Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker is a novel about crisis.
The Englishman narrator, his life seemingly at a crossroads, his moral and ethical beliefs in question in the first pages of the novel, is mysteriously disembodied. His consciousness embarks upon a fantastic journey across time, space and the entire Universe; you know, everything. As he journeys, the narrator gathers up, like a snowball tumbling down a hill, fellow intelligences from every planet that he, and then they, visit. The narrator comes to discern that each world, each intelligent species scattered through the cosmos, is experiencing or has experienced a profound crisis, sometimes spiritual, sometimes material, resolved through a fall into barbarity or a rise into a new enlightenment. Interestingly enough, though not surprising, Stapledon places our world at the cusp of this crisis, marked by the spectre of industrial exploitation, class warfare, mass movements, war and the Fascism and Stalinism of the 1930′s.
The shadow of these events lays heavy across Star Maker.
The most viscerally interesting aspect of Star Maker, however, is the incredible variety of alien worlds visited by the exploring mind narrator. Star Maker is boggling in its variety; for the nineteen thirties, homeland of the bug-eyed monster, Stapledon’s aliens are incredibly original: massive aquatic beings shaped like ships; communal-mind bird flocks; symbiotic aliens made of crab and great sea fish, cooperating to build factories and radiocommunication. Star Maker is often credited with inventing concepts of science fiction that have become practicably cliche now: guided evolution, prime directives, dyson spheres and constructed worlds, planet-sized ships, stars exploding as weapons, space empires and federations, sentient energy beings, hive-minds and shared consciousness, omnipotent aliens unto God. It’s quite humbling, to think that one man, in brief jottings and short chapters, crafted the meat and bones of so much science fiction, and then really didn’t even make those dyson spheres or space empires key to the story. The aliens keep the novel interesting, because it is barely a novel; for science fiction fans interested in tight plots and constant action, there is NONE of that here. Star Maker reads like sometimes like a dry philosophical text, at other times like a history, and the bulk of the action unfolds on a scale that is alienating, if you pardon the pun; the rise and fall of civilizations, again and again, isn’t exactly capable of communicating individual pathos and emotion, though it can be riveting in the same way that archeological studies of the Huns can be.
Star Maker isn’t going to be an easy read, but if you do it, satisfaction and wisdom may be yours. Star Maker is first and foremost a didactic novel, a result of Stapledon, a British pacifist, socialist and ethic philosopher, finding science fiction a more useful vehicle for exploring man’s purpose, the nature of God and the ideal human society, then any philosophical tract. Star Maker, despite its dryness, is an extended, broad history of galactic civilization, (much like the Silmarillion, but you know, earlier and better, in its avant garde rejection of avant garde and ordinary conventions of novels). It is as a novel of philosophy, and social criticism, that I choose to read Star Maker, but it is much much more, a rich seem of fantastic visions and strange insights the likes of which have rarely been matched.
The aliens of Star Maker, despite then their unearthly physical appearances and modes of perception, are engaged in the same spiritual crisis that humanity has reached.
What is this crisis, exactly, that so haunts the entire book and lays across the alien worlds and our own Earth a dark shadow? Stapledon, through the Narrator, believes the crisis to have arisen from the failure of the old Love-God, which inspired man with a sense of love and community. But then came the “practical minds” who with “practical curiosity and economic need produced the material sciences”. These scientists found no God, and thus no good, and were sad and bitter. The end result bears longer quotation, because
with the fever of mechanisation, and the exploitation of slaves by masters, and the passions of intertribal warfare, and the increasing neglect or coarsening of all the more awakened activities of the spirit, the little flame of praise in their hearts sank lower then it had ever been before, so low they could not recognise it….and so, without love and without worship, the unhappy beings faced the increasingly formidable problems of their mechanised and hate-racked worlds.
