I have conflicting feelings about this book: I could just as well give it 1 star or 5 stars. The British science fiction author Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) certainly had an unbridled imagination. This was already evident in his phenomenal Last and the First Men (1930), a reconstruction of more than 2 billion years of human history (you read that right: 2 billion years). In this book, Star Maker (1937), he even goes a step further: he lets a British man look back on a cosmic journey of years along solar systems with inhabited planets, entire galaxies and ultimately the Creator/Star Maker himself. Once again, the strangest creatures, civilizations and cosmic empires pass by, in an increasingly intense succession and interconnection. Again I was impressed by Stapledon’s knowledge and use of the astronomical science of the time, I just think of his description of multiverses. Most notable is his emphasis on cosmic interconnectedness: starting with the methods of ‘psychical attraction’ and ‘disembodied flight’ that he uses to transport his narrator through space (and time) faster than the speed of light, along with an ever-increasing number of mentally interconnected entities, and culminating in a collective mind that encompasses the entire cosmos, a truly impressive image: “Each world, peopled with its unique, multitudinous race of sensitive individual intelligences united in true community, was itself a living thing, possessed of a common spirit. And each system of many populous orbits was itself a communal being. And the whole galaxy, knit in a single telepathic mesh, was a single intelligent and ardent being, the common spirit, the ‘I’, of all its countless, diverse, and ephemeral individuals.” 

But Stapledon was also a child of his time (the interbellum), and that is shown, for example, in his long digression on racial differences, in the many references to fascism and capitalism, and in his very cyclical view of the development of civilizations. It is this constant rise and fall of civilizations, and especially the sometimes arbitrary destruction and annihilation of entire worlds, galaxies and even universes that raises fundamental, existential questions in the narrator: “As we searched up and down time and space, discovering more and more of the rare grains called planets, as we watched race after race struggle to a certain degree of lucid consciousness, only to succumb to some external accident or, more often, to some flaw in its own nature, we were increasingly oppressed by a sense of the futility, the planlessness of the cosmos.” 

And so our narrator in his quest ultimately ends up with the Star Maker, the creator of everything. And – as might be expected – this ‘encounter’ is expressed in true Dantesque terms: “I saw, though nowhere in cosmical space, the blazing source of the hypercosmical light, as though it were an overwhelmingly brilliant point, a star, a sun more powerful than all suns together. It seemed to me that this effulgent star was the centre of a four-dimensional sphere whose curved surface was the three-dimensional cosmos. The star of stars, this star that was indeed the Star Maker, was perceived by me, its cosmical creature, for one moment before its splendour seared my vision.” 

But the big question is of course how this Supreme Being could remain so indifferent to all these destroyed beings and worlds. In an attempt to explain this, Stapledon presents us with the image of a kind of Ultimate Laboratory Technician in a permanent creative mood, experimenting both within and outside of time (clearly Stapledon has read Augustine), with ever-reconfigured universes, a formidable, endlessly learning entity. This may seem an attractive intellectual image (which, by the way, comes close to the image of God in process theology), but from a human-existential point of view it seems to me an emotional sign of weakness. 

The scope and depth of what Stapledon touches upon in this novel may safely be called phenomenal. But in all honesty I must say that the accumulation of descriptions and experiences is so overwhelming and sometimes so very detailed that it eventually becomes very difficult to follow, and – as far as I am concerned – also a bit long-winded. Hence my allusion to the choice between 1 or 5 stars. So I will cowardly refrain from giving a rating, but this is without a doubt one of the most remarkable writings of the first half of the 20th century