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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'Star Maker,' Olaf Stapledon delves into the vastness of time and space, interweaving philosophical inquiry with speculative narrative. The novel presents a cosmic journey through the evolution of intelligent life, exploring themes of creation, purpose, and existentialism as the protagonist communes with the titular Star Maker'Äîan entity that shapes the universe. Written in a style that blends lyrical prose with a profound sense of wonder, Stapledon invites readers to reflect not only on the cosmos but on humanity's place within it, resonating deeply within the context of 20th-century modernist literature that sought to redefine the relationship between mankind and the universe. Olaf Stapledon was a British philosopher and writer whose profound intellectual upbringing influenced his visionary outlook on existence. His experiences during World War I and the tumultuous developments of the early 20th century imbued his works with urgent existential questions. Stapledon's extensive background in philosophy and sociology shaped his unique approach to science fiction, making 'Star Maker' a seminal work that transcends mere entertainment to probe the profound interconnectedness of life itself. For readers yearning for a rich, immersive experience that challenges the mind and expands the soul, 'Star Maker' is an essential read. It propels us into a thought-provoking exploration of existence and invites contemplation on our own cosmic significance, establishing itself as a cornerstone of speculative fiction. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Star Maker
Table of Contents
Introduction
To imagine the universe at its largest scale is also to confront how small any single life may seem, and to ask what kind of meaning can survive that contrast.
Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker is a work of philosophical science fiction first published in 1937, written in an era when modern cosmology and the language of vast timescales were entering popular imagination. Rather than building tension through conventional plot, it uses the speculative freedom of the genre to range across space and time, treating the cosmos itself as the primary setting. The result is less a novel of events than a designed vision, inviting the reader to engage with ideas as much as with narrative.
The premise begins from an ordinary human standpoint and then rapidly expands outward, following a mind that is carried beyond familiar limits into a widening survey of existence. The book’s opening situation is simple, but the journey quickly becomes panoramic, moving through imagined worlds, forms of life, and modes of consciousness. Stapledon frames these explorations as an attempt to understand how life might develop under different conditions and what kinds of relationships could arise between beings. It reads like an odyssey of perspective, not an adventure in the usual sense.
Stapledon’s voice is deliberate and elevated, closer to reflective essay and visionary report than to dialogue-driven storytelling. The tone is often austere, sometimes rapt, and frequently analytical, as if the narrator were struggling to render experiences too large for ordinary language. Descriptions can be sweeping and abstract, with long arcs of thought that compress immense spans into readable sequences. This style can feel demanding, yet it produces a distinctive form of wonder: not the thrill of a twist, but the gradual recalibration of what counts as significant or possible.
Across its cosmic scope, Star Maker repeatedly returns to questions of consciousness, community, and value. It considers how minds might evolve, how societies might organize themselves, and how cooperation and conflict can shape the destiny of species. Ethical reflection is central: the book asks what responsibilities intelligent beings might have toward one another, and what sorts of flourishing are conceivable when the scale of reference shifts from individuals to civilizations. It also presses on the limits of knowledge, exploring how any mind might face realities that exceed comprehension.
The book still matters because it models a way of thinking that is both expansive and critical, a rare blend in speculative fiction. Contemporary readers interested in long-term futures, existential risk, or the ethics of advanced intelligence may recognize in Stapledon an early attempt to treat such concerns with seriousness rather than gimmick. Its attention to collective life resonates in an age of global interdependence, while its insistence on comparing many possible worlds can sharpen our sense of contingency about human norms. Even when readers disagree, the exercise enlarges perspective.
Approached today, Star Maker is best read as an imaginative framework for cosmological and philosophical reflection rather than as a character-centered novel. Its pleasures lie in the accumulation of vistas, the disciplined speculation, and the sustained attempt to connect cosmic history to moral inquiry. The experience can be hypnotic, at times severe, but it rewards patience with an uncommon breadth of vision. By pushing the reader to think in unfamiliar scales, it renews a basic literary promise: that fiction can remake the boundaries of the imaginable while remaining attentive to what ultimately matters.
