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20 All Time Classic Sci Fi Novels - Star Maker (S.F. Masterworks)
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- Author: Olaf Stapledon
- Type: Paperback
- ISBN: 1857988078
- Publisher: Gollancz
Synopsis
Brian Aldiss calls this 1937 SF classic "the most wonderful novel I have ever read", and its Millennium Masterworks reissue adds admiring remarks by Jorge Luis Borges, Arthur C Clarke, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf among others. Olaf Stapledon is better known for Last and First Men (1930), a sweeping history of the future whose early chapters are now embarrassing--but Star Maker leaps straight into a unfurling vision of infinity.
Looking at the starry night from an English hillside, the unnamed narrator is snatched from his earthly body and flung through space at impossible acceleration, soon outstripping light. He visits other stars, sees other worlds and alien races, a gallery of SF marvels in documentary rather than story form. (Some of this now seems over-familiar, however fresh and new in 1937: the book drags a little here.) Fellow disembodied intelligences from the galactic community join our hero, sensing something beyond mere matter and energy:
The felt presence of the Star Maker remained unintelligible, even though it increasingly illuminated the cosmos, like the splendour of the unseen sun at dawn.
But the godlike Star Maker is not exactly God, as we see when the scope expands beyond one mere universe to show an endless cycle of creations, many of them being crude and "immature" products of this experimenter's hand. Further "mature" creations follow, foreshadowing the Ultimate Cosmos whose crystalline perfection is not comforting but terrifying. Star Maker's final unsparing evocation of the deep chill of infinity has even been compared to Dante. --David Langford
Reviews
I read this because it got such good reviews as an iconic book. It is about a chap who stands on a hillside contemplating our little world and finds himself projected through space and time to many different worlds, experiencing the beginning and end of galaxies, meeting the Starmaker, creator of everything. It's well written: "One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out onto the hill" - and good descriptions of the separate/close symbiosis of a longterm marriage. It's certainly imaginative: thought provoking descriptions of many kinds of intelligent beings, their societies and the rise and fall of their civilisations. Full of insight. Like travelling in a country where they do things differently: broadens the mind. But ultimately not involving, just endless descriptions and broad overviews of the evolution of many different species and of the universe itself. I got bored with the deluge of information and started skipping through it after a while.
I'll try his "First and Last Men" as I have already bought it and as it is more well known. Sometime, on some holiday.
Florence
This is an imagination-stretching masterpiece. How its scope - wait till you hear about the behaviour of stars - failed to tantalise one or two reviewers is baffling. A novel, I suppose, or a journey of such contemplative genius the only surprise is that there isn't a cult based upon it! Forget all that tiresome tittle tattle, earnest politics and re-examination of the post-colonial navel that seems to constitute modern creative writing. Go cosmic.
Mr. A. Bearn
I don't think I've ever read a book that has come close to this in terms of ambition and sheer hugeness in its subject matter. The reader is taken on a journey through the universe in all its glory, encountering some life forms that are as bizarre, as they are fantastic, as they are utterly believable. In the space of a page you can be taken from galaxy to galaxy, encountering ever weirder life forms along the way. This is a book that really makes you appreciate the wonder of the universe, a breathtaking book.
N. Burgess
Sorry to contradict the many fans of this "classic", but I want to offer the following warning to any newcomers to sci-fi (like myself): don't believe the hype!
I was impressed by the commendations on the jacket - including one from Virginia Woolf, no less - but this is not conventional sci-fi. It's a sort of strange prose-poem about a guy who 'astral projects' around the universe, and through time, observing different types of world created by the Star Maker (ie God). Some of the worlds are quite quirky, but don't expect any dialogue or plot.
It's a work of pop philosophy with vague conclusions. I was bored.
I would advise any newcomers to sci-fi to stick to Philip K Dick.
Michael Brooks
This is truly an amazing book. How is this man so little known? How ironic it is that this edition is published as one of the "Science Fiction Masterworks"; it is no more science-fiction than the Bible, or Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is the profoundest book I have read this year and probably for several years.
"Star Maker" is nothing less than an attempt to unite science and religion in a common philosophy. It is categorised as a novel, which says more about the frustrations of those who love and need categories than it does about this book. It is not a novel: it is a work of great imagination, a courageous attempt at an almost incredible task - to try to describe "God". It is also very uncompromising and will leave many readers uncomfortable and perhaps even angry. But at the same time its vision is so beautiful, and so clearly touches on the incomprehensible truth of reality, that you can't help feeling grateful, humbled, and shattered at the same time.
S. J. Newton
