[Book Review] Starmaker
Written in 1937, Starmaker is a future history of the quest for galactic divinity... and how God can be seen in a more nondenominational fashion
Star Maker is a book by Olaf Stapledon published in 1937. The book serves as an intellectual exercise in esoteric spirituality and future-history. Somewhat like Harassment Architecture, there is no coherent story in the piece, rather the book serves as a vehicle of discussing larger ideas tangentially contained by a point of view character. The book projects the multi-billion year process of galactic scale spiritual awakening.
The author imagines a telepathic traveler of the cosmos who exits our solar system and observes civilizations distant in both space and time. The protagonist studies the apparent universal pursuit of divinity and spiritual enlightenment among disparate peoples of varying theology, biology, and culture. Initially this takes the form of the point-of-view character finding himself lost in the void between stars and reaching out for other human-like civilizations.
The exploration first follows civilizations going through a “crisis” era. An era the author describes as similar to that which is overtaking the earth. Of course, the text was written in 1937, during a significant global crisis as radical changes were altering the culture. While the ideas of Star Maker would have been arrogantly considered outdated in the 1990s… in the 2020s, many of the ideas are highly applicable; particularly ideas around the nature of cyclic civilizations and the emergence of a technologically driven era of crisis. Star Maker has a great deal to say regarding the ways in which civilizations rise, burn themselves out, and decay once again.
At several points the author describes ideas, technologies, and methods of organizing a civilization that are dangerously forward-minded. Some of his ideas would have been very difficult to conceive of in 1937. As an example, the first civilization encountered by the point-of-view character suffers a social collapse just as they dawn upon the digital era. The author describes an advanced wireless global communications network in a way that, in 1937, would have been difficult to comprehend. Much easier today. It seems concerningly close to a description of the modern internet. Likewise, the author comes dangerously close to describing atomic weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The text describes the histories of several different civilizations that all rise, encounter an era of post-industrial high technology, and begin to decay as a byproduct. Rare is the civilization capable of facing the challenges of high technology and adapting to them. The author supposes that civilizations must reorganize and re-intellectualize themselves in order to adapt to technological changes and pass through the crisis. Those that succeed in passing through the era of crisis develop into a sort of global consciousness. Individual minds that, each in their own small way, contribute to a greater world mind (not a hive-mind, rather an awakened esoteric global spirit).
At first, the author constrains himself to worlds similar to our own, each going through a crisis unique to the physiology and psychology of that world. As time goes on, more foreign types of worlds are found that successfully pass through the crisis and achieve a sort of peaceful unity. All the worlds always have a sort of itch to seek the divine, ascending some esoteric ladder to try and make peace with the creator: the Star Maker as He is referred to in the book. Some worlds are content to seek out psychic unity, while others would seek physical expansion and fling entire planets from their solar systems on long journeys to expand toward galactic Empire.
The future-history described reaches from the scale of individuals and civilizations all the way to a galactic or even cosmic history. Special care is taken in articulating the ways in which psychology and philosophy are intertwined with biology and technology. Different civilizations develop through the various crises differently based heavily on how they can relate themselves to the larger universe.
The author is extremely skilled in creating a future history that ultimately asks (and tries to answer) the most primordial questions we all have: Why? Who? The centerpiece of the philosophical work is the endless desire to seek a form of true esoteric enlightenment on behalf of individuals, civilizations, the awakened world-minds, and a galactic community. As the civilizations mature, time seem to tick by faster and faster resulting in a seemingly rushed and endless quest for the divine.
There is a push towards seeking out the Starmaker. A desire to understand the Starmaker, commune with the Starmaker, and come to know the reason for creation. While a work of fiction, it ties well into the theologies of the digital era, and provides a great deal to think about. While the book is not of twenty first century philosophy as we attempt to navigate these new cultural and economic crises, it provides a framework from which one can examine more deeply the ideas of modern theologies.
Much like my own writing, the book posits that there is no competition between the divine and the material, rather the material is a reflected aspect of the divine. The author also takes the position that civilization, in its own ultimate aim to know the Starmaker requires a great deal of development: spiritual, social, and scientific. In that way, it reflects many of the ideas I have written about on the grounds that it is irrationally arrogant to presume that we are “finished” in our current state. Human civilization has a great deal of development yet to do, and the part played by individuals is incremental to that ultimate goal: to ultimately face the Starmaker, God, in ways we cannot now comprehend.
The book was published in 1937 in the interwar period and as a result contains several assumptions about human nature and astronomy. Star Maker is surprisingly well informed regarding cosmology for the time period when it was published. The laws of special relativity had only recently been discovered, yet the book makes full and reasonable use of them in practice.
There are a number of minor errors, artifacts of the 1930s, that a modern astronomer or cosmologist would easily point out: the author believed that the majority of stars do not host planets, while our observations since have shown that almost every star we see is host to many small worlds.
More concerningly, the book takes a pre-modernist position regarding how one should approach humanity. The book takes on the perspective that there exist some inherent character flaw in humanity that ought be fixed through the embrace of some arcane pacifism. While understandable in the interwar period, pacifistic philosophies have been shown to lead to neglect and decadence and its creations, in this case neoliberalism. Rather a form of Faustian Exceptionalism seems to be a more Enlightened path forward when it comes to an Emergent Philosophy of Man.
Regardless of a few flawed philosophical perspectives, the book Star Maker outlines a universal quest for the Divine via successively more illuminated states of being. From the primordial to the egotistical to the expanded consciousness of a world-mind, each phase of development expresses the same humble quest in wildly different ways. Even radically varied civilizations posses an inherent drive to seek Truth, to seek the Star Maker. The quest pulls them ever forward. Many of the individuals and minds attempt to remain humble in the face of the hypothetical Star Maker even while arrogantly reaching for divinity. It is both an ultimate expression of hubris and enlightenment to seek the infinite. An entire universe of finite beings reaching out for the untouchable horizon.