The characterization is not the greatest, but also not that necessary to begin with which is usual for this genre. But whenever he got into the politics, he lost me a bit. He is the best at describing some phenomena and different civilizations, those passages were great.
Olaf Stapledon is a visionary and probably the grandfather of all hard science fiction and I respect him for the plethora of ideas here, but the execution is not as visionary and, much like most of the books from his time, his writing is too difficult, to entangled and with way too long sentences in my opinion. Arthur Clarke also writes hard sci-fi with a lot of science talk in it, but he phrases his sentences in a shorter, easier and more accessible manner so that is why I prefer his writing much more. Star Maker is a dull read that isn’t too long as this is an epic story, but it should have been written in a more accessible manner for readers. But the second half became too documentary-like and thus it went off the rails in my opinion. Some of the highlights here include the various alien species and the descriptive passages there are excellent, the ending, the beginning is very intriguing and the entire first half was pretty great to me. I guess he wanted to be even more ambitious, but it wasn’t needed as this was always going to be a hugely ambitious SF work. And that duality was frustrating and not at all welcome here. But it isn’t as it isn’t real and it is fictional in its story. So Star Maker is basically a documentary, a non-fiction book in its style of writing. But I also want to say that it features a pretty problematic approach to its storytelling. I am not only saying that it is tedious and it truly is like that in most of its second half. But the relationship between the creator and the creation was simply a fascinating read and to me the book serves as a great proponent of agnosticism.īut as I said above, this is a very difficult read. The relationships between different alien civilizations and the importance of them is probably the best established and most important theme.
So obviously it deals with very fascinating and ambitious themes and it truly is one of the most ambitious and all-encompassing sci-fi novels that I’ve read. It tackles philosophical themes such as the essence of life, of birth, decay and death, and the relationship between creation and creator. It describes the history of life in the universe. Or he is the flavor of creativity pervading all things “ It is a pretty admirable, yet frustratingly uninvolving book.
Star Maker is a 1937 science fiction novel written by Olaf Stapledon.
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