Science Fiction Book Review Olaf Stapledon Star Maker

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1937 – Gollancz SF Masterworks. Spoiler alerts. No one stretched his imagination as far and wildly as Olaf Stapledon. Many writers talk about life thousands of years in the future, but Stapledon takes his characters billions of years into the future and the past as well. The un-named narrator has an extreme out of the body experience. One minute he is talking to his wife, and the next he is free-floating round the galaxy, seeing and going into suns, visiting other Worlds, and following the lives of their life-forms from their origins to their destruction. He meets other astral travellers and gets inside the minds of numerous beings. Every one of the travellers shares their wisdom with the collective mind. He sees some very strange creatures, including a people who have no sense of sound but experience everything as taste as their entire body is one big taste-bud. They use nice tasting sensations as pornography and send bad tasting things in warfare. On another world, starling-like birds are the dominant intelligent species and my favourite World is that of living sailing ships, complete with cannons, and rigging. They even have baby ships that suckle at the cannon ports until old enough to float away to their own adventures. There is also a complex symbiotic relationship on one world between fish and crabs. Though initially seeing great differences between Worlds, the narrator soon picks up on common themes. All species seem doomed to die off as they reach a peak of wisdom and peace. If they don’t destroy themselves, their stars go super-nova and wipe them out. Stapledon sees the great civilizations as doomed to collapse back into barbarism, having to start out again and again. Even the stars and galaxies are alive, and often suicidally depressed. The other common theme that unites many different Worlds is belief in a creator, a God, or as Stapledon calls him, the Star Maker. The final chapter of the Dante-esque flight over all time and space allows the narrator to see the Star Maker, creating worlds and universes like an artist creates a painting, often unhappy with the imperfections in the work which he ultimately crumples up to start anew. The Star Maker is all powerful, but coldly emotionally detached from his creations. The narrator returns home, somehow still able to see the whole World around him. Amazing, mind-blowing in concept, though lacking characterization or dialogue. We never get to engage with characters before moving on to the next amazing marvel, but this is a work of sheer poetry, loved by many later SF writers and the writer Virginia Woolfe was a big fan too. Arthur Chappell