ISBN ?

"A man sits quietly on a suburban hillside. Then, a moment later, he is whirling through time and space in search of the Star Maker behind the cosmos. Like H.G.Wells's Time Traveller, he visits many worlds, and eventually he is joined by others to form a strange mental community, reacting multidimensionally to a mind-spinning range of experiences." [publisher's bumpf, UK pbk]

"Star Maker begins, in some respects, where Last and First Men left off. An unnamed human being, the disembodied 'I' of the book, falls into a kind of trance, a 'hawk-flight' of the imagination, while sitting amid the heather on a hill close to his home. The 'I''s essence is drawn away from Earth, into the solar system and then beyond, farther and farther, and faster...

"Travelling faster than light, the traveller meets other mental cosmic adventures. They explore endless worlds, endless modes of life, in which Stapledon's ingenuity in creating varied species of men as demonstrated in Last and First Men is completely eclipsed. Here, under all sorts of alien conditions, he shows us many 'strange mankinds', as he calls them -- among them centaurs,...human echinoderms, and intelligent ships, as well as symbiotic races, multiple minds, composite beings, mobile plant men, and other teeming variants of the life force. Utopias, interstellar-ship travel, war between planets, galactic empires, terrible crises in galactic history, telepathic sub-galaxies going down in madness...until a galactic utopia becomes a possibility. In all this, the history of Last and First Men appears as a couple of paragraphs, lost among greater things. Stapledon is truly frightening at times.

"He keeps turning the volume up. We move to para-galactic scale...

"The scale increases. The 'I' is now part of the cosmic mind, listening to muttered thoughts of nebulae as it goes in quest of the Star Maker itself...

"The range of cosmoses is continued, up the scale, as the Star Maker's own skill and perception are improved by his models...

"Beyond that, the cosmic mind wakes....

"This is a new -- and so far unsurpassed -- version of the spiritual voyage." --Brian W.Aldiss (in Trillion Year Spree , 1986).

"Stapledon covers the panorama of posthuman and alien races. This book is an index of concepts, an itinerary of future fiction. Absolutely brilliant." --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , 23 November 1995)

Classic. Highly recommended.

• Books by Olaf Stapledon