The end result, when the old ways of belief and philosophy collapse, on our world or the alien worlds of Stapledon’s imagination, is the Crisis. We, as intelligences deprived of the old Spirit, are pitted between two courses, one of brutality, barbarism, destruction, a madness born of despair, or the more hopeful alternative of communal activity, the placing of the individual and the community on the same level, a new philosophy and rigorous love of art and music. Stapledon certainly believed that the world could “be saved, not by violence in the short run, but by gentleness in the long run…a gentleness that must be a religion” , despite the dark strand of pessimism that runs through his work
His own view on the matter was that if Earth was to saved from the darkness, from the march of fascism, the class divisions, the lack of love and the petty-minded herd mentality, a communistic, though not communist, mentality must be the dominant world view, restoring the small supportive community against the eviscerations of the capitalist, nationalist world system (Crossley 250). It is no coincidence, then, that the most successful of the alien species in Star Maker is the symbiotic race of the Arachnoids and Ichthyoids. These aliens have learned that individuality, theoretical, mystical, artistic nature, that of the Ichthyoids, must be carefully balanced by the community, rationality, practicality, workmanship aspect of the arachnoids. Only so properly spaced between one and the other are the Symbiotics able to develop into a world communal mind, that ultimate goal of Stapledon’s intelligence. The crisis of the Symbiots is played out the same as every other alien world, though, a period of “smelting, the steam engine, the electric current” (Stapledon 324) that upsets the balance and leads to violence, war, militarism, almost the destruction of the race. Yet through careful evolution, the joined aliens are able to survive and thrive. They serve as an example that few of the other alien races in Star Maker can attain.
The crisis, spiritual or material, reappears time and time again, on a single planet, or amongst space-faring, enlightened, communal world-minds. Intelligence faces the same crisis again and again, the perversion of the good in mankind into chauvinism, war, barbarism, madness. Every time, the crisis echoes that of the Earth, poised at the brink of horror and war. It is not difficult to see the analogies between the myriad alien worlds of the cosmos and our own world, and indeed, these aliens are just as often used as satire on our own human race and its follies.
However, rather then simply relegate the aliens in Star Maker to vehicles of satire, an acknowledgement of their parallelism should be made. In short, the aliens do not mock us, but they serve to broaden the horizons of our intimate human crises. Stapledon, in his preface, defends Star Maker from the condemnation that his book is “a distraction from the desperately urgent defence of civilisation against modern barbarism”. His argument is that, through a “detachment, that power of cold assessment”, he could create a work that sees “our turbulent world against a background of stars [that] may…increase, not lessen, the significance of the present human crisis”.
The aliens of Star Maker are a function of Stapledon’s own strange sense of historical dialectic, informed by Marx, but divorced from that historian’s more materialist, concrete and practical understanding of historical progress; in essence, Stapledon was a form of spiritual Marxist, as critic John Huntington points out, and used spiritual and moral elements to add depth and greater complexity to typical Marxist thought. Indeed, his rubric of ‘Civilization or Barbarism’ is very similar to that of, say, Luxembourg or Castoriadis, ‘Socialism or Barbarism‘, and indeed Stapledon was a supporter of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, an admirer of Lenin and an opponent of colonialism. And yet a trifle too much like the New Agers to follow, unable to diagnose his crisis in material terms, only spiritual, even if the symptoms are the same.
The alien worlds of Star Maker are the end result of the same dialectical process that has happened on the earth, the opposition of classes, the triumph of one group over the other, an eventual victory for the socialist-communitarian world view which will complete allow for true freedom and a flowering of the intellect. On Earth, so in Star Maker, for in either case, Stapledon looks to some form of “revolutionary [thought] to complete the dialectic pattern of…history”. The combination of a desire for distance, to make his criticisms and cautions less emotionally burdened, and the belief in a universally applicable dialectical model combine together to explain, partly, the aliens of Star Maker. They are satiric in many way, but also not just endless satires on our own world, but echoes of it, repetitions writ large of the crisis emerging on the Earth of the 1930′s, and growing year by year.
A few examples, more fully detailed, should show the way in which the alien life-forms of Star Maker are used to parallel our own state of crisis on Earth. The most obviously similar alien planet is the ‘Other Earth’ explored by the Englishman on his first journey. The Other Men are a doppelganger of our planet, with “dark ages and ages of brilliance…with ‘Eastern’ or ‘Western’ races… empires, republics, dictatorships”, suffering all through many of the same problems and issues that Stapledon understand to be afflicting humanity, like a mirror, reflecting our world, but also, in the novel, setting up the further crisis to come. The ‘Other Men’ are largely human in appearance, save for an odd mouth, different musculature and with a emphasis on touch and smell over sight. In some of the most openly and obviously satirical parts, Stapledon mocks the debate over religion, as the Other Men have “religious wars…to decide whether [God] was in the main sweet or salt”, and are ready to sacrifice divinity in assumption “that the flavour of deity could be bought for all eternity with money or ritual”. The Other Earth is one where people have been split apart, divorced from society, as the narrator laments that on this “passionately social world, loneliness dogs the human spirit”, and strife and sloth dominate.
