Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker

I suspect Olaf Stapledon is one of those SF authors more celebrated than read.  His language is dense, and the vocabulary is considerably above the 10th grade level of most Americans.  His diction can be formal and imposing.  Reading his best known work, Last and First Men, is like reading an abridged historical account of the human race.  That being said, the sheer sweep of Stapledon's imagination is sufficient to overcome those difficulties.

However, I am not going to comment on Last and First Men but on a more accessible work, Star Maker.  In this work, Stapledon does provide us with characters and some dialogue.  It is much closer to a traditional novel than is Last and First Men. It is a quest novel, in which the major character journeys in search of the answer to the ultimate or perennial question--what is this all about?  After having read the work, or actually part way through it, I got the idea that Stapledon was strongly influenced by Dante's Divine Comedy when he wrote Star Maker.

The subject matter is essentially the same, and both narrators are undergoing a crisis which initiates their journeys.



Midway life's journey I was made aware
   That I had strayed into a dark forest,
   And the right path appeared not anywhere.
Ah, tongue cannot describe how it oppressed,
   This wood, so harsh, dismal, and wild, that fear
   At thought of it strikes now into my beast.
So bitter it is, death is scarce bitterer.

-- Dante --
Inferno, Canto 1, ll 1-7
The Portable Dante,  
Laurence Binyon, translator



Star Maker begins--

One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out onto the hill..  .    .

. . . 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 onto the hill. 

-- Olaf Stapledon --
Star Maker.  page 1.





It is at this point that the voyage of discovery begins for both narrators.  Both find mentors or guides.  Dante is guided by Virgil, while the Canine species philosopher acts as companion and guide to the anonymous narrator.   While Dante experiences a wide variety of behaviors from various individuals, both wise and foolish, Stapledon's narrator visits a variety of species which exhibit, like individuals, cultural patterns that are wise or foolish or a mix.  And, at the end of their journeys, Dante and Stapledon's narrator meet the Creator. 


Both works provide the reader with three levels, explicitly in Dante's work, of course, and implied in Stapledon's novel.  The first level would include Dante's Inferno, whose inhabitants' behavior has condemned them to eternal torment, and in the Star Maker, the narrator visits those species that will never achieve contact with the Star Maker and are doomed to a miserable extinction.   The second level includes Purgatorio and those species that have survived their mistakes, and now the individuals in Purgatorio and those species in Star Maker are on their way to achieving contact with the Creator/Star Maker some time in the future. The third and desired level would be Paradiso and those species that have achieved the ultimate goal: direct contact with the Creator/Star Maker.

At the end, after finally meeting the Star Maker, Stapledon cleverly sidesteps the issue as to which of the various creation myths promulgated by religions is "true" by  showing that all are true, for the Englishman (as the anonymous narrator refers to himself) recounts many of the creations of the Star Maker that he experienced in the encounter. Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, and Gnosticism show up in various guises throughout.

Stapledon also includes every scientific theory  promulgated (as well as a few he made up, I suspect) about the creation of the universe.   Some, I think, he made up were later seized upon by cosmologists.  To be sure of  this, I'd have to research just when these theories appeared. 

The novel is heavy going, not only because of the content--ideas, theories, philosophy, speculations--but also because of the style, which is mostly narrative and has very little dialogue throughout.

Again, I find the imaginative sweep of the novel to be worth the effort of working one's way through a work that is not an easy few hours' read.

Recommended for those looking for something radically different, unlike anything published today. In fact, I doubt it could be published today, unless it was self-published.