Thomas F. BertonneauContact, Communion, and the Marriage of Minds: Olaf Stapledon in Context

I. Introduction

William Olaf Stapledon (1886–1960) is the prodigious unknown of science fiction, too little kenned directly, but familiar to readers of the genre anonymously and indirectly through the profound influence of his work on the creative tradition. Other writers began mining the lode of Stapledon’s mythopoeic imagination from the appearance of his first proper book Last and First Men in 1930. The work of Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) and the late work of Poul Anderson (1926–2001), to name but two instances, have foundations in Stapledon’s text; and of the two Anderson more closely approximates Stapledon in spirit and achievement than does Clarke. Nevertheless, the Clarke-Kubrick collaboration in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is inconceivable without the example of Last and First Men and Star Maker. The late Sam Moskowitz, whose chapter on Stapledon in Explorers of the Infinite (1963) began the secondary literature on its subject, writes that Last and First Men on its publication “caught both the literati and the science fiction devotees by surprise.” Moskowitz asserts that readers came unprepared “for the cosmic sweep and grandeur of the ideas and philosophical concepts to be found in the work,” which would especially have daunted those looking for an actual novel or an actual literary entertainment.

Last and First Men—some idea of which is necessary for understanding Star Maker (1937)—constituted an astonishing first book. Last and First Men was also a rather late first book. Stapledon had indeed passed his 44th birthday by the time it reached the bookstore shelves in its quite small first edition. Who was this “prodigious unknown”?

For many decades interested parties had to piece together Stapledon’s biography from inadequate sources such as Moskowitz’s chapter, some details in Leslie Fiedler’s pioneering study of Stapledon’s fiction (but that came only in 1983), and hard-to-access journal articles here and there, including a brief autobiographical statement. Robert Crossley remedied the default with his magnificent biography, Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future, first issued in 1994. Stapledon turns out to have been as remarkable as he was modest, rarely speaking or writing about the events that shaped his character. Born to upper-middle-class affluence, the only son of his Liverpudlian shipping-magnate father, Stapledon attended the Abbottsholme School in Staffordshire and thereafter Balliol College, Oxford, where he earned a baccalaureate in 1909 and a master’s degree in 1913. Crossley supplies a telling detail about Stapledon’s undergraduate years at Balliol. In 1908 he wrote a paper, which he read to the Balliol History Club, on the topic of Joan of Arc. In Crossley’s words, “Olaf proposed that Joan was a true visionary whose celebrated ‘voices’ were the product neither of hallucination or hysteria but of ‘natural causes.’”

Crossley adds that “the essay on Joan is the earliest surviving exhibit of a lifelong interest in telepathy and mystical experience”; and he remarks how for Stapledon “the unlikely peasant girl fired to heroic action by disembodied voices” influenced the narrative style of Last and First Men and its immediate sequel Last Men in London (1934), both which Stapledon framed (in Crossley’s words) “as the work of a twentieth-century amanuensis taking dictation from human voices projected from Neptune in the far future.”

For some years after earning his baccalaureate, Stapledon bowed to parental pressure, going out to Port Said in Egypt to help manage the affairs of his father’s firm in that mandate of the British Empire. He hated office life; he wanted to write. Stapledon quit the firm, earned his master’s degree, and, returning to Liverpool, began lecturing for the Workers’ Education Association—night courses in philosophy. From 1914 to 1915, he listed himself as a conscientious objector and kept out of the conflict. In 1916, however, not wanting to appear a shirker, he joined the Friends’ Ambulance Unit. He worked at the front in Belgium and France, coming under fire, risking his life many times, ultimately receiving the Croix de Guerre of the French Republic. The 1920s were for Stapledon a time of marriage and fatherhood (his daughter Mary and his son John), and relentless writing and rewriting, culminating in Last and First Men, which Crossley classes with the “great visionary fantasies” of literature. Such judgments are by no means rare in the secondary literature on Stapledon; rather, they force themselves and occur often.

