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

official part, would lose contact with the communal mind, and become

mere isolated individuals; but individuals at heart more sane than the

lofty communal mind from which they had fallen. The orthodox majority,

horrified at this mental disintegration, would then apply the familiar

ruthless methods that had been used so successfully in the uncivilized

outposts of empire. The dissentients would be arrested, and either

destroyed outright or concentrated upon the most inhospitable planet, in

the hope that their torture might prove an effective warning to others.

This policy failed. The strange mental disease spread more and more

rapidly, till the “lunatics” outnumbered the “sane.” There followed

civil wars, mass-martyrdom of devoted pacifists, dissension among the

imperialists, a steady increase of “lunacy” in every world of the

empire. The whole imperial organization fell to pieces; and since the

aristocratic worlds that formed the backbone of empire were as impotent

as soldier-ants to maintain themselves without the service and tribute

of the subject worlds, the loss of empire doomed them to death. When

almost the whole population of such a world had gone sane, great efforts

would be made to reorganize its life for self-sufficiency and peace. It

might have been expected that this task, though difficult, would not

have defeated a population of beings whose sheer intelligence and social

loyalty were incomparably greater than anything known on earth. But

there were unexpected difficulties, not economic but psychological.

These beings had been fashioned for war, tyranny and empire. Though

telepathic stimulation from superior minds could touch into life the

slumbering germ of the spirit in them, and help them to realize the

triviality of their world’s whole purpose, telepathic influence could

not refashion their nature to such an extent that they could henceforth

actually live for the spirit and renounce the old life. In spite of

heroic self-discipline, they tended to sink into inertia, like wild

beasts domesticated; or to run amok, and exercise against one another

those impulses of domination which hitherto had been directed upon

subject worlds. And all this they did with profound consciousness of

guilt.

For us it was heartrending to watch the agony of these worlds. Never did

the newly enlightened beings lose their vision of true community and of

the spiritual life; but though the vision haunted them, the power to

realize it in the detail of action was lost. Moreover, there were times

when the change of heart that they had suffered seemed to them actually

a change for the worse. Formerly all individuals had been perfectly

disciplined to the common will, and perfectly happy in executing that

will without the heart-searchings of individual responsibility. But now

individuals were mere individuals; and all were tormented by mutual

suspicion and by violent propensities for self-seeking.

The issue of this appalling struggle in the minds of these former

imperialists depended on the extent to which specialization for empire

had affected them. In a few young worlds, in which specialization had

not gone deep, a period of chaos was followed by a period of

reorientation and world-planning, and in due season by sane Utopia. But

in most of these worlds no such escape was possible. Either chaos

persisted till racial decline set in, and the world sank to the human,

the subhuman, the merely animal states; or else, in a few cases only,

the discrepancy between the ideal and the actual was so distressing that

the whole race committed suicide.

We could not long endure the spectacle of scores of worlds falling into

psychological ruin. Yet the Sub-Galactics who had caused these strange

events, and continued to use their power to clarify and so destroy these

minds, watched their handiwork unflinchingly. Pity they felt, pity such

as we feel for a child that has broken its toy; but no indignation

against fate.

Within a few thousand years every one of the imperial worlds had either

transformed itself or fallen into barbarism or committed suicide.

6. A GALACTIC UTOPIA

The events that I have been describing took place, or from the human

point of view will take place, at a date as far future to us as we are

from the condensation of the earliest stars. The next period of galactic

history covers the period from the fall of the mad empires to the

achievement of Utopia in the whole galactic community of worlds. This

transitional period was in itself in a manner Utopian; for it was an age

of triumphant progress carried out by beings whose nature was rich and

harmonious, whose nurture was entirely favorable, and their

ever-widening galactic community a wholly satisfying object of loyalty.

It was only not Utopian in the sense that the galactic society was still

expanding and constantly changing its structure to meet new needs,

economic and spiritual. At the close of this phase there came a period

of full Utopia in which the attention of the perfected galactic

community was directed mainly beyond itself toward other galaxies. Of

this I shall tell in due course; and of the unforeseen and stormy events

which shattered this beatitude.

Meanwhile we must glance at the age of expansion. The worlds of the

Sub-Galaxy, recognizing that no further great advance in culture was

possible unless the population of awakened worlds was immensely

increased and diversified, now began to play an active part in the work

of reorganizing the whole galactic continent. By telepathic

communication they gave to all awakened worlds throughout the galaxy

knowledge of the triumphant society which they themselves had created;

and they called upon all to join them in the founding of the galactic

Utopia. Every world throughout the galaxy, they said, must be an

intensely conscious individual; and each must contribute its personal

idiosyncrasy and all the wealth of its experience to the pooled

experience of all. When at last the community was completed, they said,

it must go on to fulfil its function in the far greater community of all

galaxies, there to participate in spiritual activities as yet but dimly

guessed.

