Star Maker: Olaf Stapledon (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

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Olaf Stapledon is easily one of the most brilliant and imaginative writers to have ever decided to use hard-SF as a furious vehicle of massive speculative philosophy in sociology, biology, physics, and cosmology. Was he a brilliant man? What do you think? This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sourcesin this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( November 2023) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Article: "The Man from M.O.N.S.T.E.R." Castle of Frankenstein, volume 2, No. 4 (1966)". David McCallum Fans Online . Retrieved 25 January 2008. Ninth Men. (Chapter 14) "Inevitably it was a dwarf type, limited in size by the necessity of resisting an excessive gravitation... too delicately organized to withstand the ferocity of natural forces on Neptune... civilization crumbled into savagery." After the Ninth Men's civilization collapses, the Ninth Men themselves devolve into various animal species.

Star Maker inverts the compliment commonly given to nonfiction books: "It's so good, it read like fiction." Olaf Stapledon's 1937 novel reads like nonfiction--cerebral, dry, and academic nonfiction sans drama, sans conflict, sans characterization, and sans humor composed of many paragraph-length sentences. And yet, the awe-inspiring cosmological, astronomical, anthropological, xenobiological, hyperdimensional, sociological, and ontological ideas contained in Star Maker are staggering and myriad. More than 95% of the events in this book are Baboon-like Submen. (Chapter 7) "Bent so that as often as not they used their arms as aids to locomotion, flat-headed and curiously long-snouted, these creatures were by now more baboon-like than human". Stapledon was awarded a PhD degree in philosophy from the University of Liverpool in 1925 and used his doctoral thesis as the basis for his first published prose book, A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929). However, he soon turned to fiction in the hope of presenting his ideas to a wider public. The relative success of Last and First Men (1930) prompted him to become a full-time writer. He wrote a sequel, Last Men in London, and followed it up with many more books of both fiction and philosophy. If anyone knows what story I am referring to and can send me a copy, I would greatly appreciate it, thank you. And thanks for bothering with my cosmic ramblings. I’ve seen this idea used in many subsequent works of SF, but this may be the earliest reference to the idea I’ve encountered. What impressed me at this moment about this passage was that I have within the past week heard the idea presented not as SF but as a serious scientific concept.

Liel Leibovitz (November 2011). "Star Men". Archived from the original on 4 September 2018 . Retrieved 4 September 2018. In 2017 a multimedia adaptation of Last and First Men by Oscar-nominated Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson was released, featuring narration by Tilda Swinton and a live score performed by the BBC Philharmonic. [33] From a letter to Fritz Leiber on 18 November 1936. Published in Selected Letters V edited by August Derleth and James Turner, p. 357.

The reference to objecting to Stapledon's philosophy was no accident. In particular, Christian Lewis objected to Stapledon's idea, as expressed in the present book, that mankind could escape from an outworn planet and establish itself on another one; this Lewis regarded as no less than a Satanic idea – especially, but not only, because it involved genocide of the original inhabitants of the target planet. Professor Weston, the chief villain of Lewis's Space Trilogy, is an outspoken proponent of this idea, and in Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis opposes to it the depiction of the virtuous and stoic Martians/Malacandrians who choose to die with their dying planet, even though they possessed the technology to cross space and colonise Earth. One thing that surprised me is how specific some of the answers to these big questions get toward the end. It's not just some vague notion of the "unified spirit," it's much more detailed than that. I suspect that not all readers will like these answers, but I found them to be compelling and fascinating possibilities. And the influence on later sf is obvious. Childhood's End, Dune and Hothouse spring to mind. I would imagine those chapters that didn't remind me of anything have simply inspired books I haven't read yet. Seventh Men. Flying humans, "scarcely heavier than the largest of terrestrial flying birds", are created by the Sixth Men. After 100 million years, a flightless pedestrian subspecies appears which re-develops technology. First Men. (Chapters 1–6) The First Men are our own species. Beginning in the early twenty-first century, several increasingly devastating wars take place in Europe, which result in the United States and China becoming the two dominant superpowers on Earth. In the twenty-fourth century, the US and China go to war, and the war concludes with the formation of the First World State. Two centuries thereafter, all religions and secular science consolidate into a religion based on the worship of motion whose god is Gordelpus, the Prime Mover. Four millennia after the formation of the First World State, humans deplete Earth's supply of fossil fuels, resulting in the total collapse of civilization. 100,000 years later, the Patagonian Civilization emerges. One feature of the Patagonian civilization was a cult of youth. One day, a riot occurs at a mine, and the rioters inadvertently cause a colossal subterranean explosion, rendering most of the Earth's surface uninhabitable for millions of years save for the poles and the northern coast of Siberia. The only survivors of the disaster are thirty-five humans stationed at the North Pole, whose descendants eventually split up into two separate species, the Second Men and some sub-humans. The First Men do not become completely extinct until shortly after the emergence of the Second Men.