Synopsis
Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (first published in 1937) is framed as the account of an ordinary man whose mind is suddenly carried beyond Earth into an expansive, visionary survey of the cosmos. The narrator begins with familiar human concerns and swiftly finds them dwarfed by the scale of what he is shown. The book proceeds less as a conventional plot and more as a guided, cumulative exploration of cosmic history and possibility, using imagined worlds and civilizations as evidence in an argument about mind, society, and meaning. Its opening movement establishes the tension between individual perspective and universal scope.
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The narrator’s awareness moves outward from his home planet to the wider universe, observing planetary systems and the varied forms life can take under different physical and evolutionary conditions. Stapledon treats these encounters as studies in how intelligence emerges, how it organizes itself, and how it contends with the constraints of environment, biology, and time. Civilizations rise with distinctive psychologies, arts, and technologies, but also face recurring pressures that shape their destinies. The narrative emphasizes patterns—curiosity, cooperation, conflict, adaptation—while keeping the human observer’s astonishment in view as the scale of the inquiry expands.
As the journey continues, attention turns to relations between species and between societies, including attempts at communication, coexistence, and mutual understanding across vast differences. Stapledon explores the promise and difficulty of collective life: how groups coordinate knowledge, how cultures handle power and dissent, and how contact with the unfamiliar can either enlarge imagination or provoke fear. The narrator witnesses experiments in social forms and ethical outlooks that test what “civilization” might mean when detached from specifically human traditions. Across these episodes, the book develops a sustained question about whether intelligence naturally tends toward unity, fragmentation, or cycles of both.
Increasingly, the survey shifts from individual worlds to larger cosmic structures, considering how histories interlock across immense spans. The narrator encounters minds and communities that attempt to transcend their local limitations by creating broader syntheses of knowledge and experience. Stapledon presents these efforts as both inspiring and precarious, shaped by material limits and by the inner tensions of conscious beings—between selfhood and fusion, contemplation and action, aesthetic fulfillment and survival. The narrative’s momentum comes from progressive enlargement: each apparent culmination becomes a stepping-stone toward an even wider horizon, pushing the narrator’s capacities of comprehension and empathy.
The book also reflects on the character of mind itself, depicting consciousness as something that can vary radically in form while retaining recognizable aims: understanding, expression, relationship, and sometimes domination. Stapledon uses the narrator’s widening viewpoint to test philosophical claims about purpose in nature and the possibility of value on a cosmic scale. The narrator becomes less a traveler among places than a witness to an unfolding argument: that the universe may be intelligible not only through physics but through the histories of experiencing subjects. The resulting portrait is both scientific in spirit and metaphysical in ambition, with speculation disciplined by recurring thematic concerns.
As the narrator’s perspective reaches toward the furthest reaches of cosmic development, the narrative increasingly resembles a meditation on ultimate context: what a universe of minds might be for, and whether any overarching reality can be meaningfully addressed. The book stages encounters with immensities that challenge ordinary religious and humanistic frameworks, without settling into simple affirmation or denial. Instead, Stapledon sustains an inquiry into whether creative activity, knowledge, and compassion can justify themselves amid indifferent vastness. The tone remains formally detached even when describing awe and dread, keeping attention on the implications of the narrator’s expanding awareness rather than on personal drama alone.
Historical Context
Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker appeared in Britain in 1937, issued in London by Methuen. It was written in an interwar setting shaped by the First World War’s aftermath, the Great Depression, and intensifying international tensions. Stapledon lived and worked in England, and his public intellectual environment included the expanding reach of mass print culture, popular science writing, and debates about modernity. The period also saw rapid developments in physics, astronomy, and communications, fostering a receptive audience for large-scale cosmic speculation. The novel’s wide temporal and spatial framing reflects this era’s appetite for system-level explanations and future-oriented thought.
