Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
192 pages
Published 1937
Read from September 20 to September 23
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
In terms of scope and the sheer scale of imagination and audacity of conception, this book surpasses everything I've ever read or even heard of, outside the more esoteric and convoluted cosmologies of Hinduism, mystical Buddhism, and mystical Judaism. The career of our physical universe, from Big Bang to heat death, encompassing every stage of evolution and the evolution of intelligence -- from brutish, befuddled ol' Homo sapiens up to a universal cosmic mind united in contemplation of the eternal Star Maker -- is only the foundation of an ultimate revelation: a pantheistic conception of our universe as but one particle of creation "objectified" from the Star Maker in an eternal, cyclical act of self-creation (or "divine self-midwifery," in Stapledon's phrase), but one stage in a timeless process of creative growth from crude dimensionless bubbles of rhythm and music to some ultimate cosmos beyond our (or the author's) conception, in which universes such as ours were as mere atoms in its substance. It is a thrilling vista, a truly bold attempt to grapple with the possibilities of science fiction as a philosophical medium, and an equally bold effort to imbue the scientific scale and cold brilliant majesty of the universe with something like an essentially human spiritual framework.
As with all such attempts, Stapledon's conception of the creator remains pathetically anthropomorphic, despite his protests that he must describe in human terms what defies human understanding. I can't fault him for failing to describe the indescribable. Nor can I do anything but praise Stapledon's imagination, which again glosses over in mere paragraphs or bare lines breathtaking science fictional concepts that would produce whole volumes and subgenres in the hands of subsequent writers.
No, my problem with Stapledon (beyond the taint of eugenics and flawed "race theory" of his time) is how dreadfully dull and dry it all is. Those mere lines and paragraphs, bold though they may be, carry the emotional intensity of a graphing calculator or a slide rule. "Immensity itself is not a good thing," Stapledon admonishes, yet seems to ignore that dictum in his own storytelling -- if such a word even applies to an antiseptic examination of countless eons, scarcely interrupted by so much as a pulse of life or character. The early going is positively Swiftian in character, lampooning certain ideological follies by exaggerating them into alien cultures. But nothing approaching a "story" is evident, beyond the story of the evolution of cosmical consciousness itself, which makes for dreary reading.
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