Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon | Issue 173 | Philosophy Now

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Classics

Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon

Brian Johns goes cosmic.

The 1937 science fiction novel Star Maker was written by philosophy professor Olaf Stapledon in the dark days as Europe awaited the onslaught of Nazi Germany. This casts a shadow over the whole book.

Arthur C. Clarke called the novel “probably the most powerful work of imagination ever written” and it can be found today in the Science Fiction Masterworks series, but to me it stands as a metaphysics fiction masterwork. Cosmic in its scope, Star Maker sets out the cause, evolution, history and meaning of life, including beyond our universe, including discussing the roles of God and religion. Stapledon’s narrator projects his mind across the whole of space and time, observing the evolution and death of galaxies, stars, and planets, and of the intelligence that emerges. He investigates the interaction and conflict between intelligent lifeforms through dialectics of love and hate. The tour de force conclusion witnesses the ultimate conjunction between the creator (the titular Star Maker), the created living cosmos, and the absolute spirit which ensues from their union.

Lynx Arc Star-Formation Region © ESA, NASA, Robert A.E. Fosbury 2018 Public Domain

Although a conscientious objector, Stapledon served as an ambulance driver in the First World War, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre for gallantry. His experiences influenced his pacifist beliefs. After the war, he lectured in philosophy at the University of Liverpool. He published several academic works, but wrote fiction to try to influence a wider public. Star Maker provides a social and political commentary on humanity in the 1930s. Except, reading it now, it also paints a frighteningly real picture of our world today. Or perhaps it shows that the human condition never really changes. Star Maker is also uncannily prescient in its scientific predictions, and it’s viewed by some as an early exposition of transhumanism. It even foretells the climate crisis.

Unsurprisingly given the period in which Star Maker was written, Stapledon makes clear his hostility to authoritarianism. Early in the narrative, he also questions whether love is the essence of humanity, and whether that proves that love is the ground of the cosmos. He asks whether man has a purpose, and if so, is it love, worship, wisdom, or power?

Stapledon answers his own question in a reflection on a parallel humanity, where, despite opposition or indifference from science, religion and politics, isolated groups pursue a “world-wide community of awakened and intelligently creative persons, related by mutual insight and respect”. As with other concepts in the book, this echoes the philosophy of John Macmurray (1891-1976), whose pacifism was similarly influenced by his experience as an ambulance driver in the 1914-18 war.

Some of the cosmological concepts explored in Star Maker were ahead of the physics of Stapledon’s time, but have subsequently become mainstream, such as the idea of many universes. Stapledon’s exposition of multiverses has a pedigree going back to Ancient Greece. However, his description of how “in one inconceivably complex cosmos, whenever a creature was faced with several possible courses of action, it took them all, thereby creating… an infinity of distinct universes exfoliated from every moment of every temporal sequence” predates the formal hypothesis of a quantum ‘many worlds’ theory by twenty years. Indeed, his myth conceives the Star Maker as the creator of increasingly complex universes, each with different logical, physical, biological and psychological potentials, including variations on fundamental concepts such as geometry, space-time, gravity, nuclear forces, entropy and free will. For example, he envisages universes which are musical rather than spatial, with tonal creatures moving in the dimensions of pitch. He also speculates on the apparent expansion of the universe as being an illusion due to the actual shrinkage of its physical components. As each universe dies, the Star Maker creates a replacement.

In an evocation of, for example, A.N. Whitehead’s organic metaphysics, the Star Maker originates our universe with a substance of pure potentiality, in which all parts reciprocally pervade and influence all others. The whole is the sum of its parts, but each part is an...