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Stapledon’s life intersected directly with the First World War. He served with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, a Quaker-affiliated medical relief organization, an experience that influenced his later interest in ethics, suffering, and the fate of civilizations. The war’s unprecedented casualties and technological destructiveness reshaped British intellectual life and encouraged skepticism toward triumphant narratives of progress. Interwar Britain also grappled with memorialization, social dislocation, and arguments over international order. Star Maker’s emphasis on long historical arcs and recurring civilizational patterns can be read against a background in which European societies were reassessing the stability of their institutions and the moral limits of modern state power.
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The 1920s and 1930s brought major shifts in scientific authority and public understanding of the universe. Relativity and quantum theory had altered physics; observational astronomy also changed quickly, including the recognition that the Milky Way is one among many galaxies and that the universe is expanding, associated with Edwin Hubble’s 1929 findings. Popular expositions of science circulated widely in Britain, and radio broadcasting helped spread scientific ideas to general audiences. Star Maker draws on this broadened cosmological horizon, using an enlarged universe as a stage for philosophical questions about mind, purpose, and scale, without depending on precise technical prediction.
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British literary culture in the period was marked by modernism and by flourishing speculative fiction. H. G. Wells’s earlier scientific romances and future histories remained influential, and Wells’s ideas about world government and social planning were widely discussed. The interwar years also saw the growth of science-fiction magazines and clubs, alongside more experimental narrative forms in mainstream literature. Stapledon published Last and First Men in 1930, establishing a reputation for vast “future history” and philosophical narration. Star Maker continued this tradition in a more cosmic register, reflecting a milieu in which imaginative literature was increasingly used to explore sociology, history, and the consequences of technological change.
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Star Maker
PREFACE
At a moment when Europe is in danger of a catastrophe worse than that of 1914 a book like this may be condemned as a distraction from the desperately urgent defence of civilization against modern barbarism.
Year by year, month by month, the plight of our fragmentary and precarious civilization becomes more serious. Fascism abroad grows more bold and ruthless in its foreign ventures, more tyrannical toward its own citizens, more barbarian in its contempt for the life of the mind. Even in our own country we have reason to fear a tendency toward militarization and the curtailment of civil liberty. Moreover, while the decades pass, no resolute step is taken to alleviate the injustice of our social order. Our outworn economic system dooms millions to frustration.
In these conditions it is difficult for writers to pursue their calling at once with courage and with balanced judgement. Some merely shrug their shoulders and withdraw from the central struggle of our age. These, with their minds closed against the world’s most vital issues, inevitably produce works which not only have no depth of significance for their contemporaries but also are subtly insincere. For these writers must consciously or unconsciously contrive to persuade themselves either that the crisis in human affairs does not exist, or that it is less important than their own work, or that it is anyhow not their business. But the crisis does exist, is of supreme importance, and concerns us all. Can anyone who is at all intelligent and informed hold the contrary without self-deception?
Yet I have a lively sympathy with some of those ‘intellectuals’ who declare that they have no useful contribution to make to the struggle, and therefore had better not dabble in it. I am, in fact, one of them. In our defence I should say that, though we are inactive or ineffective as direct supporters of the cause, we do not ignore it. Indeed, it constantly, obsessively, holds our attention. But we are convinced by prolonged trial and error that the most useful service open to us is indirect. For some writers the case is different. Gallantly plunging into the struggle, they use their powers to spread urgent propaganda, or they even take up arms in the cause. If they have suitable ability, and if the particular struggle in which they serve is in fact a part of the great enterprise of defending (or creating) civilization, they may, of course, do valuable work. In addition they may gain great wealth of experience and human sympathy, thereby immensely increasing their literary power. But the very urgency of their service may tend to blind them to the importance of maintaining and extending, even in this age of crisis, what may be called metaphorically the ‘self-critical self-consciousness of the human species’, or the attempt to see man’s life as a whole in relation to the rest of things. This involves the will to regard all human affairs and ideals and theories with as little human prejudice as possible. Those who are in the thick of the struggle inevitably tend to become, though in a great and just cause, partisan. They nobly forgo something of that detachment, that power of cold assessment, which is, after all, among the most valuable human capacities. In their case this is perhaps as it should be; for a desperate struggle demands less of detachment than of devotion. But some who have the cause at heart must serve by striving to maintain, along with human loyalty, a more dispassionate spirit. And perhaps the attempt to see our turbulent world against a background of stars may, after all, increase, not lessen, the significance of the present human crisis. It may also strengthen our charity toward one another.
