Aliens Never Invented the Wheel: Many aquatic civilizations stagnate in industry due to the difficulty in creating fires underwater.There are even some that are made of sound, some have time but lack space. Alien Geometries: Not all of the Star Maker's creations are Euclidean.An Aesop: It is important to love your neighbor, and to balance action with contemplation.After examining several individual alien societies in some detail, the book's perspective gradually pulls back from a planetary to a galactic scale, then to a universal scale, and finally to a viewpoint that encompasses the Star Maker himself and all of his various created universes.Īlso like its predecessor, it's told through the framing device of a man (Stapledon himself, presumably) being given this 'guided tour' of reality telepathically by advanced beings from the future.

Like Last and First Men, the story's viewpoint grows broader and broader as it progresses, though this time it is a broadness not only of time but of space. When he decided that the former book - which chronicled the entire (future) history of humankind - had not been nearly ambitious enough, Stapledon followed it up with a history of the entire universe, culminating in a brief glimpse into the nature and history of God himself (the titular Star Maker). Star Maker is a 1937 Science Fiction novel by Olaf Stapledon, and a sequel of sorts to Last and First Men.

Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon