Star Maker
First Edition
Author	Olaf Stapledon
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre(s)	Science fiction, Novel
Publisher	Methuen
Publication date	1937
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
ISBN	NA

Star Maker is an influential science fiction novel by Olaf Stapledon, written in 1937. William Olaf Stapledon ( May 10, 1886 &ndash September 6, 1950) was a British philosopher and author of several influential works The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK or Britain,is a Sovereign state located English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States A novel (from Italian novella, Spanish novela, French nouvelle for "new" "news" or "short story Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of Literature or Information &ndash the activity of making information available for public view Methuen Publishing Ltd is a British Publishing house and publishes in the areas of Theatre and Drama. Year 1937 ( MCMXXXVII) was a Common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. A hardcover (or hardback or hardbound) is a Book bound with rigid protective covers (typically of cardboard covered with Cloth Paperback, softback, or softcover describe and refer to a Book by the nature of its binding. William Olaf Stapledon ( May 10, 1886 &ndash September 6, 1950) was a British philosopher and author of several influential works Year 1937 ( MCMXXXVII) was a Common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar.

Overview

Star Maker is a cornerstone work of science fiction. Stapledon 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. Year 1930 ( MCMXXX) was a Common year starting on Wednesday (link will display 1930 calendar of the Gregorian calendar. Last and First Men A Story of the Near and Far Future is a Science fiction novel written in 1930 by the British author Olaf Stapledon. 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. The narrator starts with a concern at the clash of ideas on Earth and finds analogies to both communism and fascism among the aliens he visits. Communism is a Socioeconomic structure that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless Society based Fascism is a totalitarian nationalist and corporatist ideology Extraterrestrial life is Life originating outside of the Earth.

A pervading theme is that of progressive unity within and between different civilizations. Some of the elements and themes briefly discussed prefigure later fiction concerning genetic engineering and alien life forms. Genetic engineering, Recombinant DNA technology, genetic modification/manipulation (GM and gene splicing are terms that apply to the direct It has long been considered to be one of the finest works of science fiction ever written.

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. Science (from the Latin scientia, meaning " Knowledge " or "knowing" is the effort to discover, and increase human understanding 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 as well as the modern view of the ultimate fate of the universe. To help compare different Orders of magnitude, the following list describes various Lengths between 1 Seconds Years See also Natural history Geologic To help compare Orders of magnitude of different times this page lists times longer than 1019 Seconds (317 billion years The ultimate fate of the universe is a topic in Physical cosmology.

Stapledon imagines alien biologies, minds and civilizations radically different from human ones. But unlike Stanisław 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. Stanisław Lem ( sta'ɲiswaf lɛm 12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006 was a Polish Science fiction, philosophical and satirical writer Solaris is a Polish Science fiction Novel by Stanisław Lem (1921-2006 published in Warsaw in 1961 Charles Robert Darwin (February 12 1809 &ndash April 19 1882 was an English naturalist, who realised and demonstrated that all Species of life Marxism is the political philosophy and practice derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. 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. Eclecticism is a conceptual approach that does not hold rigidly to a single Paradigm or set of assumptions but instead draws upon multiple theories styles or ideas to Socialism refers to a broad set of economic theories of social organization advocating state or collective ownership and administration of the Means of production and distribution Mysticism (from the Greek grc μυστικός mystikos, an initiate of a Mystery religion) is the pursuit of communion with identity

Some of Stapledon's ideas for alien minds, such as collective intelligence, seem far ahead of their time, anticipating recent ideas about swarm intelligence and the general fascination with networks. Collective intelligence is a shared or group Intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals Swarm intelligence (SI is Artificial intelligence based on the Collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems He also mentions the idea of virtual reality in the first alien world visited, in the form of an apparatus that directly affects sense centers in the brain. Virtual reality ( VR) is a technology which allows a user to interact with a Computer-simulated environment be it a real or imagined one The idea of entire worlds as spacecraft is used several times.

