Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon [top rated books of all time .TXT] 📗
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Star Maker
Olaf Stapledon
1937
PREFACEAT a moment when Europe is in danger of a catastrophe worse than that of
1914 a book like this may be condemned as a distraction from the
desperately urgent defence of civilization against modern barbarism.
Year by year, month by month, the plight of our fragmentary and
precarious civilization becomes more serious. Fascism abroad grows more
bold and ruthless in its foreign ventures, more tyrannical toward its
own citizens, more barbarian in its contempt for the life of the mind.
Even in our own country we have reason to fear a tendency toward
militarization and the curtailment of civil liberty. Moreover, while the
decades pass, no resolute step is taken to alleviate the injustice of
our social order. Our outworn economic system dooms millions to
frustration.
In these conditions it is difficult for writers to pursue their calling
at once with courage and with balanced judgment. Some merely shrug their
shoulders and withdraw from the central struggle of our age. These, with
their minds closed against the world’s most vital issues, inevitably
produce works which not only have no depth of significance for their
contemporaries but also are subtly insincere. For these writers must
consciously or unconsciously contrive to persuade themselves either that
the crisis in human affairs does not exist, or that it is less important
than their own work, or that it is anyhow not their business. But the
crisis does exist, is of supreme importance, and concerns us all. Can
anyone who is at all intelligent and informed hold the contrary without
self-deception?
Yet I have a lively sympathy with some of those “intellectuals” who
declare that they have no useful contribution to make to the struggle,
and therefore had better not dabble in it. I am, in fact, one of them.
In our defense I should say that, though we are inactive or ineffective
as direct supporters of the cause, we do not ignore it. Indeed, it
constantly, obsessively, holds our attention. But we are convinced by
prolonged trial and error that the most useful service open to us is
indirect. For some writers the case is different. Gallantly plunging
into the struggle, they use their powers to spread urgent propaganda, or
they even take up arms in the cause. If they have suitable ability, and
if the particular struggle in which they serve is in fact a part of the
great enterprise of defending (or creating) civilization, they may, of
course, do valuable work. In addition they may gain great wealth of
experience and human sympathy, thereby immensely increasing their
literary power. But the very urgency of their service may tend to blind
them to the importance of maintaining and extending, even in this age of
crisis, what may be called metaphorically the “self-critical
self-consciousness of the human species,” or the attempt to see man’s
life as a whole in relation to the rest of things. This involves the
will to regard all human affairs and ideals and theories with as little
human prejudice as possible. Those who are in the thick of the struggle
inevitably tend to become, though in a great and just cause, partisan.
They nobly forgo something of that detachment, that power of cold
assessment, which is, after all, among the most valuable human
capacities. In their case this is perhaps as it should be; for a
desperate struggle demands less of detachment than of devotion. But some
who have the cause at heart must serve by striving to maintain, along
with human loyalty, a more dispassionate spirit. And perhaps the attempt
to see our turbulent world against a background of stars may, after all,
increase, not lessen the significance of the present human crisis. It
may also strengthen our charity toward one another.
In this belief I have tried to construct an imaginative sketch of the
dread but vital whole of things. I know well that it is a ludicrously
inadequate and in some ways a childish sketch, even when regarded from
the angle of contemporary human experience. In a calmer and a wiser age
it might well seem crazy. Yet in spite of its crudity, and in spite of
its remoteness, it is perhaps not wholly irrelevant.
At the risk of raising thunder both on the Left and on the Right, I have
occasionally used certain ideas and words derived from religion, and I
have tried to interpret them in relation to modern needs. The valuable,
though much damaged words “spiritual” and “worship,” which have become
almost as obscene to the Left as the good old sexual words are to the
Right, are here intended to suggest an experience which the Right is apt
to pervert and the Left to misconceive. This experience, I should say,
involves detachment from all private, all social, all racial ends; not
in the sense that it leads a man to reject them, but that it makes him
prize them in a new way. The “spiritual life” seems to be in essence the
attempt to discover and adopt the attitude which is in fact appropriate
to our experience as a whole, just as admiration is felt to be in fact
appropriate toward a well-grown human being. This enterprise can lead to
an increased lucidity and finer temper of consciousness, and therefore
can have a great and beneficial effect on behavior. Indeed, if this
supremely humanizing experience does not produce, along with a kind of
piety toward fate, the resolute will to serve our waking humanity, it is
a mere sham and a snare.
Before closing this preface I must express my gratitude to Professor L.
C. Martin, Mr. L. H. Myers, and Mr. E. V. Rieu, for much helpful and
sympathetic criticism, in consequence of which I rewrote many chapters.
