Product Description

One moment a man sits on a suburban hill, gazing curiously at the stars. The next, he is whirling through the firmament, and perhaps the most remarkable of all science fiction journeys has begun. Even Stapledon's other great work, LAST AND FIRST MEN, pales in ambition next to STAR MAKER, which presents nothing less than an entire imagined history of life in the universe, encompassing billions of years.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25699 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-11
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Brian Aldiss calls this 1937 SF classic "the most wonderful novel I have ever read", and its Millennium Masterworks reissue adds admiring remarks by Jorge Luis Borges, Arthur C Clarke, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf among others. Olaf Stapledon is better known for Last and First Men (1930), a sweeping history of the future whose early chapters are now embarrassing--but Star Maker leaps straight into a unfurling vision of infinity.

Looking at the starry night from an English hillside, the unnamed narrator is snatched from his earthly body and flung through space at impossible acceleration, soon outstripping light. He visits other stars, sees other worlds and alien races, a gallery of SF marvels in documentary rather than story form. (Some of this now seems over-familiar, however fresh and new in 1937: the book drags a little here.) Fellow disembodied intelligences from the galactic community join our hero, sensing something beyond mere matter and energy:

The felt presence of the Star Maker remained unintelligible, even though it increasingly illuminated the cosmos, like the splendour of the unseen sun at dawn.

But the godlike Star Maker is not exactly God, as we see when the scope expands beyond one mere universe to show an endless cycle of creations, many of them being crude and "immature" products of this experimenter's hand. Further "mature" creations follow, foreshadowing the Ultimate Cosmos whose crystalline perfection is not comforting but terrifying. Star Maker's final unsparing evocation of the deep chill of infinity has even been compared to Dante. --David Langford

Synopsis
One moment a man sits on a suburban hill, gazing curiously at the stars. The next, he is whirling through the firmament, and perhaps the most remarkable of all science fiction journeys has begun. Even Stapledon's other great work, LAST AND FIRST MEN, pales in ambition next to STAR MAKER, which presents nothing less than an entire imagined history of life in the universe, encompassing billions of years.

About the Author
SALES POINTS * #21 in the Millennium SF Masterworks series, a library of the finest science fiction ever written * 'A prodigious novel' -- Jorge Luis Borges * 'Probably the most powerful work of imagination ever written' -- Arthur C. Clarke * 'His influence is probably second only to that of H.G. Wells' -- The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

Customer Reviews

Breathtaking scope, a tour-de-force journey through the universe
I don't think I've ever read a book that has come close to this in terms of ambition and sheer hugeness in its subject matter. The reader is taken on a journey through the universe in all its glory, encountering some life forms that are as bizarre, as they are fantastic, as they are utterly believable. In the space of a page you can be taken from galaxy to galaxy, encountering ever weirder life forms along the way. This is a book that really makes you appreciate the wonder of the universe, a breathtaking book.

Don't believe the hype!
Sorry to contradict the many fans of this "classic", but I want to offer the following warning to any newcomers to sci-fi (like myself): don't believe the hype!
I was impressed by the commendations on the jacket - including one from Virginia Woolf, no less - but this is not conventional sci-fi. It's a sort of strange prose-poem about a guy who 'astral projects' around the universe, and through time, observing different types of world created by the Star Maker (ie God). Some of the worlds are quite quirky, but don't expect any dialogue or plot.
It's a work of pop philosophy with vague conclusions. I was bored.
I would advise any newcomers to sci-fi to stick to Philip K Dick.

Big. Really big.
While heartily endorsing everything my fellow reviewers have said about this book, I think potential readers should know of it's few downsides.

Stapledon's natural detachment comes through in his writing and it can sometimes read like the work of the lecturer of philosophy that he was and the formality of 1930's English, with no dialogue, only narration, can be a little hard work. Most of all, the middle section of the book gets a bit stuck as the reader realises that, though the ideas on display are wonderful, they will play no part in the grand sweep of the storyline.

That said, there is much here that's simply wonderful. To start a novel with a man lying on a hillside, then have the story grow to encompass the entire universe, no less, and then grow again to encompass a near-infinite number of universes is a work of unparalleled scale.

If you like your SF big...really big... then this is the book for you.