Reputation

Critics of the novel see it as full of interesting ideas but its writing as dull, dry, characterless, difficult, and even scientifically implausible at points. However, its admirers at the time of first publication saw it as one of the most brilliant, inventive, and daring science fiction books. Among its more famous admirers were H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, C. S. Lewis, Jorge Luis Borges and Doris Lessing. Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 &ndash 13 August 1946 He was an outspoken socialist and a pacifist, his later works becoming increasingly political (Adeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941 was an English Novelist and Essayist, regarded as one of the foremost Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963 Doris May Lessing, CH, OBE (née Tayler; born 22 October 1919) is a British Writer, author of works such Borges wrote a prologue for a 1965 edition and called it “a prodigious novel”. Lessing wrote an afterword for a UK edition. Among SF writers, Arthur C. Clarke has been strongly influenced by Stapledon. Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE (16 December 1917–19 March 2008 was a British Science fiction Author, Inventor, and

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. A narrator (or the extremely rarely used female equivalent narratress) is within any story (literary work movie play verbal account etc England is a Country which is part of the United Kingdom. Its inhabitants account for more than 83% of the total UK population whilst its mainland After exploring another 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 travellers encounter many ideas that are interesting from both science-fictional and philosophical points of view. These include the first known instance of what is now called the Dyson sphere, reference to a scenario closely predicting the later zoo hypothesis or Star Trek's Prime Directive[1], many imaginative descriptions of species, civilizations and methods of warfare, and the idea that the stars and even the pre-galactic nebulae are intelligent beings, operating on vast time scales. A Dyson sphere (or shell as it appeared in the original paper is a hypothetical Megastructure originally described by Freeman Dyson. The zoo hypothesis is one of a number of suggestions that have been advanced in response to the Fermi paradox, regarding the apparent absence of evidence in support of the existence In the Fictional universe of Star Trek, the Prime Directive, Starfleet 's General Order #1 is the most prominent guiding principle of the A nebula (from Latin: "mist" pl nebulae or nebulæ, with ligature or nebulas) is an Interstellar cloud of 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. Telepathy ( Greek τηλε tele meaning "distant" and πάθεια patheia meaning "to be affected by" describes the purported transfer In its most general sense a cosmos is an orderly or harmonious system

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 climax (from the Greek word “κλῖμαξ” ( klimax) meaning “staircase” and “ladder” or turning point of a Narrative The Star Maker is the creator of the universe, but stands 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 the novel one of Stapledon's efforts to write "an essay in myth making". The word mythology (from the Greek grc μυθολογία mythología, meaning "a story-telling a legendary lore"

1. The Earth
   1. The Starting Point
   2. Earth among the Stars
2. Interstellar Travel
3. The Other Earth
   1. On the Other Earth
   2. A Busy World
   3. Prospects of the Race
4. I Travel Again
5. Worlds Innumerable
   1. The Diversity of Worlds
   2. Strange Mankinds
   3. Nautiloids
6. Intimations of the Star Maker
7. More Worlds
   1. A Symbiotic Race
   2. Composite Beings
   3. Plant Men and Others
8. Concerning the Explorers
9. 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
10. A Vision of the Galaxy
11. Stars and Vermin
    1. The Many Galaxies
    2. Disaster in Our Galaxy
    3. Stars
    4. Galactic Symbiosis
12. A Stunted Cosmical Spirit
13. The Beginning and the End
    1. Back to the Nebulae
    2. The Supreme Moment Nears
    3. The Supreme Moment and After
14. The Myth of Creation
15. The Maker and his Works
    1. Immature Creating
    2. Mature Creating
    3. The Ultimate Cosmos and the Eternal Spirit
16. Epilogue: Back to Earth

Appendix: A Note on Magnitude

References

• A paperback edition has appeared in the SF Masterworks series. SF Masterworks is a series of Science fiction books originally published by Millennium but currently by Gollancz (both being imprints of the UK based Orion Publishing

External links

• Book transcript by Project Gutenberg of Australia