Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon (bts book recommendations .txt) 📕

Since we were now free of space, we ranged with equal ease over the

nearer and the remoter tracts of this galaxy. That we did not till much

later make contact with minds in other galaxies was not due to any

limitations imposed by space, but seemingly to our own inveterate

parochialism, to a strange limitation of our own interest, which for

long rendered us inhospitable to the influence of worlds lying beyond

the confines of the Milky Way. I shall say more of this curious

restriction when I come to describe how we did at last outgrow it.

Along with freedom of space we had freedom of time. Some of the worlds

that we explored in this early phase of our adventure ceased to exist

long before my native planet was formed; others were its contemporaries;

others were not born till the old age of our galaxy, when the Earth had

been destroyed, and a large number of the stars had already been

extinguished.

As we searched up and down time and space, discovering more and more of

the rare grains called planets, as we watched race after race struggle

to a certain degree of lucid consciousness, only to succumb to some

external accident or, more often, to some flaw in its own nature, we

were increasingly oppressed by a sense of the futility, the planlessness

of the cosmos. A few worlds did indeed wake to such lucidity that they

passed beyond our ken. But several of the most brilliant of these

occurred in the earliest epoch of the galactic story; and nothing that

we could as yet discover in the later phases of the cosmos suggested

that any galaxies, still less the cosmos as a whole, had at last come

(or will at last come) more under the sway of the awakened spirit than

they were during the epoch of those early brilliant worlds. Not till a

much later stage of our inquiry were we fitted to discover the glorious

but ironical and heartrending climax for which this vast proliferation

of worlds was but a prologue.

In the first phase of our adventure, when, as I have said, our powers of

telepathic exploration were incomplete, every world that we entered

turned out to be in the throes of the same spiritual crisis as that

which we knew so well on our native planets. This crisis I came to

regard as having two aspects. It was at once a moment in the spirit’s

struggle to become capable of true community on a worldwide scale; and

it was a stage in the age-long task of achieving the right, the finally

appropriate, the spiritual attitude toward the universe.

In every one of these “chrysalis” worlds thousands of millions of

persons were flashing into existence, one after the other, to drift

gropingly about for a few instants of cosmical time before they were

extinguished. Most were capable, at least in some humble degree, of the

intimate kind of community which is personal affection; but for nearly

all of them a stranger was ever a thing to fear and hate. And even their

intimate loving was inconstant and lacking in insight. Nearly always

they were intent merely on seeking for themselves respite from fatigue

or boredom, fear or hunger. Like my own race, they never fully awoke

from the primeval sleep of the subman. Only a few here and there, now

and then, were solaced, goaded, or tortured by moments of true

wakefulness. Still fewer attained a clear and constant vision, even of

some partial aspect of truth; and their half-truths they nearly always

took to be absolute. Propagating their little partial truths, they

bewildered and misdirected their fellow mortals as much as they helped

them.

Each individual spirit, in nearly all these worlds, attained at some

point in life some lowly climax of awareness and of spiritual integrity,

only to sink slowly or catastrophically back into nothingness. Or so it

seemed. As in my own world, so in all these others, lives were spent in

pursuit of shadowy ends that remained ever just round the comer. There

were vast tracts of boredom and frustration, with here and there some

rare bright joy. These were ecstasies of personal triumph, of mutual

intercourse and love, of intellectual insight, of aesthetic creation.

There were also religious ecstasies; but these, like all else in these

worlds, were obscured by false interpretations. There were crazy

ecstasies of hate and cruelty, felt against individuals and against

groups. Sometimes during this early phase of our adventure we were so

distressed by the incredible bulk of suffering and of cruelty up and

down the worlds that our courage failed, our telepathic powers were

disordered, and we slipped toward madness.

Yet most of these worlds were really no worse than our own. Like us,

they had reached that stage when the spirit, half awakened from

brutishness and very far from maturity, can suffer most desperately and

behave most cruelly. And like us, these tragic but vital worlds, visited

in our early adventures, were agonized by the inability of their minds

to keep pace with changing circumstance. They were always behindhand,

always applying old concepts and old ideals inappropriately to novel

situations. Like us, they were constantly tortured by their hunger for a

degree of community which their condition demanded but their poor,

cowardly, selfish spirits could by no means attain. Only in couples and

in little circles of companions could they support true community, the

communion of mutual insight and respect and love. But in their tribes

and nations they conceived all too easily the sham community of the

pack, baying in unison of fear and hate.

