine more coldly this remarkable ‘us’, this surprisingly impressive datum, which to ourselves remained basic to the universe, though in relation to the stars it appeared so slight a thing.
Considered even without reference to our belittling cosmical background, we were after all insignificant, perhaps ridiculous. We were such a commonplace occurrence, so trite, so respectable. We were just a married couple, making shift to live together without undue strain. Marriage in our time was suspect. And ours, with its trivial romantic origin, was doubly suspect.
We had first met when she was a child. Our eyes encountered. She looked at me for a moment with quiet attention; even, I had romantically imagined, with obscure, deep-lying recognition. I, at any rate, recognized in that look (so I persuaded myself in my fever of adolescence) my destiny. Yes! How predestinate had seemed our union! Yet now, in retrospect, how accidental! True, of course, that as a long-married couple we fitted rather neatly, like two close trees whose trunks have grown upwards together as a single shaft, mutually distorting, but mutually supporting. Coldly I now assessed her as merely a useful, but often infuriating adjunct to my personal life. We were on the whole sensible companions. We left one another a certain freedom, and so we were able to endure our proximity.