Crawford also said that Stapledon appeared to downplay the economic and scientific motivations for space exploration, yet the former is important for maximizing human well-being and the latter is a key component of human intellectual development. He spoke about the race we appear to be in now, between cosmic fulfillment and cosmic death. A situation echoed by our current dilemma, to become a spacefaring civilization or face stagnation and decay. Crawford made the important point that in thinking about space exploration we had to justify why we want another planet and what we are going to do with it, given that we already have a planet and have not treated the Earth very well. He asked whether before we consider this question, we should consider what man ought to do first with himself. Crawford ended by pointing towards the September 2011 publication of “The Global Exploration Roadmap” by the International Space Exploration Coordination Group and said that if Stapledon were here today he would have approved of this as a sign of positive progress that humanity is starting to work together as a global community in the exploration of space. A prescient view of society falling into war and racial hatred again and again, and radio/virtual reality being used to control the populace, reminds the reader a bit of George Orwell.Wow. Just wow. This novel disproves the general assumption that golden age SF is either hokey or unscientific. I should say that my interest in big ideas, such as the make up of the universe, has never been too strong. If you are more interested in this subject I can see you finding a lot of enjoyment in this book but for me I lost grasp of the world he was trying to convey and loss interest after that. The complexity of the problem will be analyzed and we will show that some philosophical prejudice is unavoidable. There are two types of philosophy: “Natural Philosophy”, seeking for some essence of things, and “Critical (or analytical) Philosophy”, devoted to the analysis of the procedures by which we claim to construct a reality. An extension of Critical Philosophy, Epistemo-Analysis (i.e. the Psycho-Analysis of concepts) is presented and applied to the definition of Life and to Astrobiology. Here’s the Dyson sphere part first. Describing a super-advanced, enlightened, and unified galactic consciousness, Stapledon writes that this “vast community…began to avail itself of the energies of its stars upon a scale hitherto unimagined. Not only was every solar system now surrounded by a gauze of light traps, which focused the escaping solar energy for intelligent use, so that the whole galaxy was dimmed, but many stars that were not suited to be suns were disintegrated, and rifled of their prodigious stores of subatomic energy.” Right there, in the middle, those light traps? I think that’s the Dyson sphere. Freeman Dyson, demur as he may, deserves plenty of credit for extrapolating out from that half sentence. And Stapledon deserves more credit, too, because, far beyond imagining light-trapping spheres, he conjured in this novel a vast and inspiring vision of what advanced alien life in the cosmos could be. Tenth to Thirteenth Men. (Chapter 14) "Nowhere did the typical human form survive." About three hundred million years after the colonization of Neptune, a rabbit-like species evolves into the Tenth Men. The Tenth Men are sapient but primitive. After a plague wipes out the Tenth Men, several other primitive human species rise and fall.

At the end of the book I have included a note on Magnitude, which may be helpful to readers unfamiliar with The narrator does starts as a human being. I think the first sentence is completely wonderful: "One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill." On the hill, he looks at the stars and then suddenly he finds himself "soaring away from [his] native planet at incredible speed. . . I was not troubled by the absence of oxygen and atmospheric pressure. I experienced only an increasing exhilaration and a delightful effervescence of thought." And so it goes on, like an astonishing, amazing dream. In 1932, Stapledon followed Last and First Men with the far less acclaimed Last Men in London. Another Stapledon novel, Star Maker (1937), could also be considered a sequel to Last and First Men (mentioning briefly man's evolution on Neptune), but is even more ambitious in scope, being a history of the entire universe. Fourth Men. (Chapter 11) Giant brains bred by one faction of the Third Men. For a long time they help govern their creators, but eventually their rule becomes oppressive and the Third Men rebel. The Fourth Men prevail by recruiting as servants a subspecies of Third Men prone to hypnotic suggestion (the ultimate product of the effort to breed a mediumistic subspecies). The docile subspecies of the Third Men exterminate the original subspecies, save for a few individuals to be used as lab specimens. After the war, the Fourth Men eventually reach the limits of their scientific abilities and discover that emotions and body are also necessary for complete understanding of the cosmos.

CHAPTER VI - INTIMATIONS OF THE STAR MAKER

The only other Sci-Fi book I've read from this time period is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Last and First Men was published two years prior but I think BNW is a far more interesting and timeless book (and I don't think it's perfect by any means). However in essence many of the descriptions of alien societies are all quite reflective of the age the writer forms part of, with class warfare and exploitation recurring. Some commentators have called Stapledon a Marxist, although Stapledon distanced himself from the label stating that - "I am not a Marxist, but I have learned much from Marxists, and I am not anti-Marxist". [11] Although he did refer to himself as a socialist. [12] The disembodied travellers encounter many ideas that are interesting from both science-fictional and philosophical points of view. These include many imaginative descriptions of species, civilisations and methods of warfare, descriptions of the multiverse, and the idea that the stars and pre-galactic nebulae are intelligent beings, operating on vast time scales. 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.