Following my marathon slog through the author's turgid Last and First Men a couple of weeks
ago I girded up my loins, gritted my teeth and picked up Star Maker (published in 1937) with considerable apprehension. Be
warned, there are spoilers in this review.
An unnamed man, living on a contemporary Earth, has a vision
in which he finds his disembodied self speeding away from our planet and into the
depths of the galaxy. The story consists of what he discovers there, could up
to the ultimate revelation of the origin and purpose of the Universe; Stapledon
can never be accused of lack of ambition in his writing!
Initially, the man finds an "Other Earth" in a
far-distant star system, on which there are more or less humanoid inhabitants
living in a society at a comparable level to Earth's. He spends several
subjective years there, seeing the world through the eyes of the people. A key
difference is that for them, taste and scent are much stronger senses than
sight, which has some interesting social implications. The author holds up a
mirror to the Earth by describing some of the more ridiculous or depressing
trends in a society which is like Earth's only more so, including parodying the
emphasis on religious differences (he obviously has little sympathy with
religion, which caused some controversy at the time). In this part he is
following a similar path to that of Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels, only in a less exaggerated form and without the
humour.
The protagonist is able to join minds with one of the
natives, and the pair of them set off on a mental tour of the galaxy, to
explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations (to
borrow a phrase). These they find, in vast numbers and with a wide variety in
the nature of their inhabitants, and they add other minds to their group as
they travel. Millions of years pass and civilisations rise and mostly fall
again with depressing frequency. Those
which survive for long enough may develop a "communal world mind",
with every individual contributing telepathically to such "wakened
worlds". Utopian civilisations often result, based on communism and
eugenics – popular and respectable ideas in the 1930s, rather less so
today.
As civilisations continue to develop, they learn how to move
planets, creating artificial suns to orbit around them in order to maintain
life, and they make artificial planets consisting of concentric spheres with
people living on many different levels within them (readers may recognise here
ideas used by Larry Niven and Iain M Banks, among others). There are
devastating wars between wakened worlds until telepathic powers become strong
enough to bind them together over interstellar, and eventually galactic,
distances, such telepathic unions enabling a far greater understanding of life,
the universe and all that, than individual minds can achieve. The scale of the
story becomes ever-greater as it proceeds to the climax – the identification of
the Star Maker, the creator of the universe, followed by long descriptions of
his works.
In contrast with Last
and First Men, at least this one has a kind of plot and a protagonist who
tells the tale in the first person, and the description of the Other Earth is
entertaining. However, as the story progresses it becomes increasingly metaphysical
and remote from any kind of human experience, and I must confess to doing some
skim-reading as I approached the end to get to the conclusion as soon as
possible. Like Stapledon's earlier work, Star
Maker is packed full of interesting and original ideas which must have
inspired many SF writers, but this is frankly a terrible novel in terms of
engaging the reader and is only worth ploughing through for its historical
interest.
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