Billions of years come to pass until this combined entity meets the creator itself, the Star Maker. He combines psychically with every successive individual he meets, a cosmic entity that is one with each new form of life it encounters – as the scale of the book gets progressively larger, going from planetary and galactic, to intergalactic scales until the scale is universal and as cosmic as it can get. Star Maker begins with an unnamed narrator standing atop a hill thinking about the tumultuous and bitter currents of the world, and who inexplicably gets swept away into the cosmos, his consciousness transported light years away with each page, seeking out and meeting extra-terrestrial lifeforms, recognisable and humanoid at first, but getting progressively different and more ‘alien’. Left: The cover & blurb from the dust jacket of the 1937 first edition of Star Maker. But you have gone much further and I can’t help envying you – as one does those who reach what one has aimed at.’ It’s the book that that Borges called ‘a prodigious novel’, one which Clarke said is ‘probably the most powerful work of imagination ever written’, and upon reading which, Virginia Woolf wrote to Stapledon saying, ‘you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction. Clarke, Jorge Luis Borges, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, just to name a few, Stapledon was the writer who influenced these greats.Īnd his 1937 masterpiece – Star Maker – sees Olaf Stapledon at his most sweeping, ambitious, influential and cosmic best, a book in which we get a glimpse into one vision of a future through the eyes of eternity. If the authors of today are influenced by masters such as Virginia Woolf, Arthur C. His writing has inspired so many authors that the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction says that his influence on the development of science fiction is second only to that of H.G. A crying shame, given the vast influence of this British philosopher and writer’s books and ideas on science fiction.
You don’t often hear Olaf Stapledon’s name much anymore.
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