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

A still more ingenious plan the evil spirit sometimes used with great

effect. When the “good” spirit had hit upon some promising device, and

from small beginnings had worked up in its favoured species some new

organic structure or mode of behavior, the evil spirit would contrive

that the process of evolution should continue long after it had reached

perfect adjustment to the creature’s needs. Teeth would grow so large

that eating became excessively difficult, protective shells so heavy

that they hampered locomotion, horns so curved that they pressed upon

the brain, the impulse to individuality so imperious that it destroyed

society, or the social impulse so obsessive that individuality was

crushed.

Thus in world after world of this cosmos, which greatly surpassed all

earlier creations in complexity, almost every species came sooner or

later to grief. But in some worlds a single species reached the “human”

level of intelligence and I of spiritual sensibility. Such a combination

of powers ought to have secured it from all possible attack. But both

intelligence and spiritual sensibility were most skilfully perverted by

the “evil” spirit. For though by nature they were complementary, they

could be brought into conflict; or else one or both could be exaggerated

so as to become as lethal as the extravagant horns and teeth of earlier

kinds. Thus intelligence, which led on the one hand to the mastery of

physical force and on the other to intellectual subtlety, might, if

divorced from spiritual sensibility, cause disaster. The mastery of

physical force often produced a mania for power, and the dissection of

society into two alien classes, the powerful and the enslaved.

Intellectual subtlety might produce a mania for analysis and

abstraction, with blindness to all that intellect could not expound. Yet

sensibility itself, when it rejected intellectual criticism and the

claims of daily life, would be smothered in dreams.

2. MATURE CREATING

According to the myth that my mind conceived when the supreme moment of

my cosmical experience had passed, the Star Maker at length entered into

a state of rapt meditation in which his own nature suffered a

revolutionary change. So at least I judged from the great change that

now came over his creative activity.

After he had reviewed with new eyes all his earlier works, dismissing

each, as it seemed to me, with mingled respect and impatience, he

discovered in himself a new and pregnant conception.

The cosmos which he now created was that which contains the readers and

the writer of this book. In its making he used, but with more cunning

art, many of the principles which had already served him in earlier

creations; and he wove them together to form a more subtle and more

capacious unity than ever before.

It seemed to me, in my fantasy, that he approached this new enterprise

in a new mood. Each earlier cosmos appeared to have been fashioned with

conscious will to embody certain principles, physical, biological,

psychological. As has already been reported, there often appeared a

conflct between his intellectual purpose and the raw nature which he had

evoked for his creature out of the depth of his own obscure being. This

time, however, he dealt more sensitively with the medium of his

creation. The crude spiritual “material” which he objectified from his

own hidden depth for the formation of his new creature was molded to his

still tentative purpose with more sympathetic intelligence, with more

respect for its nature and its potentiality, though with detachment from

its more extravagant demands.

To speak thus of the universal creative spirit is almost childishly

anthropomorphic. For the life of such a spirit, if it exists at all,

must be utterly different from human mentality, and utterly

inconceivable to man. Nevertheless, since this childish symbolism did

force itself upon me, I record it. In spite of its crudity, perhaps it

does contain some genuine reflection of the truth, however distorted.

In the new creation there occurred a strange kind of discrepancy between

the Star Maker’s own time and the time proper to the cosmos itself.

Hitherto, though he could detach himself from the cosmical time when the

cosmical history had completed itself, and observe all the cosmical ages

as present, he could not actually create the later phases of a cosmos

before he had created the earlier. In his new creation he was not thus

limited.

Thus although this new cosmos was my own cosmos, I regarded it from a

surprising angle of vision. No longer did it appear as a familiar

sequence of historical events beginning with the initial physical

explosion and advancing to the final death. I saw it now not from within

the flux of the cosmical time but quite otherwise. I watched the

fashioning of the cosmos in the time proper to the Star Maker; and the

sequence of the Star Maker’s creative acts was very different from the

sequence of historical events.

First he conceived from the depth of his own being a something, neither

mind nor matter, but rich in potentiality, and in suggestive traits,

gleams, hints for his creative imagination. Over this fine substance for

a long while he pondered. It was a medium in which the one and the many

demanded to be most subtly dependent upon one another; in which all

parts and all characters must pervade and be pervaded by all other parts

and all other characters; in which each thing must seemingly be but an

influence in all other things; and yet the whole must be no other than

the sum of all its parts, and each part an all-pervading determination

of the whole. It was a cosmical substance in which any individual spirit

must be, mysteriously, at once an absolute self and a mere figment of

the whole.

