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342 ] •16• on staPledon’s Star Maker stanislaW lem Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 mind-stretching sf work Star Maker has been compared to Dante’s Divine Comedy in its narrative structure and the richness of its cosmological and ontological visions. Polish sf writer and literary theorist Stanislaw Lem (1921–2006) has been described as “one of the most significant sf writers of our century and a distinctive voice in world literature” (SF Encyclopedia ). It should not be surprising, therefore, that an analysis by Lem of Star Maker would yield some remarkable philosophical insights, as the following essay aptly demonstrates. This essay originally appeared in SFS 14, no. 1 (March 1987): 1–8. Stapledon intended Star Maker to be the summa of cosmic science fiction; and indeed science fiction could nourish itself for years on the treasures in this essay (it can hardly be called a novel).1 Yet, considered as a whole, Star Maker is a rather monstrous torso. The narrator, who leaves his English home each evening to marvel at the stars, ascends in spirit one night into the cosmic void, and embarks on an odyssey among the stars. He learns to insert himself for intervals into the minds of beings on other planets, and through their eyes and minds he comes to know the innumerable civilizations of the Milky Way: beings with human forms, “plant men,” “underwater men,” “flying men,” intelligent insects, crabs, a birdlike race with a collective intelligence, etc. In the course of his wanderings he expands to greater and greater magnitude ; soon he’s describing not individual worlds but whole classes and categories of them. He contrasts “unified” civilizations with “insane” ones. He depicts species in which different sense organs dominate sense experience and which therefore construct different images of deity (“God as the Most On Stapledon’s Star Maker [ 343 Perfect Flavour”—for those beings who have extraordinarily highly developed organs of taste and scent). But that is not all. Once the universe has become densely populated by civilizations, the stars begin to destroy the life in their ecospheres with a series of nova explosions. Some even emit long, horrible protuberances from their chromospheres that wipe their planets clean of life. What does it all mean? It so happens that the stars are also endowed with spiritual-intellectual life. They are born, they mature, and they age, since they are organisms, and indeed sentient organisms. And when the narrator begins to travel in time as he had in space, returning to the distant past of the universe, he understands that there was consciousness already awake in the very first galactic dust and gas clouds, before the stars had emerged from them. But not even this is enough. All these rungs in the cosmogonic ladder imply ever more clearly the existence of One who creates them all—the “Star Maker,” to whom Stapledon devotes his last chapters. Star Maker is a journey to the Last Things. Like the expanding vista viewed from an ascending balloon, an ever more monumental panorama of cosmic objects and projects extends before us. There are some sacred places in this cosmo-psychogony—as well as some merely strange ones (the grotesque image of stars angrily sweeping the life from their planets’ surfaces with their protuberances reminds one of a feather duster). Stapledon depicts a mass of psychozoic monsters, because he pays no attention to the evolutionary law by virtue of which the emergence of reason—as an extraordinary accelerator of adaptation, compared with the results of natural selection —makes the outgrowth of any sort of wings quite impossible (since it would take millions of years to occur by evolution, while the art of flying can be mastered a thousand times faster by technical means). But these are not the book’s most serious flaws. After all, they are merely steps in the progress of thought in its ascent to the figure of the Star Maker. This Highest Being had Its own callow youth, during which, playing at creation, It constructed a multitude of “unsuccessful” universes, as it were. In different stages of Its life, good and evil elements collided within It with different results, as did also Its tendencies toward active intervention in Its creations and passive contemplation of their processes. This is the concept of the Developing God, which necessarily assumes the original imperfection of the god. It implies the existence of laws to which the Creator of the Cosmos is subject, since if It can develop and mature...

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