SF Masterworks #21: Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker

In a study of Poe's Eureka, Valéry has observed that cosmogony is the most ancient of the literary genres; despite the anticipations of Bacon, whose New Atlantis was published at the beginning of the seventeenth century, it is possible to confirm that the most modern is the fable or fantasy of scientific character.  It is known that Poe approached the two genres separately and perhaps invented the last one; Olaf Stapledon combined the two in this singular book.  For this imaginary exploration of time and space, he did not resort to vague troublesome mechanisms, but instead to the fusion of a human mind with others, to a kind of lucid ecstasy or (if one wants) a variation of a certain famous Cabalistic doctrine, which supposes that in the body of a man can inhabit many souls, as in the body of a woman about to be a mother.  The majority of Stapledon's colleagues seem arbitrary or irresponsible; this work, in exchange, leaves the impression of sincerity, despite the singular and at times monstrous nature of his stories.  He doesn't accumulate inventions for the distraction or stultification of those who will read him; it follows and it registers with honest rigor the complex and shady vicissitudes of a coherent dream. (Jorge Luis Borges, Prólogos con un prólogo de prólogos, p. 232)

Borges' commentary on Olaf Stapledon's 1937 novel, Star Maker, serves as a perfect introduction to this work that builds upon and expands the scope found in his earlier 1930 novel, Last and First Men.  In my review of that earlier book, I focused on the cyclical nature of the narrative as two billion imagined years of future human existence were outlined.  Here in Star Maker, Stapledon expands that narrative in two ways.  The first is simply a matter of magnitude, instead of a measly two billion years, he charts a course through innumerable epochs of stars, galaxies, and the life that sometimes sprung up out of dead stellar material.  The second is more tricky.  As Borges notes in the excerpt I translated above, there is a sort of union of souls, as the human narrator at the beginning of the novel finds himself disassociated from his body, which in turn permits him to touch upon what may be the ultimate cosmic mind, the Star Maker himself.

Due to the presence of this disembodied human observer, the narrative structure for Star Maker oddly enough feels less "distant" than that of Last and First Men, despite the tens of billions more years covered in this book compared to the other.  Although the narrator is mostly content to make observations about the various strange (and sometimes familiar) life forms he encounters on his psychic journey through space-time, there are times that his observations serve to create a sort of quasi-mystical connection between various lifeforms and their struggles to understand that central mystery of "what is life and why am I alive to ask this question?"  Take for instance this passage about a race of plant-men:

It was of course through animal prowess and practical human intelligence that the species had long ago come to dominate its word.  But at all times this practical will had been tempered and enriched by a kind of experience which among men is very rare.  Every day, throughout the ages, these beings had surrendered their feverish animal nature not merely to unconscious or dream-racked sleep, such as animals know, but to the special kind of awareness which (we learned) belongs to plants.  Spreading their leaves, they had absorbed directly the essential elixir of life which animals receive only at second hand in the mangled flesh of their prey.  Thus they seemingly maintained immediate physical contact with the source of all cosmical being.  And this state, though physical, was also in some sense spiritual.  It had a far-reaching effect on all their conduct.  If theological language were acceptable, it might well be called a spiritual contact with God.  During the busy night-time they went about their affairs as insulated individuals, having no present immediate experience of their underlying unity; but normally they were always preserved from the worst excesses of individualism by memory of their day-time life. (p. 118)

Although there was some hint of this metaphysical concern in Last and First Men, it is here in Star Maker where Stapledon unfolds his narrative further to incorporate speculations on "meanings" and "purposes" for life and the cosmos.  While much of Stapledon's writings show at least some influence from authors like Schopenhauer and Spengler, the structure of Stapledon's narrative here (as it was to a lesser extent in Last and First Men) is that of a Marxist character, especially with its focus on societal mechanisms of thesis-antithesis-synthesis.  However, Stapledon added a few quasi-religious undertones to this narrative (as the above quote hints at) that likely confounded the more orthodox Marxist readers of this text.  In speculating on a divine figure, Stapledon is not demonstrating any loyalty to a particular creed; if anything, his Star Maker is a troubling entity, unconcerned as it seems to be, at least at first, with the organisms, ranging from galaxies to microbes, that it creates in order to destroy, perhaps in order to learn how to perfect what it has created.

This is not a comforting element.  It can be downright disturbing to imagine.  Yet Stapledon manages to create a sprawling narrative around this Star Maker (as witnessed in glimpses by the disembodied narrator) that somehow manages to be less threatening than it otherwise may have been.  Perhaps it is the Star Maker's quest for perfection reminds us of our own all-too-human desire to improve and expand our horizons and accomplishments that makes at least one facet of its immense personality fathomable to us.  Star Maker is not as much a novel about the universe as it is a microcosm in print form for all of our hopes and dreams regarding where we came from and where we're heading.  As such, it is a fitting sequel to Last and First Men and its sometimes-inconclusive responses to core human concerns makes it a "masterwork" worthy of reading by people from all walks of life even after seventy-plus years since its initial publication.