The Other Men, like the men of our world, are also riven by class divisions, the minority of wealthy driving the majority to work, with the owners more concerned with “the production of more means of production rather then to the fulfilment of the needs of individual life”. The Other Earth is heading toward a financial world crisis (“a familiar story!” the narrator mocks), while the workers are huddled in slums “more squalid then anything in England”, which mark those who labour by a vile smell, impossible to hide from the wealthy, marking them out as a ‘pariah-race’. The pariah-race, a clear analogue for both reaction and anti-semitism, are “physiologically useful to the hate-needs of the scared, but still powerful, prosperous”; they are blamed for the economic crisis, blamed for the disintegration of society, blamed for the vile mixing of the races, in a litany distressingly similar to those often uttered on our planet. The certain smell exposes the pariahs to “extravagant prosecution”, even if the narrator finds some countries beginning to doubt this division as being ‘natural’ and educating against it. However, on this world, as on Earth, everything is heading toward a crisis, hatreds, divisions, religious incredulity and strife boiling over from the lack of a truly fulfilling community.
Racial nationalism becomes the centrepiece of capitalists and militarists attempting to assert control against the pernicious influence of ‘radio-bliss’, the mass delusions of entertainment that keeps most lazy. The radio is used to break strikes, cease reforms, make slums and poverty tolerable, so long as everything counter to keeping authority was shown to be “inimical to the national radio-system”. When even this does not work, the great rulers use the forces of nationalism, to create the machineries of fascism, terrible and ruthless as for us, replete “with lies, with mystical cult of race and state, with scorn of reason, with praise of brutal mastery, with appeal to the …vilest motives of the deluded young”. Worse yet, the growing economic crisis leads into war and military competition, with armaments being built, frontier posts ablaze, propaganda and lies spread by the radio, national frenzies whipped up, mirroring the same forces and terrible events that Stapledon discerned were on the rise. Does any of this sound familiar?
After the encounter with the Other Men, more and more alien ‘humanities’ are encountered… Each alien race is a variation on a theme, a fragment of the whole picture, emphasising and detailing one particular element of the spiritual crisis. The next detailed alien race is called the Echinoderms, beings evolved from creatures like starfishes. They are alien in appearance and in habits, their society based on joint birthing and the intensive feelings of community, and yet they too fall prey to the madness and spiritual crisis. As highly communal beings, Stapledon describes their conflict as one between the individual and the group, the “supreme temptation [being] the surrender of the individual to the group”, fitfully counteracted by the “religions of self”, by belief in the individual.
Stapledon himself was particularly concerned with the herd-mindedness of humanity, with our tendency to easily be swayed by the emotions of the masses and by baser, nationalist passions, a sure indication of crisis in his mind, demonstrated by his conscientious objector status and resistance to the exuberant patriotism of his fellows during the Great War. The Other Men, who “howled with the pack and hounded with the pack” (274), fall into this trap; for the Echinoderms, who are biologically inclined towards the herd tendency, the crisis is even worse.
Yet, it is precipitated by the same forces as on Earth, as the Echinoderm world splits into rich tribes of employers and poor, large, tribes of employees. Nations arise as super-tribes, and the ‘national’ ideologies come to “exercise absolute control over all individuals”. The Echinoderm section repeats and emphasises the pernicious role of the nation-state in disordering men: the “individual might still behave with intelligence and imagination” but once a part of a super-tribe, or nation states, the individual, under influence of the tribe, “under sanction of nation or class”, would not be questioned. The individual becomes “a sort of de-cerebrate animal, capable only of stereotypical actions”. All hatred, all violence, can be directed mindlessly toward self-sacrifice, against whomever is the current enemy. The Echinoderms are almost destroyed by this ‘national’ madness until suddenly, with a crude deus ex machina, they are saved. The parallels with Earth are fairly clear, and Stapledon himself was heavily opposed to nationalism, putting his faith, as did his contemporary H.G. Wells, in a world government or state that would have overshadow petty ‘tribal’ loyalties. Without this, as the alien examples indicate, he feared disaster.