One could be a bit more specific than Crossley in categorizing Last and First Men. In its titular allusion to the Sermon on the Mount, Stapledon’s quirky book, not really a novel by any normative definition, reveals itself as an eschatological narrative, if not sui generis, then related in form and content only to other idiosyncratic books—Plato’s Timaeus, Dante’s Divine Comedy, William Blake’s prophetic poems, and perhaps to Flaubert’s Tempation of Saint Anthony and George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah—and to Stapledon’s other titles, fiction and nonfiction. In Moskowitz’s description, Last and First Men “projects the history of mankind from 1930 to the end of time—two thousand million years in the future—when one of the Last Men, through a method of temporal projection, succeeds in transmitting to his distant ancestors the incredible saga of the history that is our future.” This contact theme in Stapledon’s speculative fantasy exercises special interest. Years earlier, Camille Flammarion made the eccentric claim that Martians, who stand in advance of humanity many millions of years in the development of their mental and moral capacities, have historically made several attempts to establish dialogue with humanity.

Star Maker, like Last and First Men, purports to be the first-person account of a visionary experience, this time embracing not merely the span of human time in the solar system but rather the entire duration of mind in the minded four-dimensional cosmos of indefinitely plural extrasolar and extragalactic humanities. Such a narrative necessarily incorporates the themes of contact and communion. The narrator in Star Maker ultimately affirms reality and his sense of rightness and decency in simple arrangements that accord themselves with the cosmos, but not before undergoing the ordeal of initiation into higher consciousness. In Star Maker, the reader cannot untangle the theme of plurality from the quest. Stapleton’s two works communicate with the line of astronomical-theosophical speculation instantiated in the work of the fin-de-siècle pluralists as can be seen in the work of Camille Flammarion and Percival Lowell.

II. Fin-de-siècle Pluralism

Aficionados of science fiction know of “contact” as one of the ubiquitous themes in the genre, but they would do well to remind themselves that the same theme has also taken the form of a persistent practical project going back to the mid-nineteenth century and still going strong. Schemes to establish significant commerce with other worlds appeared in the wake of the technically refined telescopes of the period and the resulting improved astronomy. These schemes largely concerned the planet Mars for an obvious reason. Unlike any other object in the solar system save the moon, the “Red Planet” reveals a plethora of geographical detail to remote observation. Sky watchers like Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835–1910), Camille Flammarion (1842–1925), and Percival Lowell (1855–1916) thought that they detected the signs on Mars of a planet remarkably similar to Earth, with seas and continents and polar icecaps, the greening of the prairies in spring and their burnishment in autumn, and beyond all that certain features—the notorious “canals,” first reported by Schiaparelli in 1877—that betokened the industry of intelligent beings on earth’s neighbor. Schiaparelli remained hesitant about the likelihood of “essere intelligenti” on Mars, but Flammarion and Lowell took the proposition for a certainty, and they and others spent hundreds of thousands of words in speculating on the topic over the years.

The Ann Arbor Argus for 12 March 1897 contains the featurette headline, “Signaling from Mars.” By itself the item is nearly inconsiderable; it is a third-hand report lifted from Harper’s Weekly, whose editors lifted it from The London Fortnightly Review. Nevertheless, it is interesting for its vocabulary and assumptions, despite its ironic tone. The anonymous reporter’s opening sentence lets on that, “Any citizen who is tired of mundane concerns and wants to fix his mind on something higher is invited to consider the allegation of Sir Francis Galton... some one on Mars is signaling to the earth.” The little article describes a series of “Martian flashes,” which “might be read like telegraphic messages,” recorded at “one of the European observatories.” The writer, who has maintained an ironic tone throughout, adds how, “There seems no intrinsic possibility of our having relations with people in Mars.” By accident perhaps or through unconscious mimesis the writer invokes characteristic tropes of contact poetics: the Platonic desire that drives the mind to turn from “mundane concerns” and fix itself “on something higher”; the assumption that celestial space signifies; and the related assumption that the universe gives home to a plurality of worlds and many extraterrestrial humanities. Finally, in the prospect of entering into rapport with an extraplanetary humanity on Mars, the writer foresees the possibility that acknowledging marvels in the celestial realm will reendow the mundane world with its vital connotation, nowadays somewhat depleted: “We have to nudge ourselves from time to time in this age of swift surprises and remind ourselves that nothing that is new to us can possibly be more marvelous than many things that have grown familiar.”