In this belief I have tried to construct an imaginative sketch of the dread but vital whole of things. I know well that it is a ludicrously inadequate and in some ways a childish sketch, even when regarded from the angle of contemporary human experience. In a calmer and a wiser age it might well seem crazy. Yet in spite of its crudity, and in spite of its remoteness, it is perhaps not wholly irrelevant.
At the risk of raising thunder both on the Left and on the Right, I have occasionally used certain ideas and words derived from religion, and I have tried to interpret them in relation to modern needs. The valuable, though much damaged words ‘spiritual’ and ‘worship’, which have become almost as obscene to the Left as the good old sexual words are to the Right, are here intended to suggest an experience which the Right is apt to pervert and the Left to misconceive. This experience, I should say, involves detachment from all private, all social, all racial ends; not in the sense that it leads a man to reject them, but that it makes him prize them in a new way. The ‘spiritual life’ seems to be in essence the attempt to discover and adopt the attitude which is in fact appropriate to our experience as a whole, just as admiration is felt to be in fact appropriate toward a well-grown human being. This enterprise can lead to an increased lucidity and finer temper of consciousness, and therefore can have a great and beneficial effect on behaviour. Indeed, if this supremely humanizing experience does not produce, along with a kind of piety toward fate, the resolute will to serve our waking humanity, it is a mere sham and a snare.
Before closing this preface I must express my gratitude to Professor L. C. Martin, Mr. L. H. Myers, and Mr. E. V. Rieu, for much helpful and sympathetic criticism, in consequence of which I re-wrote many chapters. Even now I hesitate to associate their names with such an extravagant work. Judged by the standards of the Novel, it is remarkably bad. In fact, it is no novel at all.
Certain ideas about artificial planets were suggested by Mr. J. D. Bernal[1]’s fascinating little book The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. I hope he will not strongly disapprove of my treatment of them.
My wife I must thank both for work on the proofs and for being herself.
At the end of the book I have included a note on Magnitude, which may be helpful to readers unfamiliar with astronomy. The very sketchy time scales may amuse some.
O. S.
March 1937
I THE EARTH
1. THE STARTING POINT
One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out[1q] on to the hill. Dark heather checked my feet. Below marched the suburban street lamps. Windows, their curtains drawn, were shut eyes, inwardly watching the lives of dreams. Beyond the sea’s level darkness a lighthouse pulsed. Overhead, obscurity.
I distinguished our own house, our islet in the tumultuous and bitter currents of the world. There, for a decade and a half, we two, so different in quality, had grown in and in to one another, for mutual support and nourishment, in intricate symbiosis. There daily we planned our several undertakings, and recounted the day’s oddities and vexations. There letters piled up to be answered, socks to be darned. There the children were born, those sudden new lives. There, under that roof, our own two lives, recalcitrant sometimes to one another, were all the while thankfully one, one larger, more conscious life than either alone.
All this, surely, was good. Yet there was bitterness. And bitterness not only invaded us from the world; it welled up also within our own magic circle. For horror at our futility, at our own unreality, and not only at the world’s delirium, had driven me out on to the hill.
We were always hurrying from one little urgent task to another, but the upshot was insubstantial. Had we, perhaps, misconceived our whole existence? Were we, as it were, living from false premises? And in particular, this partnership of ours, this seemingly so well-based fulcrum for activity in the world, was it after all nothing but a little eddy of complacent and ingrown domesticity, ineffectively whirling on the surface of the great flux, having in itself no depth of being, and no significance? Had we perhaps after all deceived ourselves? Behind those rapt windows did we, like so many others, indeed live only a dream? In a sick world even the hale are sick. And we two, spinning our little life mostly by rote, seldom with clear cognizance, seldom with firm intent, were products of a sick world.
