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

the cosmos; in some, as in our own cosmos, it was manifested as in many

respects “expanding.” In others again space “contracted”; so that the

end of such a cosmos, rich perhaps in intelligent communities, was the

collision and congestion of all its parts, and their final coincidence

and vanishing into a dimensionless point.

In some creations expansion and ultimate quiescence were followed by

contraction and entirely new kinds of physical activity. Sometimes, for

example, gravity was replaced by anti-gravity. All large lumps of matter

tended to burst asunder, and all small ones to fly apart from each

other. In one such cosmos the law of entropy also was reversed. Energy,

instead of gradually spreading itself evenly throughout the cosmos,

gradually piled itself upon the ultimate material units. I came in time

to suspect that my own cosmos was followed by a reversed cosmos of this

kind, in which, of course, the nature of living things was profoundly

different from anything conceivable to man. But this is a digression,

for I am at present describing much earlier and simpler universes. Many

a universe was physically a continuous fluid in which the solid

creatures swam. Others were constructed as series of concentric spheres,

peopled by diverse orders of creatures. Some quite early universes were

quasi-astronomical, consisting of a void sprinkled with rare and minute

centers of power.

Sometimes the Star Maker fashioned a cosmos which was without any

single, objective, physical nature. Its creatures were wholly without

influence on one another; but under the direct stimulation of the Star

Maker each creature conceived an illusory but reliable and useful

physical world of its own, and peopled it with figments of its

imagination. These subjective worlds the mathematical genius of the Star

Maker correlated in a manner that was perfectly systematic.

I must not say more of the immense diversity of physical form which,

according to my dream, the early creations assumed. It is enough to

mention that, in general, each cosmos was more complex, and in a sense

more voluminous than the last; for in each the ultimate physical units

were smaller in relation to the whole, and more multitudinous. Also, in

each the individual conscious creatures were generally more in number,

and more diverse in type; and the most awakened in each cosmos reached a

more lucid mentality than any creatures in the previous cosmos.

Biologically and psychologically the early creations were very diverse.

In some cases there was a biological evolution such as we know. A small

minority of species would precariously ascend toward greater

individuation and mental clarity. In other creations the species were

biologically fixed, and progress, if it occurred, was wholly cultural.

In a few most perplexing creations the most awakened state of the cosmos

was at the beginning, and the Star Maker calmly watched this lucid

consciousness decay.

Sometimes a cosmos started as a single lowly organism with an internal,

non-organic environment. It then propagated by fission into an

increasing host of increasingly small and increasingly individuated and

awakened creatures. In some of these universes evolution would continue

till the creatures became too minute to accommodate the complexity of

organic structure necessary for intelligent minds. The Star Maker would

then watch the cosmical societies desperately striving to circumvent the

fated degeneration of their race.

In some creations the crowning achievement of the cosmos was a chaos of

mutually unintelligible societies, each devoted to the service of some

one mode of the spirit, and hostile to all others. In some the climax

was a single Utopian society of distinct minds; in others a single

composite cosmical mind.

Sometimes it pleased the Star Maker to ordain that each creature in a

cosmos should be an inevitable, determinate expression of the

environment’s impact on its ancestors and itself. In other creations

each creature had some power of arbitrary choice, and some modicum of

the Star Maker’s own creativity. So it seemed to me in my dream; but

even in my dream I suspected that to a more subtle observer both kinds

would have appeared as in fact determinate, and yet both of them also

spontaneous and creative.

In general the Star Maker, once he had ordained the basic principles of

a cosmos and created its initial state, was content to watch the issue;

but sometimes he chose to interfere, either by infringing the natural

laws that he himself had ordained, or by introducing new emergent

formative principles, or by influencing the minds of the creatures by

direct revelation. This according to my dream, was sometimes done to

improve a cosmical design; but, more often, interference was included in

his original plan. Sometimes the Star Maker flung off creations which

were in effect groups of many linked universes, wholly distinct physical

systems of very different kinds, yet related by the fact that the

creatures lived their lives successively in universe after universe,

assuming in each habitat an indigenous physical form, but bearing with

them in their transmigration faint and easily misinterpreted memories of

earlier existences. In another way also, this principle of

transmigration was sometimes used. Even creations that were not thus

systematically linked might contain creatures that mentally echoed in

some vague but haunting manner the experience or the temperament of

their counterparts in some other cosmos.

One very dramatic device was used in cosmos after cosmos. I mentioned

earlier that in my dream the immature Star Maker had seemed to regard

the tragic failure of his first biological experiment with a kind of

diabolical glee. In many subsequent creations also he appeared to be

two-minded. Whenever his conscious creative plan was thwarted by some I

unsuspected potentiality of the substance which he had objectified from

his unconscious depth, his mood seemed to include not only frustration

but also surprised satisfaction, as of some unrecognized hunger

unexpectedly satisfied. This twi-mindedness at length gave rise to a new

mode of creating. There came a stage in the Star Maker’s growth, as my

dream represented it, when he contrived to dissociate himself as two

independent spirits, the one his essential self, the spirit that sought

positive creation of vital and spiritual forms and ever more lucid

awareness, the other a rebellious, destructive and cynical spirit, that

could have no being save as a parasite upon the works of the other.

