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

THE MAKER AND HIS WORKS

1. IMMATURE CREATING

ACCORDING to the fantastic myth or dream that was evoked from my mind

after the supreme moment of experience, the particular cosmos which I

had come to regard as “myself” falls somewhere neither early nor late in

the vast series of creations. It appeared to be in some respects the

Star Maker’s first mature work; but in comparison with later creations

it was in many ways juvenile in spirit.

Though the early creations express the nature of the Star Maker merely

in his immature phase, for the most part they fall in important respects

aside from the direction of human thought, and therefore I cannot now

recapture them. They have left me with little more than a vague sense of

the multiplicity and diversity of the Star Maker’s works. Nevertheless a

few humanly intelligible traces remain and must be recorded.

In the crude medium of my dream the first cosmos of all appeared as a

surprisingly simple thing. The infant Star Maker, teased, as it seemed

to me, by his unexpressed potency, conceived and objectified from

himself two qualities. With these alone he made his first toy cosmos, a

temporal rhythm, as it were of sound and silence. From this first simple

drum-beat, premonitory of a thousand creations, he developed with

infantile but godlike zest a flickering tattoo, a changeful complexity

of rhythm. Presently, through contemplation of his creature’s simple

form, he conceived the possibility of more subtle creating. Thus the

first of all creatures itself bred in its creator a need that itself

could never satisfy. Therefore the infant Star Maker brought his first

cosmos to a close. Regarding it from outside the cosmical time which it

had generated, he apprehended its whole career as present, though none

the less a flux. And when he had quietly assessed his work, he withdrew

his attention from it and brooded for a second creation.

Thereafter, cosmos upon cosmos, each more rich and subtle than the last,

leapt from his fervent imagination. In some of his earliest creations he

seemed to be concerned only with the physical aspect of the substance

which he had objectified from himself. He was blind to its physical

potentiality. In one early cosmos, however, the patterns of physical

quality with which he played simulated an individuality and a life which

they did not in fact possess. Or did they possess it? In a later

creation, certainly, true life broke out most strangely. This was a

cosmos which the Star Maker apprehended physically much as men

apprehended music. It was a rich sequence of qualities diverse in pitch

and in intensity. With this toy the infant Star Maker played

delightedly, inventing an infinite wealth of melody and counterpoint.

But before he had worked out all the subtleties of pattern implied in

this little world of cold, mathematical music, before he had created

more than a few kinds of lifeless, musical creatures, it became evident

that some of his creatures were manifesting traces of a life of their

own, recalcitrant to the conscious purpose of the Star Maker. The themes

of the music began to display modes of behavior that were not in accord

with the canon which he had ordained for them. It seemed to me that he

watched them with intense interest, and that they spurred him to new

conceptions, beyond the creatures’ power to fulfil. Therefore he brought

this cosmos to completion; and in a novel manner. He contrived that the

last state of the cosmos should lead immediately back to the first. He

knotted the final event temporally to the beginning, so that the

cosmical time formed an endless circlet. After considering his work from

outside its proper time, he set it aside, and brooded for a fresh

creation.

For the next cosmos he consciously projected something of his own

percipience and will, ordaining that certain patterns and rhythms of

quality should be the perceivable bodies of perceiving minds. Seemingly

these creatures were intended to work together to produce the harmony

which he had conceived for this cosmos; but instead, each sought to mold

the whole cosmos in accordance with its own form. The creatures fought

desperately, and with self-righteous conviction. When they were damaged,

they suffered pain. This, seemingly, was something which the young Star

Maker had never experienced or conceived. With rapt, surprised interest,

and (as it seemed to me) with almost diabolical glee, he watched the

antics and the sufferings of his first living creatures, till by their

mutual strife and slaughter they had reduced this cosmos to chaos.

Thenceforth the Star Maker never for long ignored his creatures’

potentiality for intrinsic life. It seemed to me, however, that many of

his early experiments in vital creation went strangely awry, and that

sometimes, seemingly in disgust with the biological, he would revert for

a while to purely physical fantasies.

I can only briefly describe the host of the early creations. Suffice it

that they issued from the divine though still infantile imagination one

after the other like bright but trivial bubbles, gaudy with color, rich

with all manner of physical subtleties, lyrical and often tragic with

the loves and hates, the lusts and aspirations and communal enterprises

of the Star Maker’s early experimental conscious beings.

Many of these early universes were non-spatial, though none the less

physical. And of these non-spatial universes not a few were of the

“musical” type, in which space was strangely represented by a dimension

corresponding to musical pitch, and capacious with myriads of tonal

differences. The creatures appeared to one another as complex patterns

and rhythms of tonal characters. They could move their tonal bodies in

the dimension of pitch, and sometimes in other dimensions, humanly

inconceivable. A creature’s body was a more or less constant tonal

pattern, with much the same degree of flexibility and minor

changefulness as a human body. Also, it could traverse other living

bodies in the pitch dimension much as wave-trains on a pond may cross

one another. But though these beings could glide through one another,

they could also grapple, and damage one another’s tonal tissues. Some,

indeed, lived by devouring others; for the more complex needed to

integrate into their own vital patterns the simpler patterns that

exfoliated throughout the cosmos directly from the creative power of the

Star Maker. The intelligent creatures could manipulate for their own

ends elements wrenched from the fixed tonal environment, thus

constructing artifacts of tonal pattern. Some of these served as tools

for the more efficient pursuit of “agricultural” activities, by which

they enhanced the abundance of their natural food. Universes of this

non-spatial kind, though incomparably simpler and more meager than our

own cosmos, were rich enough to produce societies capable not only of

“agriculture” but of “handicrafts,” and even a kind of pure art that

combined the characteristics of song and dance and verse. Philosophy,

generally rather Pythagorean, appeared for the first time in a cosmos of

this “musical” kind. In nearly all the Star Maker’s works, as revealed

in my dream, time was a more fundamental attribute than space. Though in

some of his earliest creations he excluded time, embodying merely a

static design, this plan was soon abandoned. It gave little scope to his

skill. Moreover, since it excluded the possibility of life and mind, it

was incompatible with all but the earliest phase of his interest.

Space, my dream declared, appeared first as a development of a

non-spatial dimension in a “musical” cosmos. The tonal creatures in this

cosmos could move not merely “up” and “down” the scale but “sideways.”

In human music particular themes may seem to approach or retreat, owing

to variations of loudness and timbre. In a rather similar manner the

creatures in this “musical” cosmos could approach one another or retreat

and finally vanish out of earshot. In passing “sideways” they traveled

through continuously changing tonal environments. In a subsequent cosmos

this “sideways” motion of the creatures was enriched with true spatial

experience.

There followed creations with spatial characters of several dimensions,

creations Euclidean and non-Euclidean, creations exemplifying a great

diversity of geometrical and physical principles. Sometimes time, or

space-time, was the fundamental reality of the cosmos, and the entities

were but fleeting modifications of it; but more often, qualitative

events were fundamental, and these were related in spatio-temporal

manners. In some cases the system of spatial relations was infinite, in

others finite though boundless. In some the finite extent of space was