Even now I hesitate to associate their names with such an extravagant
work. Judged by the standards of the Novel, it is remarkably bad. In
fact, it is no novel at all.
Certain ideas about artificial planets were suggested by Mr. J. D.
Bernal’s fascinating little book The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. I
hope he will not strongly disapprove of my treatment of them.
My wife I must thank both for work on the proofs and for being herself.
At the end of the book I have included a note on Magnitude, which may be
helpful to readers unfamiliar with astronomy. The very sketchy time
scales may amuse some.
O. S. March 1937
THE EARTH
1. THE STARTING POINT
ONE night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill. Dark
heather checked my feet. Below marched the suburban lamps. Windows,
their curtains drawn, were shut eyes, inwardly watching the lives of
dreams. Beyond the sea’s level darkness a lighthouse pulsed. Overhead,
obscurity. I distinguished our own house, our islet in the tumultuous
and bitter currents of the world. There, for a decade and a half, we
two, so different in quality, had grown in and in to one another, for
mutual support and nourishment, in intricate symbiosis. There daily we
planned our several undertakings, and recounted the day’s oddities and
vexations. There letters piled up to be answered, socks to be darned.
There the children were born, those sudden new lives. There, under that
roof, our own two lives, recalcitrant sometimes to one another, were all
the while thankfully one, one larger, more conscious life than either
alone.
All this, surely, was good. Yet there was bitterness. And bitterness not
only invaded us from the world; it welled up also within our own magic
circle. For horror at our futility, at our own unreality, and not only
at the world’s delirium, had driven me out on to the hill.
We were always hurrying from one little urgent task to another, but the
upshot was insubstantial. Had we, perhaps, misconceived our whole
existence? Were we, as it were, living from false premises? And in
particular, this partnership of ours, this seemingly so well-based
fulcrum for activity in the world, was it after all nothing but a little
eddy of complacent and ingrown domesticity, ineffectively whirling on
the surface of the great flux, having in itself no depth of being, and
no significance? Had we perhaps after all deceived ourselves? Behind
those rapt windows did we, like so many others, in-deed live only a
dream? In a sick world even the hale are sick. And we two, spinning our
little life mostly by rote, sel-dom with clear cognizance, seldom with
firm intent, were products of a sick world.
Yet this life of ours was not all sheer and barren fantasy. Was it not
spun from the actual fibres of reality, which we gathered in with all
the comings and goings through our door, all our traffic with the suburb
and the city and with remoter cities, and with the ends of the earth?
And were we not spinning together an authentic expression of our own
nature? Did not our life issue daily as more or less firm threads of
active living, and mesh itself into the growing web, the intricate,
ever-proliferating pattern of mankind?
I considered “us” with quiet interest and a kind of amused awe. How
could I describe our relationship even to myself without either
disparaging it or insulting it with the tawdry decoration of
sentimentality? For this our delicate balance of dependence and
independence, this coolly critical, shrewdly ridiculing, but loving
mutual contact, was surely a microcosm of true community, was after all
in its simple style an actual and living example of that high goal which
the world seeks.
The whole world? The whole universe? Overhead, obscurity unveiled a
star. One tremulous arrow of light, projected how many thousands of
years ago, now stung my nerves with vision, and my heart with fear. For
in such a universe as this what significance could there be in our
fortuitous, our frail, our evanescent community?
But now irrationally I was seized with a strange worship, not, surely of
the star, that mere furnace which mere distance falsely sanctified, but
of something other, which the dire contrast of the star and us signified
to the heart. Yet what, what could thus be signified? Intellect, peering
beyond the star, discovered no Star Maker, but only darkness; no Love,
no Power even, but only Nothing. And yet the heart praised.
Impatiently I shook off this folly, and reverted from the inscrutable to
the familiar and the concrete. Thrusting aside worship, and fear also
and bitterness, I determined to examine more coldly this remarkable
“us,” this surprisingly impressive datum, which to ourselves remained
basic to the universe, though in relation to the stars it appeared so
slight a thing.
Considered even without reference to our belittling cosmical background,
we were after all insignificant, perhaps ridiculous. We were such a
commonplace occurrence, so trite, so respectable. We were just a married
couple, making shift to live together without undue strain. Marriage in
our time was suspect. And ours, with its trivial romantic origin, was
doubly suspect.
We had first met when she was a child. Our eyes encountered. She looked
at me for a moment with quiet attention; even, I had romantically
imagined, with obscure, deeplying recognition. I, at any rate,
recognized in that look (so I persuaded myself in my fever of
adolescence) my destiny. Yes! How predestinate had seemed our union! Yet
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