Again and again he dissociated these two moods of himself, objectified

them as independent spirits, and permitted them to strive within a

cosmos for mastery. One such cosmos, which consisted of three linked

universes, was somewhat reminiscent of Christian orthodoxy. The first of

these linked universes was inhabited by generations of creatures gifted

with varying degrees of sensibility, intelligence, and moral integrity.

Here the two spirits played for the souls of the creatures. The “good”

spirit exhorted, helped, rewarded, punished; the “evil” spirit

deceived, tempted, and morally destroyed. At death the creatures passed

into one or other of the two secondary universes, which constituted a

timeless heaven and a timeless hell. There they experienced an eternal

moment either of ecstatic comprehension and worship or of the extreme

torment of remorse.

When my dream presented me with this crude, this barbaric figment, I was

at first moved with horror and incredulity. How could the Star Maker,

even in his immaturity, condemn his creatures to agony for the weakness

that he himself had allotted to them? How could such a vindictive deity

command worship? In vain I told myself that my dream must have utterly

falsified the reality; for I was convinced that in this respect it was

not false, but in some sense true, at least symbolically. Yet, even when

I was confronted by this brutal deed, even in the revulsion of pity and

horror, I saluted the Star Maker.

To excuse my worship, I told myself that this dread mystery lay far

beyond my comprehension, and that in some sense even such flagrant

cruelty must, in the Star Maker, be right. Did barbarity perhaps belong

to the Star Maker only in his immaturity? Later, when he was fully

himself, would he finally outgrow it? No! Already I deeply knew that

this ruthlessness was to be manifested even in the ultimate cosmos.

Could there, then, be some key fact, overlooked by me, in virtue of

which such seeming vindictiveness was justified? Was it simply that all

creatures were indeed but figments of the creative power, and that in

tormenting his creatures the Star Maker did but torment himself in the

course of his adventure of self-expression? Or was it perhaps that even

the Star Maker himself, though mighty, was limited in all creation by

certain absolute logical principles, and that one of these was the

indissoluble bond between betrayal and remorse in half-awakened spirits?

Had he, in this strange cosmos, simply accepted and used the ineluctable

limitations of his art? Or again, was my respect given to the Star Maker

only as the “good” spirit, not as the “evil” spirit? And was he in fact

striving to eject evil from himself by means of this device of

dissociation?

Some such explanation was suggested by the strange evolution of this

cosmos. Since its denizens had mostly a very low degree of intelligence

and moral integrity, the hell was soon overcrowded, while the heaven

remained almost empty. But the Star Maker in his “good” aspect loved and

pitied his creatures. The “good” spirit therefore entered into the

mundane sphere to redeem the sinners by his own suffering. And so at

last the heaven was peopled, though the hell was not depopulated.

Was it, then, only the “good” aspect of the Star Maker that I

worshipped? No! Irrationally, yet with conviction, I gave my adoration

to the Star Maker as comprising both aspects of his dual nature, both

the “good” and the “evil,” both the mild and the terrible, both the

humanly ideal and the incomprehensibly inhuman. Like an infatuated lover

who denies or excuses the flagrant faults of the beloved, I strove to

palliate the inhumanity of the Star Maker, nay positively I gloried in

it. Was there then something cruel in my own nature? Or did my heart

vaguely recognize that love, the supreme virtue in creatures, must not

in the creator be absolute?

This dire and insoluble problem confronted me again and again in the

course of my dream. For instance there appeared a creation in which the

two spirits were permitted to strive in a novel and more subtle manner.

In its early phase this cosmos manifested only physical characters; but

the Star Maker provided that its vital potentiality should gradually

express itself in certain kinds of living creatures which, generation by

generation, should emerge from the purely physical and evolve toward

intelligence and spiritual lucidity. In this cosmos he permitted the two

spirits, the “good” and the “evil,” to compete even in the very making

of the creatures.

In the long early ages the spirits struggled over the evolution of the

innumerable species. The “good” spirit worked to produce creatures more

highly organized, more individual, more delicately related to the

environment, more skilled in action, more comprehensively and vividly

aware of their world, of themselves, and of other selves. The “evil”

spirit tried to thwart this enterprise.

The organs and tissues of every species manifested throughout their

structure the conflict of the two spirits. Sometimes the “evil” spirit

contrived seemingly unimportant but insidious and lethal features for a

creature’s undoing. Its nature would include some special liability to

harbor parasites, some weakness of digestive machinery, some instability

of nervous organization. In other cases the “evil” spirit would equip

some lower species with special weapons for the destruction of the

pioneers of evolution, so that they should succumb, either to some new

disease, or to plagues of the vermin of this particular cosmos, or to

the more bruitsh of their own kind.