Star Maker (1937) is a cornerstone work of science fiction by Olaf Stapledon, in which he 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. A pervading theme is that of progressive unity within and between different civilizations. Some of the elements and themes briefly discussed prefigure, if crudely, 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. 1937 (MCMXXXVII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ... Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ... William Olaf Stapledon (1886 – 1950) was a British philosopher and author of several influential works of science fiction. ... 1930 (MCMXXX) is a common year starting on Wednesday. ... Last and First Men is a science fiction novel written in 1930 by the British author Olaf Stapledon. ... An iconic image of genetic engineering; this 1986 autoluminograph of a glowing transgenic tobacco plant bearing the luciferase gene of the firefly strikingly demonstrates the power and potential of genetic manipulation. ... The existence of extraterrestrial life remains hypothetical though human beings continue to search Extraterrestrial life is life that may exist and originate outside the planet Earth. ...

Science 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. // What is science? There are various understandings of the word science. According to empiricism, scientific theories are objective, empirically testable, and predictive — they predict empirical results that can be checked and possibly contradicted. ... Categories: Orders of magnitude (length) | Length ... The pages linked in the right-hand column contain lists of times that are of the same order of magnitude (power of ten). ... To help compare orders of magnitude of different times, this page lists times longer than 1019 seconds (320,000 million years) See also times of other orders of magnitude. ...

Stapledon imagines alien biologies, minds and civilizations radically different from human ones. But unlike 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. Basic Info Lem lies below the Leichian Desert. ... Solaris is a science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem, published in Warsaw in 1961. ... In his lifetime Charles Darwin gained international fame as a controversial and influential scientist. ... Marxism is the social theory and political practice based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century German philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. ... Eclecticism is an approach to thought that does not hold rigidly to a single paradigm or set of assumptions or conclusions, but instead draws upon multiple theories to gain complementary insights into phenomena, or applies only certain theories in particular cases. ... ...

Some of Stapledon's ideas for alien minds, i.e. collective intelligence, seem far ahead of their time, anticipating recent ideas about swarm intelligence and the general fascination with networks. This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... ...

Criticisms

Critics of the novel see it as dry, characterless, difficult, and even scientifically implausible at points. Although admiring its inventiveness, C. S. Lewis deemed it to be ultimately "diabolical". Hence Lewis often called his own science fiction works a rebuttal or rebuke of Stapledon's views and particularly Stapledon's view of God, as Stapledon departed from Christianity greatly on that. Clive Staples Lewis (November 29, 1898 — November 22, 1963), commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis, was an Irish author and scholar, born into a Protestant family in Belfast, though mostly resident in England. ... See also: Timeline of Christianity Beliefs Jesus crucifixion as portrayed by Diego Velázquez. ...

However, its admirers are often as enthusiastic as Lewis was hostile. Many at the time saw it as one of the most brilliant, inventive, and daring science fiction books before or since. Its vast scope made many see it as the most daring and cosmic SF made then or ever. Among its more famous, and perhaps surprising, admirers was the writer Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) was a British author and feminist, who is considered to be one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. ...

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 one other 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 Narrator is the entity within a story that tells the story to the reader. ... Snowballing is: A situation in which the exercise of stop orders in a declining market or advancing market or specific share creates further downward or upward pressure, triggering more stop orders, magnifying the decline or advance. ...

The travellers encounter many ideas that are interesting from both science-fictional and philosophical points of view. These include the first instance of the Dyson sphere, many imaginative species, civilizations and methods of warfare, and the idea that the stars and even the pre-galactic nebulae were 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. Diagram of an idealized Dyson shell of 1 AU radius A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure first described in 1960 by the physicist Freeman Dyson. ... Telepathy, from the Greek τηλε, tele, distant, and πάθεια, patheia, feeling, is the claimed innate ability of humans and other creatures to communicate information from one mind to another, without the use of extra tools such as speech or body language. ...

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 was the creator of the universe, but stood 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 element makes it one of Stapledon's efforts to write "an essay in myth making". The climax of a narrative work is its point of highest tension or drama. ...

References

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