Yet this life of ours was not all sheer and barren fantasy. Was it not spun from the actual fibres of reality, which we gathered in with all the comings and goings through our door, all our traffic with the suburb and the city and with remoter cities, and with the ends of the earth? And were we not spinning together an authentic expression of our own nature? Did not our life issue daily as more or less firm threads of active living, and mesh itself into the growing web, the intricate, ever-proliferating pattern of mankind?
I considered ‘us’ with quiet interest and a kind of amused awe. How could I describe our relationship even to myself without either disparaging it or insulting it with the tawdry decoration of sentimentality? For this our delicate balance of dependence and independence, this coolly critical, shrewdly ridiculing, but loving mutual contact, was surely a microcosm of true community, was after all in its simple style an actual and living example of that high goal which the world seeks.
The whole world? The whole universe? Overhead, obscurity unveiled a star. One tremulous arrow of light, projected how many thousands of years ago, now stung my nerves with vision, and my heart with fear. For in such a universe as this what significance could there be in our fortuitous, our frail, our evanescent community?
But now irrationally I was seized with a strange worship, not, surely of the star, that mere furnace which mere distance falsely sanctified, but of something other, which the dire contrast of the star and us signified to the heart. Yet what, what could thus be signified? Intellect, peering beyond the star, discovered no Star Maker, but only darkness; no Love, no Power even, but only Nothing. And yet the heart praised.
Impatiently I shook off this folly, and reverted from the inscrutable to the familiar and the concrete. Thrusting aside worship, and fear also and bitterness, I determined to examine more coldly this remarkable ‘us’, this surprisingly impressive datum, which to ourselves remained basic to the universe, though in relation to the stars it appeared so slight a thing.
Considered even without reference to our belittling cosmical background, we were after all insignificant, perhaps ridiculous. We were such a commonplace occurrence, so trite, so respectable. We were just a married couple, making shift to live together without undue strain. Marriage in our time was suspect. And ours, with its trivial romantic origin, was doubly suspect.
We had first met when she was a child. Our eyes encountered. She looked at me for a moment with quiet attention; even, I had romantically imagined, with obscure, deep-lying recognition. I, at any rate, recognized in that look (so I persuaded myself in my fever of adolescence) my destiny. Yes! How predestinate had seemed our union! Yet now, in retrospect, how accidental! True, of course, that as a long-married couple we fitted rather neatly, like two close trees whose trunks have grown upwards together as a single shaft, mutually distorting, but mutually supporting. Coldly I now assessed her as merely a useful, but often infuriating adjunct to my personal life. We were on the whole sensible companions. We left one another a certain freedom, and so we were able to endure our proximity.
Such was our relationship. Stated thus it did not seem very significant for the understanding of the universe. Yet in my heart I knew that it was so. Even the cold stars, even the whole cosmos with all its inane immensities could not convince me that this our prized atom of community, imperfect as it was, short-lived as it must be, was not significant.
But could this indescribable union of ours really have any significance at all beyond itself? Did it, for instance, prove that the essential nature of all human beings was to love, rather than to hate and fear? Was it evidence that all men and women the world over, though circumstance might prevent them, were at heart capable of supporting a world-wide, love-knit community? And further, did it, being itself a product of the cosmos, prove that love was in some way basic to the cosmos itself? And did it afford, through its own felt intrinsic excellence, some guarantee that we two, its frail supporters, must in some sense have eternal life? Did it, in fact, prove that love was God, and God awaiting us in his heaven?
No! Our homely, friendly, exasperating, laughter-making, undecorated though most prized community of spirit proved none of these things. It was no certain guarantee of anything but its own imperfect rightness. It was nothing but a very minute, very bright epitome of one out of the many potentialities of existence. I remembered the swarms of the unseeing stars. I remembered the tumult of hate and fear and bitterness which is man’s world. I remembered, too, our own not infrequent discordancy. And I reminded myself that we should very soon vanish like the flurry that a breeze has made on still water.
Once more there came to me a perception of the strange contrast of the stars and us. The incalculable potency of the cosmos mysteriously enhanced the rightness of our brief spark of community, and of mankind’s brief, uncertain venture. And these in turn quickened the cosmos.
