Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker!

"In the year 7510
If God's a-comin' he oughta make it by then
Maybe he'll look around himself and say
Guess it's time for the judgment day"

Zager and Evans - In the Year 2525


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I ... guess I'm giving away the ending? Though Star Maker has no "plot" by any reasonable definition and lays the foreshadowing on so thick as to... well, shit, it's in the title.
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Olaf Stapledon is remembered for what's remained one of the most sweeping and grandiose future histories, Last and First Men, which encompasses human social and physical evolution on an ever-accelerating timescale through the collapse of the solar system. But fewer have bothered reading his sequels to that book. Like me, for one. I only got around to one of them now.

Star Maker distinguishes itself by grasping at even more grandiose fancies. The narrator, after some point-blank philosophical vacillation and by no particular causality, finds himself inexplicably lifted out of his body and relocated as an astral spirit drifting among the stars someplace, sometime, of indeterminate time and place. Observing first a race of humanoids thenceforth to ever more alien aliens, he follows the fate of the galaxy from barbarism to enlightenment and enlightened barbarism, with humans merely a "mostly harmless" footnote to irrelevance. I certainly would not recommend it for anyone who's not already into this sort of thing, but to fans of thoughtful Science Fiction it's as enlightening a read as Last and First Men itself.

Given how many ideas it throws at the reader it's largely pointless to try summarizing the book, but I'd like to focus on two aspects.

1) Telepathy. Is a dead end. For science fiction.
I've said it once and many times since and it only grows truer with every example: of all superpowers, more than even teleportation or time travel, in a universe ruled by materialist causality, telepathy pre-empts, obsoletes and negates so many other technologies and social practices that it rapidly monopolizes all the action. Every problem begs the solution "why don't you just nuke their brains?"
Stapledon casually mentions technological marvels like hollowed-out planetoids or planets-as-spacecraft, but after the "other men" and their haptic radio, tech grows largely irrelevant to the march of galactic civilization. Races contact each other by telepathy, The Federation conducts business by telepathy, symbiotic races arise by telepathy, wars are fought by telepathy, universal one-ness is sought by telepathy, etc., etc., etc. Unlike with the seventeen post-human races of man in the first novel, which largely focused on the interface of biology with the vicissitudes of various environments, the science drops out of Star Maker's fiction very quickly and we're left with nominally alien space wizards squinting and grunting at each other over the interstellar void.

2) Commune-ism.
Stapledon played up, as a virtue no less, telepathy's inherently creepy capacity for effacing the individual."The Community" is synonymous with universal good, escalating into grinding all persons together into a universal singularity with its highest goal to subsume itself into the multiversal singularity of the titular Maker of Stars itself. In contrast to the overblown swashbuckling Messianic macho space opera heroes which predominated the first half of 20th century SciFi, Star Maker's disdain for individual rights and agency and its emphasis on conjoining carries a distinctly Asiatic flair. Nobody could be blamed for assuming it must've been a much later sequel written during the hippie era of the 1960s when gurus were being jai deva-d left and om. Especially if that nobody is yours truly blameless.

Turns out the author died in 1950, however, and Star Maker itself dates from 1937(!) making Stapledon also one of the shamefully few to have openly denounced fascism during its pre-WWII formative years. While that perceived ideological opposition to fascist cults of personality might explain some of the book's obsession with togetherness, it's mythical aspects remain perplexing... until one remembers the cyclical myopia of human culture. As I've been posthumously flagellating this particular equine in my "humanity" posts over the past few years, America and Western Europe's current obsession with destroying Western individualism and individual freedom via political correctness apes to a disturbingly close degree the facetious moralizing and propriety of late 19th and early 20th century culture. They did indeed boast their own brands of fashionably risque Orientalism back then as well, and Star Maker likely both owes much of its spiritualism directly to Madame Blavatsky's insane ramblings and was at the same time reacting to theosophy's less cuddly offshoot of ariosophy.

... And there it is again, that shiver-inducing glint of recognition, the formulaic march of human self-destruction evident in century-old reflections. Anti-intellectual New Age theosophy leading to messianic revolutionary propaganda. Feel-good Pride and safe Community segue into Action and Discipline.

"Many of the great economic masters, though they had originally favored radio-bliss in moderation as an opiate for the discontented workers, now turned against it. Their craving was for power; and for power they needed slaves whose labor they could command for their great industrial ventures. They therefore devised an instrument which was at once an opiate and a spur. By every method of propaganda they sought to rouse the passions of nationalism and racial hatred. They created, in fact, the "Other Fascism," complete with lies, with mystical cult of race and state, with scorn of reason, with praise of brutal mastery, with appeal at once to the vilest and to the generous motives of the deluded young.
[...]
Of the horrors of this war, of the destruction of city after city, of the panic-stricken, starving hosts that swarmed into the open country, looting and killing, of the starvation and disease, of the disintegration of the social services, of the emergence of ruthless military dictatorships, of the steady or catastrophic decay of culture and of all decency and gentleness in personal relations, of this there is no need to speak in detail.
Instead, I shall try to account for the finality of the disaster which overtook the Other Men. My own human kind, in similar circumstances, would never, surely, have allowed itself to be so completely overwhelmed. No doubt, we ourselves are faced with the possibility of a scarcely less destructive war; but, whatever the agony that awaits us, we shall almost certainly recover. Foolish we may be, but we always manage to avoid falling into the abyss of downright madness. At the last moment sanity falteringly reasserts itself."

- and so does insanity.