This most subtle medium the Star Maker now rough-hewed into the general

form of a cosmos. Thus he fashioned a still indeterminate space-time, as

yet quite ungeometrized; an amorphous physicality with no clear quality

or direction, no intricacy of physical laws; a more distinctly conceived

vital trend and epic adventure of mentality; and a surprisingly definite

climax and crown of spiritual lucidity. This last, though its situation

in the cosmical time was for the most part late, was given a certain

precision of outline earlier in the sequence of creative work than any

other factor in the cosmos. And it seemed to me that this was so because

the initial substance itself so clearly exposed its own potentiality for

some such spiritual form. Thus it was that the Star Maker at first

almost neglected the physical minutiae of his work, neglected also the

earlier ages of cosmical history, and devoted his skill at first almost

entirely to shaping the spiritual climax of the whole creature. Not till

he had blocked in unmistakably the most awakened phase of the cosmical

spirit did he trace any of the variegated psychological trends which, in

the cosmical time, should lead up to it. Not till he had given outline

to the incredibly diverse themes of mental growth did he give attention

fully to constructing the biological evolutions and the physical and

geometrical intricacy which could best evoke the more subtle

potentialities of his still rough-hewn cosmical spirit. But, as he

geometrized, he also intermittently turned again to modify and elucidate

the spiritual climax itself. Not till the physical and geometrical form

of the cosmos was almost completely fashioned could he endow the

spiritual climax with fully concrete individuality.

While he was still working upon the detail of the countless, poignant

individual lives, upon the fortunes of men, of ichthyoids, of

nautiloids, and the rest, I became convinced that his attitude to his

creatures was very different from what it had been for any other cosmos.

For he was neither cold to them nor yet simply in love with them. In

love with them, indeed, he still was; but he had seemingly outgrown all

desire to save them from the consequences of their finitude and from the

cruel impact of the environment. He loved them without pity. For he saw

that their distinctive virtue lay in their finitude, their minute

particularity, their tortured balance between dullness and lucidity; and

that to save them from these would be to annihilate them.

When he had given the last touches to all the cosmical ages from the

supreme moment back to the initial explosion and on to the final death,

the Star Maker contemplated his work. And he saw that it was good.

As he lovingly, though critically, reviewed our cosmos in all its

infinite diversity and in its brief moment of lucidity, I felt that he

was suddenly filled with reverence for the creature that he had made, or

that he had ushered out of his own secret depth by a kind of divine

self-midwifery. He knew that this creature, though imperfect, though a

mere cerature, a mere figment of his own creative power, was yet in a

manner more real than himself. For beside this concrete splendor what

was he but a mere abstract potency of creation? Moreover in another

respect the thing that he had made was his superior, and his teacher.

For as he contemplated this the loveliest and subtlest of all his works

with exultation, even with awe, its impact upon him changed him,

clarifying and deepening his will. As he discriminated its virtue and

its weakness, his own perception and his own skill matured. So at least

it seemed to my bewildered, awe-stricken mind.

Thus, little by little, it came about, as so often before, that the Star

Maker outgrew his creature. Increasingly he frowned upon the loveliness

that he still cherished. Then, seemingly with a conflict of reverence

and impatience, he set our cosmos in its place among his other works.

Once more he sank into deep meditation. Once more the creative urge

possessed him.

Of the many creations which followed I must perforce say almost nothing,

for in most respects they lay beyond my mental reach. I could not have

any cognizance of them save in so far as they contained, along with much

that was inconceivable, some features that were but fantastic

embodiments of principles which I had already encoutered. Thus all their

most vital novelty escaped me.

I can, indeed, say of all these creations that, like our own cosmos,

they were immensely capacious, immensely subtle; and that, in some alien

manner or other, every one of them had both a physical and a mental

aspect; though in many the physical, however crucial to the spirit’s

growth, was more transparent, more patently phantasmal than in our own

cosmos. In some cases this was true equally of the mental, for the

beings were often far less deceived by the opacity of their individual

mental processes, and more sensitive to then-underlying unity.

I can say too that in all these creations the goal which, as it seemed

to me, the Star Maker sought to realize was richness, delicacy, depth

and harmoniousness of being. But what these words in detail mean I

should find it hard to say. It seemed to me that in some cases, as in

our own cosmos, he pursued this end by means of an evolutionary process

crowned by an awakened cosmical mind, which strove to gather into its

own awareness the whole wealth of the cosmical existence, and by

creative action to increase it. But in many cases this goal was achieved

with incomparably greater economy of effort and suffering on the part of

the creatures, and without the huge dead loss of utterly wasted,

ineffective lives which is to us so heartrending. Yet in other

creations suffering seemed at least as grave and widespread as in our

own cosmos.

In his maturity the Star Maker conceived many strange forms of time. For

instance, some of the later creations were designed with