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[Comment by Brian Aldiss][1]:
> It requires little sophistry to consider Daniel Defoe's immortal Robinson Crusoe as a metaphor for a man stranded on an alien planet. Crusoe is an exile, and exile has proved a perennial theme within the genre of science fiction. Of all its great themes, lingering on the fringes of comprehension is Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon (1882-1950). Stapledon was an exile, his childhood spent between Egypt and England. Star Maker is both illuminated and darkened by a feeling of not belonging, the essence of exile.
> It was published in 1937, when it received a rather chilly reception; the public did not know what to make of it. If it was influenced by Milton's Paradise Lost, it was doubtless also formed by the terror of the war against Nazi Germany, which was about to descend upon us.
> The opening sentence of Star Maker is: "One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill." The lonely voyager through the cosmos finds world after world, some worlds inhabited by races of bird-clouds, some by insect-like creatures, each of whose swarms form the bodies of a single mind. Such is the mystery of creation; what of the spirit itself? "When I tried to probe the depths of my own being, I found impenetrable mystery." Something of which we all know but can hardly enunciate – certainly not as Stapledon does. The speaker, on its spiritual odyssey throughout creation, gains a cold, almost incomprehensible confrontation with the Star Maker itself.
> What can we make of this terrible thing creating and controlling entire galaxies?
> "All passions, it seemed, were compromised within the spirit's temper: but mastered, icily gripped within the cold, clear, crystal ecstasy of contemplation."
> Stapledon's book embraces the firmament. Read it and you will be forever changed.
[1]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice
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L. S.Jackson
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- Cosmology
- Fiction
- Fiction in English
- Science Fiction
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