The Star Maker.pdf

You may read Stapledon's work for his mysticism; for the social symbolism and commentary on man

implicit in his studies of other beings; for the bubbling ingenuity of his ideas; for the depth of his tragic

sense; for the splendor of his epic sweep. But from whatever motive, read him."

—H. H. Homes, N. Y. Herald Tribune

The Star Maker

Olaf Stapledon

ABERKLEY MEDALLION BOOK

PREFACE

AT a moment whenEurope is in danger of a catastrophe worse than that of 1914 a book like this may

be condemned as a distraction from the desperately urgent defence of civilization against modern

barbarism.

Year by year, month by month, the plight of our fragmentary and precarious civilization becomes more

serious. Fascism abroad grows more bold and ruthless in its foreign ventures, more tyrannical toward its

own citizens, more barbarian in its contempt for the life of the mind. Even in our own country we have

reason to fear a tendency toward militarization and the curtailment of civil liberty. Moreover, while the

decades pass, no resolute step is taken to alleviate the injustice of our social order. Our outworn

economic system dooms millions to frustration.

In these conditions it is difficult for writers to pursue their calling at once with courage and with balanced

judgment. Some merely shrug their shoulders and withdraw from the central struggle of our age. These,

with their minds closed against the world's most vital issues, inevitably produce works which not only

have no depth of significance for their contemporaries but also are subtly insincere. For these writers

must consciously or unconsciously contrive to persuade themselves either that the crisis in human affairs

does not exist, or that it is less important than their own work, or that it is anyhow not their business. But

the crisis does exist, is of supreme importance, and concerns us all. Can anyone who is at all intelligent

and informed hold the contrary without self-deception?

Yet I have a lively sympathy with some of those "intellectuals" who declare that they have no useful

contribution to make to the struggle, and therefore had better not dabble in it. I am, in fact, one of them.

In our defense I should say that, though we are inactive or ineffective as direct supporters of the cause,

we do not ignore it. Indeed, it constantly, obsessively, holds our attention. But we are convinced by

prolonged trial and error that the most useful service open to us is indirect. For some writers the case is

different. Gallantly plunging into the struggle, they use their powers to spread urgent propaganda, or they

even take up arms in the cause. If they have suitable ability, and if the particular struggle in which they

serve is in fact a part of the great enterprise of defending (or creating) civilization, they may, of course, do

valuable work. In addition they may gain great wealth of experience and human sympathy, thereby

immensely increasing their literary power. But the very urgency of their service may tend to blind them to

the importance of maintaining and extending, even in this age of crisis, what may be called metaphorically

the "self-critical self-consciousness of the human species," or the attempt to see man's life as a whole in

relation to the rest of things. This involves the will to regard all human affairs and ideals and theories with

as little human prejudice as possible. Those who are in the thick of the struggle inevitably tend to become,

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though in a great and just cause, partisan. They nobly forgo something of that detachment, that power of

cold assessment, which is, after all, among the most valuable human capacities. In their case this is

perhaps as it should be; for a desperate struggle demands less of detachment than of devotion. But some

who have the cause at heart must serve by striving to maintain, along with human loyalty, a more

dispassionate spirit. And perhaps the attempt to see our turbulent world against a background of stars

may, after all, increase, not lessen the significance of the present human crisis. It may also strengthen our

charity toward one another.

In this belief I have tried to construct an imaginative sketch of the dread but vital whole of things. I know

well that it is a ludicrously inadequate and in some ways a childish sketch, even when regarded from the

angle of contemporary human experience. In a calmer and a wiser age it might well seem crazy. Yet in

spite of its crudity, and in spite of its remoteness, it is perhaps not wholly irrelevant.

At the risk of raising thunder both on the Left and on the Right, I have occasionally used certain ideas

and words derived from religion, and I have tried to interpret them in relation to modem needs. The

valuable, though much damaged words "spiritual" and "worship," which have become almost as obscene

to the Left as the good old sexual words are to the Right, are here intended to suggest an experience

which the Right is apt to pervert and the Left to misconceive. This experience, I should say, involves

detachment from all private, all social, all racial ends; not in the sense that it leads a man to reject them,

but that it makes him prize them in a new way. The "spiritual life" seems to be in essence the attempt to

discover and adopt the attitude which is in fact appropriate to our experience as a whole, just as

admiration is felt to be in fact appropriate toward a well-grown human being. This enterprise can lead to

an increased lucidity and finer temper of consciousness, and therefore can have a great and beneficial

effect on behavior. Indeed, if this supremely humanizing experience does not produce, along with a kind

of piety toward fate, the resolute will to serve our waking humanity, it is a mere sham and a snare.

Before closing this preface I must express my gratitude to Professor L. C. Martin, Mr. L. H. Myers, and

Mr. E. V. Rieu, for much helpful and sympathetic criticism, in consequence of which I rewrote many

chapters. Even now I hesitate to associate their names with such an extravagant work. Judged by the

standards of the Novel, it is remarkably bad. In fact, it is no novel at all.

Certain ideas about artificial planets were suggested by Mr. J. D. Bernal's fascinating little book The

World, the Flesh, and the Devil. I hope he will not strongly disapprove of my treatment of them.

My wife I must thank both for work on the proofs and for being herself.

At the end of the book I have included a note on Magnitude, which may be helpful to readers unfamiliar

with astronomy. The very sketchy time scales may amuse some.