I sat down on the heather. Overhead obscurity was now in full retreat. In its rear the freed population of the sky sprang out of hiding, star by star.
On every side the shadowy hills or the guessed, featureless sea extended beyond sight. But the hawk-flight of imagination followed them as they curved downward below the horizon. I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of stars.
If one could know whether among that glittering host there were here and there other spirit-inhabited grains of rock and metal, whether man’s blundering search for wisdom and for love was a sole and insignificant tremor, or part of a universal movement!
2. EARTH AMONG THE STARS
Overhead obscurity was gone. From horizon to horizon the sky was an unbroken spread of stars. Two planets stared, unwinking. The more obtrusive of the constellations asserted their individuality. Orion’s foursquare shoulders and feet, his belt and sword, the Plough[2], the zig-zag of Cassiopeia, the intimate Pleiades, all were duly patterned on the dark. The Milky Way, a vague hoop of light, spanned the sky.
Imagination completed what mere sight could not achieve. Looking down, I seemed to see through a transparent planet, through heather and solid rock, through the buried grave-yards of vanished species, down through the molten flow of basalt, and on into the Earth’s core of iron; then on again, still seemingly downwards, through the southern strata to the southern ocean and lands, past the roots of gum trees and the feet of the inverted antipodeans[3], through their blue, sun-pierced awning of day, and out into the eternal night, where sun and stars are together. For there, dizzyingly far below me, like fishes in the depth of a lake, lay the nether constellations. The two domes of the sky were fused into one hollow sphere, star-peopled, black, even beside the blinding sun. The young moon was a curve of incandescent wire. The completed hoop of the Milky Way encircled the universe.
In a strange vertigo, I looked for reassurance at the little glowing windows of our home. There they still were; and the whole suburb, and the hills. But stars shone through all. It was as though all terrestrial things were made of glass, or of some more limpid, more ethereal vitreosity. Faintly the church clock chimed for midnight. Dimly, receding, it tolled the first stroke.
Imagination was now stimulated to a new, strange mode of perception. Looking from star to star, I saw the heaven no longer as a jewelled ceiling and floor, but as depth beyond flashing depth of suns. And though for the most part the great and familiar lights of the sky stood forth as our near neighbours, some brilliant stars were seen to be in fact remote and mighty, while some dim lamps were visible only because they were so near. On every side the middle distance was crowded with swarms and streams of stars. But even these now seemed near; for the Milky Way had receded into an incomparably greater distance. And through gaps in its nearer parts appeared vista beyond vista of luminous mists, and deep perspectives of stellar populations.
The universe in which fate had set me was no spangled chamber, but a perceived vortex of star-streams. No! It was more. Peering between the stars into the outer darkness, I saw also, as mere flecks and points of light, other such vortices, such galaxies, sparsely scattered in the void, depth beyond depth, so far afield that even the eye of imagination could find no limits to the cosmical, the all-embracing galaxy of galaxies. The universe now appeared to me as a void wherein floated rare flakes of snow, each flake a universe.
Gazing at the faintest and remotest of all the swarm of universes, I seemed, by hypertelescopic imagination, to see it as a population of suns; and near one of those suns was a planet, and on that planet’s dark side a hill, and on that hill myself. For our astronomers assure us that in this boundless finitude which we call the cosmos the straight lines of light lead not to infinity but to their source. Then I remembered that, had my vision depended on physical light, and not on the light of imagination, the rays coming thus to me ‘round’ the cosmos would have revealed, not myself, but events that had ceased long before the Earth, or perhaps even the Sun, was formed.
But now, once more shunning these immensities, I looked again for the curtained windows of our home, which, though star-pierced, was still more real to me than all the galaxies. But our home had vanished, with the whole suburb, and the hills too, and the sea. The very ground on which I had been sitting was gone. Instead there lay far below me an insubstantial gloom. And I myself was seemingly disembodied, for I could neither see nor touch my own flesh. And when I willed to move my limbs, nothing happened. I had no limbs. The familiar inner perceptions of my body, and the headache which had oppressed me since morning, had given way to a vague lightness and exhilaration.
