The combined genres of science fiction and fantasy are referred to as speculative fiction because both share a key distinguishing feature: they speculate. They take the familiar world, some idea, and explore them in a way that it could not be explored in the “real” world. This does not make them mere flights of fancy; to the contrary, the imagination involved in writing speculative fiction is valuable precisely because it is, at its best, grounded in our own experiences and our own reality. Many of the most interesting books I’ve read are those which take this idea of speculation to the extreme, and contrive to present something innovative and boundary-pushing in the process. Stapledon’s 1937 novel is a prime example.
Star Maker reminds me a little of All of an Instant, in that it is so speculative and innovative that it is pushing at the boundaries of the author’s ability to convey what he imagined. In a few places, the narrator admits to anthropomorphizing descriptions and stories in order to make them accessible to the reader, making assumptions and simplifications to allow these ideas to be conveyed in this limited textual medium, which I often consider a copout, but is perhaps inescapable when a story involves galactic-scale civilizations and evolution beyond the limits of the human imagination. Stapledon’s writing, which often waxes poetic, helps to convey the sense that this story is trying to communicate something grander and more significant than the mere events of which it is composed.
Some years ago, I wrote a post about writing aliens, and the profound difficulty of writing and imagining truly alien aliens. It may even be impossible to write truly alien aliens, at least until we meet some (and if they are truly alien, will we even be able to recognize and interact with them?), but some of the best science fiction authors manage to convey at least one trait or concept that communicates that beautiful dissonance of something that is fundamentally different from the experience of life on planet Earth. The purely herbivorous aliens in Hogan’s Inherit the Stars, for instance, despite their otherwise humanoid characteristics, or the amoebic, mathematical lifeforms on the overcontact binary in Rocheworld. Stapledon’s aliens are amongst the most imaginative in all science fiction I’ve encountered. Anatomically, they are Earth-forms granted at least human-level intelligence – symbiotic crabs and whales, bird-flock emergent intelligences, plant-like intelligences, et cetera – which alone makes them more imaginative than all the major aliens in popular franchises. Their forms are often secondary, albeit influential, to their minds. Star Maker is a story about alien neuropsychology and sociology, as a way of examining our own tendencies.
Though the narrator’s journey begins like a fever-dream, once he encounters his first alien lifeform, the novels achieves a kind of grounding. It’s still wildly imaginative and innovative, but it does not remain the novelistic equivalent of the animated music video of “Yellow Submarine.” Instead, it turns to a serious contemplation of the core questions of what it means to be human, what it means to be intelligent, and how our intrinsic biology influences the inherent tension between individuality and community. That last is a particularly dominant theme throughout the book, and fascinating to consider – Stapledon manages to explore the topic in speculative fashion without dragging the novel into the tendentious political debates contemporary to the novel (and resonant in our own time). His ability to seriously explore the ramifications for intellectual and civilizational development of different forms of intelligence and different biological factors is a great strength.
If only there were a little more plot. I know, I know, I’m always saying how plot is rather secondary to many of these classic science fiction novels, that they’re really about the speculative aspects and ideas being explored, with the characters and plots merely a framework through which to conduct that exploration. However, the plot in Star Maker is almost nonexistent. There is a general effort, first by the narrator, and then by a kind of gestalt intelligence which includes the narrator, to achieve a “higher state of being,” which, in context, is an intellectual and sympathetic evolution to a harmonization of communal and individual urges, which opens up the mind of the gestalt to explore more worlds and thus embrace a fuller understanding of life in the universe, in all its myriad forms and developments, but this happens incidentally to the narrator actively trying to do anything. After initially tearing around the galaxy trying to get home, the narrator doesn’t actively pursue much of anything. Despite the beauty of the writing and the compelling nature of the ideas, this lack of plot and motive make for sometimes tedious, or at least slow, reading.
It read, at times, more like a philosophy book than a science fiction book, and that might be how it should be shelved. Rather than speculative fiction, perhaps we should call this an entry in the genre of speculative philosophy, but grounded in science. Much has been written, including on this site, about the intersection between philosophy and science, especially the influence of basic principles of reality like fundamental physics on philosophical ideas. With Star Maker, we have philosophy explored through the lens of hard science fiction and poetry. Despite its brevity, this is not a book you should plan to whip through – it’s one of those you really must sit with and contemplate, both while actively reading and afterwards, if you want to appreciate it properly. Star Maker probably isn’t for everyone, but if the idea of hard science fiction speculative philosophy appeals to you, well, you’re definitely on the right website, and you should give Stapledon’s novel a read soon.
IGC Publishing 