O. S.

March 1937

CONTENTS

preface v

I. The earth 11

1. The Starting Point 11

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2. Earth Among the Stars 14

II. Interstellar travel 18

III. The other earth 27

1. On the Other Earth 27

2. A Busy World 31

3. Prospects of the Race 44

IV. I travel again 54

V. Worlds innumerable 62

1. The Diversity of Worlds 62

2. Strange Mankinds 68

3. Nautiloids 76

VI. Intimations of the star maker 82

VII. More worlds 87

1. A Symbiotic Race 87

2. Composite Beings 97

3. Plant Men and Others 104

VIII. Concerning the explorers 113

IX. The community of worlds 117

1. Busy Utopias 117

2. Intermundane Strife 125

3. A Crisis in Galactic History 136

4. Triumph in a Sub-Galaxy 138

5. The Tragedy of the Perverts 143

6. A Galactic Utopia 147

X. A vision of the galaxy 151

XI. Stars AND vermin 159

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1. The Many Galaxies 159

2. Disaster in Our Galaxy 161

3. Stars 166

4. Galactic Symbiosis 174

XII. A stunted cosmical spirit 178

xiii. The beginning AND THE end 181

1. Back to the Nebulae 181

2. The Supreme Moment Nears 185

3. The Supreme Moment and After 190

xiv. The myth of creation 196

xv. The maker and HIS works 200

1. Immature Creating 200

2. Mature Creating 209

3. The Ultimate Cosmos and the

Eternal Spirit 214

xvi. Epilogue: back ?? earth 218

CHAPTER I

THE EARTH

1. THE STARTING POINT

ONE night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill. Dark heather checked my feet. Below

marched the suburban lamps. Windows, their curtains drawn, were shut eyes, inwardly watching the lives

of dreams. Beyond the sea's level darkness a lighthouse pulsed. Overhead, obscurity. I distinguished our

own house, our islet in the tumultuous and bitter currents of the world. There, for a decade and a half, we

two, so different in quality, had grown in and in to one another, for mutual support and nourishment, in

intricate symbiosis. There daily we planned our several undertakings, and recounted the day's oddities

and vexations. There letters piled up to be answered, socks to be darned. There the children were born,

those sudden new lives. There, under that roof, our own two lives, recalcitrant sometimes to one another,

were all the while thankfully one, one larger, more conscious life than either alone.

All this, surely, was good. Yet there was bitterness. And bitterness not only invaded us from the world; it

welled up also within our own magic circle. For horror at our futility, at our own unreality, and not only at

the world's delirium, had driven me out on to the hill.

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We were always hurrying from one little urgent task to another, but the upshot was insubstantial. Had

we, perhaps, misconceived our whole existence? Were we, as it were, living from false premises? And in

particular, this partnership of ours, this seemingly so well-based fulcrum for activity in the world, was it

after all nothing but a little eddy of complacent and ingrown domesticity, ineffectively whirling on the

surface of the great flux, having in itself no depth of being, and no significance? Had we perhaps after all

deceived ourselves? Behind those rapt windows did we, like so many others, in- deed live only a dream?

In a sick world even the hale are sick. And we two, spinning our little life mostly by rote, seldom with

clear cognizance, seldom with firm intent, were products of a sick world.

Yet this life of ours was not all sheer and barren fantasy. Was it not spun from the actual fibres of reality,

which we gathered in with all the comings and goings through our door, all our traffic with the suburb and

the city and with remoter cities, and with the ends of the earth? And were we not spinning together an

authentic expression of our own nature? Did not our life issue daily as more or less firm threads of active

living, and mesh itself into the growing web, the intricate, ever-proliferating pattern of mankind?

I considered "us" with quiet interest and a kind of amused awe. How could I describe our relationship

even to myself without either disparaging it or insulting it with the tawdry decoration of sentimentality? For

this our delicate balance of dependence and independence, this coolly critical, shrewdly ridiculing, but

loving mutual contact, was surely a microcosm of true community, was after all in its simple style an actual

and living example of that high goal which the world seeks.

The whole world? The whole universe? Overhead, obscurity unveiled a star. One tremulous arrow of

light, projected how many thousands of years ago, now stung my nerves with vision, and my heart with

fear. For in such a universe as this what significance could there be in our fortuitous, our frail, our

evanescent community?

But now irrationally I was seized with a strange worship, not, surely of the star, that mere furnace which

mere distance falsely sanctified, but of something other, which the dire contrast of the star and us signified

to the heart. Yet what, what could thus be signified? Intellect, peering beyond the star, discovered no

Star Maker, but only darkness; no Love, no Power even, but only Nothing. And yet the heart praised.

Impatiently I shook off this folly, and reverted from the inscrutable to the familiar and the concrete.

Thrusting aside worship, and fear also and bitterness, I determined to examine more coldly this

remarkable "us," this surprisingly impressive datum, which to ourselves remained basic to the universe,

though in relation to the stars it appeared so slight a thing.

Considered even without reference to our belittling cosmical background, we were after all insignificant,

perhaps ridiculous. We were such a commonplace occurrence, so trite, so respectable. We were just a

married couple, making shift to live together without undue strain. Marriage in our time was suspect. And

ours, with its trivial romantic origin, was doubly suspect.

We had first met when she was a child. Our eyes encountered. She looked at me for a moment with

quiet attention; even, I had romantically imagined, with obscure, deep-lying recognition. I, at any rate,

recognized in that look (so I persuaded myself in my fever of adolescence) my destiny. Yes! How

predestinate had seemed our union! Yet now, in retrospect, how accidental! True, of course, that as a

long-married couple we fitted rather neatly, like two close trees whose trunks have grown upwards

together as a single shaft, mutually distorting, but mutually supporting. Coldly I now assessed her as

merely a useful, but often infuriating adjunct to my personal life. We were on the whole sensible

companions. We left one another a certain freedom, and so we were able to endure our proximity.

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