Book Entry · Science Fiction

Star Maker

by Olaf Stapledon · 1937

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What is Star Maker about?

A man walks out of his suburban house after a quarrel, sits on a hill, and finds his consciousness flung across the universe. Joining with other minds, he tours the entire history of cosmic intelligence — symbiotic races, sentient stars, galactic utopias, the artificial worlds later called Dyson spheres — before the climactic, devastating audience with the Star Maker itself, an artist-creator who regards our cosmos as one draft among many. Written as fascism gathered in Europe, it is metaphysics delivered with the force of revelation.

Why it matters

Routinely cited (by Clarke, Lessing and Borges among others) as the most visionary SF novel ever written. Freeman Dyson credited it as the source of the Dyson sphere concept.

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