The examples continue apace, with world after world that suffers from the same divisions, the same difficulties that must be overcome, lest they be destroyed. As the scale increases and the aliens grow less and less human in mentality, so does how closely they adhere to the model of disaster and the variations on a theme. The resolutions of the crises cease to be so pessimistic, and slowly the narrator grasps at societies where Stapledon’s vision for hopeful future have come true. Yet, still, even with truly alien aliens, the repeating pattern holds. Communal insect-minds gather together, and wage wars against each other, developing class conflicts, economic disparities, fascisms, until the great conquering empires are defeated by the combination of disarmament and enlightenment. Some aliens actually accomplish, after surviving “a long-drawn agony of economic distress and maniac warfare, haunted by an increasingly clear vision of a happier future” (346) a Utopian world community, a series of linked minds that allows for the flourishing of arts, the intellect, the truer meanings of existence. The Symbiots were one such group, who transcend the crisis and become a minded world exploring the galaxy. Eventually, the highly advanced Symbiots intervene, and the narrator can move on, growing ever closer to the truly alien, the truly bizarre, the Star Maker itself, whose form and meaning are beyond the narrator’s words, and this essay, to describe and discuss.
The narrator returns to Earth at the end, and Stapledon returns to the 1930′s, even if the novel never truly left that time and place. The alien worlds, who mirrored and repeated the same crisis, the same dialectic, the same danger of war and disintegration, over and over again, are concluded in the narrator’s survey of the Earth. Here, Star Maker presents its most direct commentary on our own planet. The narrator sees, far away, “the Spanish night…ablaze with the murder of cities”, recalling the destruction of the Other Earth; he glances toward Germany, “with its forests and factories, its music, its steel helmets…in thousands, saluting the flood-lit Fuhrer”, and toward Italy, where the mob’s idol spell-bound the young”, recalling other aliens dictators and brute-men. In Russia, “Lenin lay victorious”, whilst across Asia, “children were waking to another schoolday, and to the legend of Lenin”; in Japan, “a volcanic population…already spilled over Asia a flood of armies and of trade.” In Africa, “where Dutch and English profit by the Negro millions” the slaves are “stirred by vague dreams of freedom”. The narrator perceives, thanks to his voyage across the stars, the same crisis looming over the world, “two spirits preparing for a critical struggle…the great struggle of our age”. The original draft of Star Maker was even more explicitly political, with references in the first chapter to the march of armies of conquest, the rise of Fascism and Nazism, and specific references to the wars in China and in Spain, which Stapledon viewed as the opening salvoes of the spiritual crisis looming so close he wrote of the gathering clouds; the sequences at the end about Africa and Asia were toned down, where once revolution seemed in the air. Nonetheless, the force of Stapledon’s visions remain, his sense of urgency still calling in the last pages for a stand against the accumulating oppression.
Though Stapledon may have wanted to create a sense of distance and cold analysis with Star Maker, the end result is hardly what he claimed. Though the sense of titanic scale and alien worlds is disorienting at times, it is quite clear what he wants, and what he believes the purpose of mankind, as a whole is. The crisis of Earth frames the struggle of all intelligence itself against the collapse into barbarism. The dialectical element of Star Maker , applied to myriad alien cultures, can be applied to the myriad human cultures of our Earth, establishing, in Stapledon’s view at least, a pattern of resistance and evolution for all mankind. The universalising aspect is especially interesting when it is recalled that Star Maker was published during the days of the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that Stapledon was highly involved and interested in, seeing it as the first flashpoint, the first rumblings, of the struggle against the darkness, personified in Fascism and Nazism. The brave Republicans were the warriors, the “practical men” he refers to his preface, that will help to raise the world community and world-mind Stapledon believes is the only cure for the degradation and danger of the modern era. The Spanish Civil War was seen as a universal struggle, between abstracted forces, freedom versus tyranny on the hills of Aragon and Catalonia. Across Stapledon’s cosmology is this same crisis, the same struggle, no matter the intelligence,struggling for the same thing