When I realized fully the change that had come over me, I wondered if I had died, and was entering some wholly unexpected new existence. Such a banal possibility at first exasperated me. Then with sudden dismay I understood that if indeed I had died I should not return to my prized, concrete atom of community. The violence of my distress shocked me. But soon I comforted myself with the thought that after all I was probably not dead, but in some sort of trance, from which I might wake at any minute. I resolved, therefore, not to be unduly alarmed by this mysterious change. With scientific interest I would observe all that happened to me.
I noticed that the obscurity which had taken the place of the ground was shrinking and condensing. The nether stars were no longer visible through it. Soon the earth below me was like a huge circular table-top, a broad disc of darkness surrounded by stars. I was apparently soaring away from my native planet at incredible speed. The sun, formerly visible to imagination in the nether heaven, was once more physically eclipsed by the Earth. Though by now I must have been hundreds of miles above the ground, I was not troubled by the absence of oxygen and atmospheric pressure. I experienced only an increasing exhilaration and a delightful effervescence of thought. The extraordinary brilliance of the stars excited me. For, whether through the absence of obscuring air, or through my own increased sensitivity, or both, the sky had taken on an unfamiliar aspect. Every star had seemingly flared up into higher magnitude. The heavens blazed. The major stars were like the headlights of a distant car. The Milky Way, no longer watered down with darkness, was an encircling, granular river of light.
Presently, along the Planet’s eastern limb, now far below me, there appeared a faint line of luminosity; which, as I continued to soar, warmed here and there to orange and red. Evidently I was travelling not only upwards but eastwards, and swinging round into the day. Soon the sun leapt into view, devouring the huge crescent of dawn with his brilliance. But as I sped on, sun and planet were seen to drift apart, while the thread of dawn thickened into a misty breadth of sunlight. This increased, like a visibly waxing moon, till half the planet was illuminated. Between the areas of night and day, a belt of shade, warm-tinted, broad as a sub-continent, now marked the area of dawn. As I continued to rise and travel eastwards, I saw the lands swing westward along with the day, till I was over the Pacific and high noon.
The Earth appeared now as a great bright orb hundreds of times larger than the full moon. In its centre a dazzling patch of light was the sun’s image reflected in the ocean. The planet’s circumference was an indefinite breadth of luminous haze, fading into the surrounding blackness of space. Much of the northern hemisphere, tilted somewhat toward me, was an expanse of snow and cloud-tops. I could trace parts of the outlines of Japan and China, their vague browns and greens indenting the vague blues and greys of the ocean. Toward the equator, where the air was clearer, the ocean was dark. A little whirl of brilliant cloud was perhaps the upper surface of a hurricane. The Philippines and New Guinea were precisely mapped. Australia faded into the hazy southern limb.
The spectacle before me was strangely moving. Personal anxiety was blotted out by wonder and admiration; for the sheer beauty of our planet surprised me. It was a huge pearl, set in spangled ebony. It was nacrous, it was an opal. No, it was far more lovely than any jewel. Its patterned colouring was more subtle, more ethereal. It displayed the delicacy and brilliance, the intricacy and harmony of a live thing. Strange that in my remoteness I seemed to feel, as never before, the vital presence of Earth as of a creature alive but tranced and obscurely yearning to wake.
I reflected that not one of the visible features of this celestial and living gem revealed the presence of man. Displayed before me, though invisible, were some of the most congested centres of human population. There below me lay huge industrial regions, blackening the air with smoke. Yet all this thronging life and humanly momentous enterprise had made no mark whatever on the features of the planet. From this high look-out the Earth would have appeared no different before the dawn of man. No visiting angel, or explorer from another planet, could have guessed that this bland orb teemed with vermin, with world-mastering, self-torturing, incipiently angelic beasts.
II INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL
While I was thus contemplating my native planet, I continued to soar through space. The Earth was visibly shrinking into the distance, and as I raced eastwards, it seemed to be rotating beneath me. All its features swung westwards, till presently sunset and the Mid-Atlantic appeared upon its eastern limb, and then the night. Within a few minutes, as it seemed to me, the planet had become an immense half-moon. Soon it was a misty, dwindling crescent, beside the sharp and minute crescent of its satellite.