Particularly in one respect these races were recognizably our kin. Each

had risen by a strange mixture of violence and gentleness. The apostles

of violence and the apostles of gentleness swayed them this way and

that. At the time of our visit many of these worlds were in the throes

of a crisis of this conflict. In the recent past, loud lip-service had

been paid to gentleness and tolerance and freedom; but the policy had

failed, because there was no sincere purpose in it, no conviction of the

spirit, no true experience of respect for individual personality. All

kinds of self-seeking and vindictiveness had nourished, secretly at

first, then openly as shameless individualism. Then at last, in rage,

the peoples turned away from individualism and plunged into the cult of

the herd. At the same time, in disgust with the failure of gentleness,

they began openly to praise violence, and the ruthlessness of the

godsent hero and of the armed tribe. Those who thought they believed in

gentleness built up armaments for their tribes against those foreign

tribes whom they accused of believing in violence. The highly developed

technique of violence threatened to destroy civilization; year by year

gentleness lost ground. Pew could understand that their world must be

saved, not by violence in the short run, but by gentleness in the long

run. And still fewer could see that, to be effective, gentleness must be

a religion; and that lasting peace can never come till the many have

wakened to the lucidity of consciousness which, in all these worlds,

only the few could as yet attain.

If I were to describe in detail every world that we explored, this book

would develop into a world of libraries. I can give only a few pages to

the many types of worlds encountered in this early stage of our

adventure, up and down the whole breadth and length and the whole

duration of our galaxy. Some of these types had apparently very few

instances; other occurred in scores or hundreds.

The most numerous of all classes of intelligent worlds is that which

includes the planet familiar to readers of this book. Homo sapiens has

recently flattered and frightened himself by conceiving that, though

perhaps he is not the sole intelligence in the cosmos, he is at least

unique, and that worlds suited to intelligent life of any kind must be

extremely rare. This view proves ludicrously false. In comparison with

the unimaginable number of stars intelligent worlds are indeed very

rare; but we discovered some thousands of worlds much like the Earth and

possessed by beings of essentially human kind, though superficially they

were often unlike the type that we call human. The Other Men were

amongst the most obviously human. But in a later stage of our adventure,

when our research was no longer restricted to worlds that had reached

the familiar spiritual crisis, we stumbled on a few planets inhabited by

races almost identical with Homo sapiens, or rather with the creature

that Homo sapiens was in the earliest phase of his existence. These most

human worlds we had not encountered earlier because, by one accident or

another, they were destroyed before reaching the stage of our own

mentality.

Long after we had succeeded in extending our research from our peers

among the worlds to our inferiors in mental rank we remained unable to

make any sort of contact with beings who had passed wholly beyond the

attainment of Homo sapiens. Consequently, though we traced the history

of many worlds through many epochs, and saw many reach a catastrophic

end, or sink into stagnation and inevitable decline, there were a few

with which, do what we would, we lost touch just at that moment when

they seemed ripe for a leap forward into some more developed mentality.

Not till a much later stage of our adventure, when our corporate being

had itself been enriched by the influx of many superior spirits, were we

able to pick up once more the threads of these most exalted

world-biographies.

2. STRANGE MANKINDS

Though all the worlds which we entered in the first phase of our

adventure were in the throes of the crisis known so well in our own

world, some were occupied by races biologically similar to man, others

by very different types. The more obviously human races inhabited

planets of much the same size and nature as the Earth and the Other

Earth. All, whatever the vagaries of their biological history, had

finally been molded by circumstance to the erect form which is evidently

most suited to such worlds. Nearly always the two nether limbs were used

for locomotion, the two upper limbs for manipulation. Generally there

was some sort of head, containing the brain and the organs of remote

perception, and perhaps the orifices for eating and breathing. In size

these quasi-human types were seldom larger than our largest gorillas,

seldom much smaller than monkeys; but we could not estimate their size

with any accuracy, as we had no familiar standards of measurements.

Within this approximately human class there was great variety. We came

upon feathered, penguin-like men, descended from true fliers, and on

some small planets we found bird-men who retained the power of flight,

yet were able to carry an adequate human brain. Even on some large

planets, with exceptionally buoyant atmosphere, men flew with their own

wings. Then there were men that had developed from a slug-like ancestor

along a line which was not vertebrate, still less mammalian. Men of this

type attained the necessary rigidity and flexibility of limb by means of

a delicate internal “basket-work” of wiry bones.

On one very small but earthlike planet we discovered a quasi-human race

which was probably unique. Here, though life had evolved much as on

earth, all the higher animals differed remarkably from the familiar type

in one obvious respect. They were without that far-reaching duplication

of organs which characterizes all our vertebrates. Thus a man in this

world was rather like half a terrestrial man. He hopped on one sturdy,

splay-footed leg, balancing himself with a kangaroo tail. A single arm

protruded from his chest, but branched