In their earlier age of meditation the Sub-Galactic worlds, or rather

the single intermittently awakening mind of the Sub-Galaxy, had

evidently made discoveries which had very precise bearing on the

founding of the galactic society; for they now put forward the demand

that the number of minded worlds in the Galaxy must be increased to at

least ten thousand times its present extent. In order that all the

potentialities of the spirit should be fulfilled, they said there must

be a far greater diversity of world-types, and thousands of worlds of

each type. They themselves, in their small Sub-Galactic community, had

learned enough to realize that only a very much greater community could

explore all the regions of being, some few of which they themselves had

glimpsed, but only from afar.

The natural worlds of the galactic continent were bewildered and alarmed

by the magnitude of this scheme. They were content with the extant scale

of life. The spirit, they affirmed, had no concern for magnitude and

multiplicity. To this the reply was made that such a protest came ill

from worlds whose own achievement depended on the splendid diversity of

their members. Diversity and multiplicity of worlds was as necessary on

the galactic plane as diversity and multiplicity of individuals on the

world plane and diversity and multiplicity of nerve-cells on the

individual plane. In the upshot the natural worlds of the “continent”

played a decreasing part in the advancing life of the galaxy. Some

merely remained at the level of their own unaided achievement. Some

joined in the great cooperative work, but without fervor and without

genius. A few joined heartily and usefully in the enterprise. One,

indeed, was able to contribute greatly. This was a symbiotic race, but

of a very different kind from that which had founded the community of

the Sub-Galaxy. The symbiosis consisted of two races which had

originally inhabited separate planets of the same system. An intelligent

avian species, driven to desperation by the desiccation of its native

planet, had contrived to invade a neighboring world inhabited by a

manlike species. Here I must not tell how, after ages of alternating

strife and cooperation, a thorough economic and psychological symbiosis

was established.

The building of the galactic community of worlds lies far beyond the

comprehension of the writer of this book. I cannot now remember at all

clearly what I experienced of these obscure matters in the state of

heightened lucidity which came to me through participation in the

communal mind of the explorers. And even in that state I was bewildered

by the effort to comprehend the aims of that close-knit community of

worlds.

If my memory is to be trusted at all, three kinds of activity occupied

the minded worlds in tills phase of galactic history. The main practical

work was to enrich and harmonize the life of the galaxy itself, to

increase the number and diversity and mental unity of the fully awakened

worlds up to the point which, it was believed, was demanded for the

emergence of a mode of experience more awakened than any hitherto

attained. The second kind of activity was that which sought to make

closer contact with the other galaxies by physical and telepathic study.

The third was the spiritual exercise appropriate to beings of the rank

of the world-minds. This last seems to have been concerned (or will be

concerned) at once with the deepening of the self-awareness of each

individual world-spirit and the detachment of its will from merely

private fulfilment. But this was not all. For on this relatively high

level of the spirit’s ascent, as on our own lowliest of all spiritual

planes, there had also to be a more radical detachment from the whole

adventure of life and mind in the cosmos. For, as the spirit wakens, it

craves more and more to regard all existence not merely with a

creature’s eyes, but in the universal view, as though through the eyes

of the creator.

At first the task of establishing the galactic Utopia occupied almost

the whole energy of the awakened worlds. More and more of the stars were

encircled with concentric hoops of pearls, perfect though artificial.

And each pearl was a unique world, occupied by a unique race. Henceforth

the highest level of persistent individuality was not a world but a

system of scores of hundreds of worlds. And between the systems there

was as easy and delightful converse as between human individuals.

In these conditions, to be a conscious individual was to enjoy

immediately the united sensory impressions of all the races inhabiting a

system of worlds. And as the sense-organs of the worlds apprehended not

only “nakedly” but also through artificial instruments of great range

and subtlety, the conscious individual perceived not only the structure

of hundreds of planets, but also the configuration of the whole system

of planets clustered about its sun. Other systems also it perceived, as

men perceive one another; for in the distance the glittering bodies of

other “multi-mundane” persons like itself gyrated and drifted.

Between the minded planetary systems occurred infinite variations of

personal intercourse. As between human individuals, there were loves

and hates, temperamental sympathies and antipathies, joyful and

distressful intimacies, cooperations and thwartings in personal ventures

and in the great common venture of building the galactic Utopia.

Between individual systems of the worlds, as between symbiotic partners,

there sometimes occurred relationships with an almost sexual flavor,

though actual sex played no part in them. Neighboring systems would

project traveling woridlets, or greater worlds, or trains of worlds,

across the ocean of space to take up orbits round each other’s suns and

play intimate parts in symbiotic, or rather “sympsychic” relationships

in one another’s private life. Occasionally a whole system would migrate

to another system, and settle its worlds in rings between the rings of

the