With amazement I realized that I must be travelling at a fantastic, a quite impossible rate. So rapid was my progress that I seemed to be passing through a constant hail of meteors. They were invisible till they were almost abreast of me; for they shone only by reflected sunlight, appearing for an instant only, as streaks of light, like lamps seen from an express train. Many of them I met in head-on collision, but they made no impression on me. One huge irregular bulk of rock, the size of a house, thoroughly terrified me. The illuminated mass swelled before my gaze, displayed for a fraction of a second a rough and lumpy surface, and then engulfed me. Or rather, I infer that it must have engulfed me; but so swift was my passage that I had no sooner seen it in the middle distance than I found myself already leaving it behind.
Very soon the Earth was a mere star. I say soon, but my sense of the passage of time was now very confused. Minutes and hours, and perhaps even days, even weeks, were now indistinguishable.
While I was still trying to collect myself, I found that I was already beyond the orbit of Mars, and rushing across the thoroughfare of the asteroids. Some of these tiny planets were now so near that they appeared as great stars streaming across the constellations. One or two revealed gibbous, then crescent forms before they faded behind me.
Already Jupiter, far ahead of me, grew increasingly bright and shifted its position among the fixed stars. The great globe now appeared as a disc, which soon was larger than the shrinking sun. Its four major satellites were little pearls floating beside it. The planet’s surface now appeared like streaky bacon, by reason of its cloud-zones. Clouds fogged its whole circumference. Now I drew abreast of it and passed it. Owing to the immense depth of its atmosphere, night and day merged into one another without assignable boundary. I noted here and there on its eastern and unilluminated hemisphere vague areas of ruddy light, which were perhaps the glow cast upwards through dense cloud by volcanic upheavals.
In a few minutes, or perhaps years, Jupiter had become once more a star, and then was lost in the splendour of the diminished but still blazing sun. No other of the outer planets lay near my course, but I soon realized that I must be far beyond the limits of even Pluto’s orbit. The sun was now merely the brightest of the stars, fading behind me.
At last I had time for distress. Nothing now was visible but the starry sky. The Plough, Cassiopeia, Orion, the Pleiades, mocked me with their familiarity and their remoteness. The sun was now but one among the other bright stars. Nothing changed. Was I doomed to hang thus for ever out in space, a bodiless view-point? Had I died? Was this my punishment for a singularly ineffectual life? Was this the penalty of an inveterate will to remain detached from human affairs and passions and prejudices?
In imagination I struggled back to my suburban hill-top. I saw our home. The door opened. A figure came out into the garden, lit by the hall light. She stood for a moment looking up and down the road, then went back into the house. But all this was imagination only. In actuality, there was nothing but the stars.
After a while I noticed that the sun and all the stars in his neighbourhood were ruddy. Those at the opposite pole of the heaven were of an icy blue. The explanation of this strange phenomenon flashed upon me. I was still travelling, and travelling so fast that light itself was not wholly indifferent to my passage. The overtaking undulations took long to catch me. They therefore affected me as slower pulsations than they normally were, and I saw them therefore as red. Those that met me on my headlong flight were congested and shortened, and were seen as blue.
Very soon the heavens presented an extraordinary appearance, for all the stars directly behind me were now deep red, while those directly ahead were violet. Rubies lay behind me, amethysts ahead of me[2q]. Surrounding the ruby constellations there spread an area of topaz stars, and round the amethyst constellations an area of sapphires. Beside my course, on every side, the colours faded into the normal white of the sky’s familiar diamonds. Since I was travelling almost in the plane of the galaxy, the hoop of the Milky Way, white on either hand, was violet ahead of me, red behind. Presently the stars immediately before and behind grew dim, then vanished, leaving two starless holes in the heaven, each hole surrounded by a zone of coloured stars. Evidently I was still gathering speed. Light from the forward and the hinder stars now reached me in forms beyond the range of my human vision.
