Star Maker

Philosophy is bunk. I've gleaned that philosophers in the course of history have felt the need to concoct a cosmology. Over the centuries the great discoveries of science have rendered those earlier confections meaningless, yet they linger. If all the great thinkers of classical antiquity had access to the insights of Newton, Darwin and EInstein, they would have saved a lot of time and not bothered with their speculations about the will of the gods in creating life and matter and all the rest.

Here we have Olaf Stapledon who does indeed have access to the insights of Newton, Darwin and Einstein, come up with a load of tedious waffle trying to describe god. Stapledon thinly disguises his theological nonsense as a journey through space and time. It gets worse and worse as the book goes on as he loses interest in the disguise . Stapledon shouldn't have bothered to write it, and I don't think you should bother to read it.

Some books can be likened to running a 5k race. They don't take too much preperation, they take a short amount of energy, and whilst satisfying and enjoyable, the feeling is somewhat short-term. Other novels look to take the reader on a marathon. Each page is painstakingly detailed, full of ideas and scope, leading to a such an epic conclusion you are left completely exhaused and needing a week to recover.

Reading Star Maker has the physical effect of running several marathons back to back, with a very short recovery period to treat your blisters. Olaf Stapledon has written a fictional-history of the universe which challenges your views on size, scope and importance. This is not a very physically large book, but rather unusually, has taken me around two weeks to complete. I've only been able to read a chapter at a time (and in some cases not even that), before having to put the book down, go away and /really/ think about the content. This is not a book designed to entertain its readers, it is a book designed to teach and make you think. No one has written anything on a similar scale since, and I think that is a good thing, since Star Maker has the feeling of a book which could only be written once.

The writing style of this book is dry, which makes it hard to read as a casual read. It does not make good bed-time reading, as you will find yourself drifint to sleep and not properly absorbing the content. For me, the only way to read this book was in small doses, whilst very much awake. A momentary lapse of concerntration will lose you the thread for the entire chapter, and be a wasted effort.

I would recommend this book to seasoned science-fiction readers who genuinely want a challenge to not just their reading, but their perceptions of the genre.