SF Masterworks #11: Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men

Life comes, life goes.  Species rise to prominence, only to fade into extinction.  Vast ecosystems emerge, then suddenly crash into a near-total collapse.  Over the three billion or so years that life has been present on Earth, this has been the rhythm of life.  The same doubtless will hold true for humanity.  We have risen from the drying forests of eastern Africa, learned to walk upright, to speak, to sing, to make tools, to create lasting cultures.  We have built cities, only to turn around and destroy them ourselves or to wait until natural catastrophes strike region, laying low tribes and nations of people.  The higher we build and aspire, the greater our fall can and most likely shall be.  We are not separate from the planet's ecosystem, no matter how much we may wish otherwise.  As has been stated in several "wisdom" sayings over the centuries, this (we) too shall pass.  There will come a time when human civilizations have changed so much that whether it be due to our own self-injurious machinations or due to nature's fickleness, our "modern" civilization will cease to exist.  Homo sapiens may become extinct or it may evolve into a higher form.  Whatever happens, the life that we know almost certainly will not last for millions of years.

British writer Olaf Stapledon spent the second half of his life pondering these sorts of issues mentioned above.  A pacifist at heart, Stapledon ended up serving as an ambulance driver during World War I, where he witnessed not just the worst atrocities that human aggression and fear can afflict upon its populaces, but also some heartwarming episodes of camaraderie and shared sacrifice.  He was influenced heavily by the immediate interwar writings of Oswald Spengler, among others, as his most famous work, Last and First Men (1930), displays the sort of cyclical and often pessimistic attitude toward civilizations as that found in Spengler's The Decline of the West.  But whereas Spengler's work has fallen into disrepute since the beginning of World War I, Stapledon's work continues to inspire generations of SF writers, including Gregory Benford and Brian Aldiss.

Last and First Men, strictly speaking, is not a novel.  There are no characters, nor is there anything remotely resembling a conventional plot.  It is an imagined history of the world, from the early 20th century until the final death of the eighteenth human species two billion years into the future.  Broken into sixteen chapters, this book might be best imagined as a spiral, with our present being at the center and with each turn having a wider space between the preceding layers.  The first third of the novel is devoted to telling the continued rise and then fall of the First Men (homo sapiens sapiens).  We see an emergent America whose capitalistic spirit threatens the fabric of the fragile peace wrought from the trenches of World War I.  These first five chapters perhaps are the most dated, as Stapledon's references to then-commonly held assumptions on race and national characteristics are so foreign to our post-Auschwitz understanding of societies.  It may be a dry and rough patch for readers to overcome, but once the story moves five million years into the future, after the First Men have collapsed due to environmental degradation and increased vulcanism on the Earth's surface, the story begins to become all the more compelling to read as Stapledon traces the rise and fall of several other successor human species.

To sum the matter, circumstance had thrown up a very noble species.  Essentially it was of the same type as the earlier species, but it had undergone extensive improvements.  Much that the First Men could only achieve by long schooling and self-discipline the Second Men performed with effortless fluency and delight.  In particular, two capacities which for the First Men had been unattainable ideals were now realized in every normal individual, namely the power wholly dispassionate cognition, and the power of loving one's neighbor as oneself, without reservation.  Indeed, in this respect, the Second Men might be called 'Natural Christians', so readily and constantly did they love one another in the manner of Jesus, and infuse their whole social policy with loving-kindness.  Early in their career they conceived the religion of love, and they were possessed by it again and again, in diverse forms, until their end.  On the other hand, their gift of dispassionate cognition helped them to pass speedily to the admiration of fate.  And being by nature rigorous thinkers, they were peculiarly liable to be disturbed by the conflict between their religion of love and their loyalty to fate.

Well might it seem that the stage was now set for a triumphant and rapid progress of the human spirit.  But though the second human species constituted a real improvement on the first, it lacked certain faculties without which the next great mental advance could not be made. (pp. 117-118)

The above passage is representative of the general tone and tenor of Last and First Men.  Told in a distant, "historical" voice (toward the end of the book, we learn just who has been doing the telling and how their own histories have influenced the writing of this missive on the long human past), the story concentrates on detailing the attempts of various human species to rise above their current condition and the struggles, internal and external alike, that combine to defeat most of these noble goals.  As the Second Men fade and the Third arise, only to beget the Fourth, more artificial human race, which is supplanted by the fifth and so forth until the eighteenth and last human species, Stapledon introduces concepts such as the conflict noted above between Love and Rationality, between altruism and a desire to defeat mortality.  There are successes along the way, but most of these prove to be ephemeral.  But there is something that seems to improve within most of these successor species as the two billion years allotted for humankind unfolds.

The result of this is a very powerful story that serves to make us reflect upon our own goals and aspirations.  If part of being human is the quest for the seemingly unattainable, then the quixotic quests found within Last and First Men are perhaps some of the more powerfully told stories of the human race of the past century.  Grounded in the troubled interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, Last and First Men still possesses a power to move the hearts and minds of early 21st century readers.  It is a staggering achievement of the imagination, for it encapsulates so many of our hopes, dreams, as well as our fears and neuroses in barely 300 pages of text, all without the need for a framing character or plot.  Truly a "masterwork" of the imagination, rivaled perhaps only by another Stapledon novel, Star Maker.