A New York Times story from 27 April describes Harvard astronomer William Pickering’s idea for establishing communication between the third and fourth planets of the solar system. Although a skeptic with regard to any Martians, Pickering (1858–1938) nevertheless thought the possibility of a sentient fourth planet worth testing. “My idea of the best way to settle the matter is to send messages,” the article quotes him as saying, which, if answered, “would prove that there are intelligent beings on Mars.” Pickering proposed, in his scheme, “to fix fifty mirrors, each twenty-five feet square, on a shaft like the polar axis of an equatorial telescope”; furthermore, “there should be fifty staffs... bringing the total number of mirrors to 2,500.” Managers of the project should flash consistent heliograph messages towards Mars for three or four months straight and then after a pause “they should repeat the pattern.”

This same article quotes Lowell, whose bold enthusiasm counterbalances Pickering’s careful sobriety. “Not only do the observations... lead us to conclusion that Mars at this moment is inhabited,” Lowell writes, “but they land us at the further one that these denizens are of an order whose acquaintance [is] worth the making.” The Martians, in Lowell’s speculation, are “made all the more interesting by their precedence of us in the path of evolution,” such that “their presence [would] certainly [oust] us from any unique or self-centered position in the cosmos.” Precisely because they go before humanity in their term of development, and because their planet slowly succumbs to “desertification,” the Martians must perish before humanity does. Thus for Lowell, the Martian civilization “takes on an added glamour from the fact that it has not long to last” and serves as a reminder that everything in the cosmos comes under the implacable rule of mortality.

The Times returned to the topic of Mars on 9 May 1909, in a guest-written article by Amherst astronomer David Todd. Like Pickering, Todd inclined to skepticism concerning Martians, although he conceded that telescopic observation made it fairly likely that vegetable life existed on the planet. Todd divulges, however, that despite his doubts he favors the realization of Pickering’s equatorial heliograph. No matter how slim the chance of sentience on Mars, communication with it, “might... be very useful to the human race in the future development and exploitation of the resources of our planetary home.”

Nicola Tesla agreed. In the Times for 29 May 1909, Tesla wrote that he believed himself to have detected radio signals from Mars during his experiments of 1899. Tesla criticized Pickering’s heliograph and recommended powerful electrical transmissions. By 1909, in fact, persistent observation of the Red Planet had already drastically reduced the plausibility of the Flammarion-Lowell model of an inhabited Mars; the sympathetic remarks by Pickering and Dodd reveal the lingering mythopoeic glamour, not the scientific validity, of the Symbolist-Transcendentalist model of earth’s tantalizing neighbor. When Crowe, in his exhaustive study, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750–1900 (1986) suggests that at best Flammarion and Lowell fell victim to their own uncritical Romanticism, while at worst they fudged their observations and resisted opposing data for the sake of publicity, he is treating them purely as scientists while castigating them from a purely scientific perspective. One might legitimately ask whether Flammarion and Lowell were indeed scientists or whether they might have been something else.

That Flammarion and Lowell corresponded positively to something other than scientists, their respective bibliographies abundantly testify. Flammarion, who wrote prolifically throughout his long life, began with La pluralité des mondes habités [The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds] (1862), following it up with Les mondes réels et les mondes imaginaires [Real and Imaginary Worlds] (1865) and Dieu dans la nature [God in Nature] (1865); his last book on an astronomical topic, La planète Mars [The Planet Mars] in two volumes, appeared in 1892, to be followed by such titles as L’inconnu et les problèmes psychiques [trans. As L’inconnu: The Unknown, literally “The unknown and the psychic problems”] (1900) and La mort et sa mystère [Death and Its Mystery]—in three volumes (1921, 1922, and 1923). Before Lowell published his first book on an astronomical topic, Mars (1895), which he followed up with Mars and Its Canals (1906) and Mars as the Abode of Life (1908), he saw into print Chosön, the Land of the Morning Calm (1886), Noto: An Unexplored Corner of Japan (1891), Occult Japan (1894), and The Soul of the Far East (also 1894), the first and fourth of those titles being studies of Korean religiosity, in which he took a pioneering interest. Neither Flammarion nor Lowell presages twentieth-century astronomy or cosmology; they instantiate, rather, the last phase of medieval cosmology, following in the footsteps of such as Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695), pluralists both, and having an ultimate source in Pythagorean and Platonic speculation. In a more proximate way, Flammarion and Lowell are poetic “seers,” Flammarion in his associations with Poe and the French Symbolist school and Lowell in his continuation of Emersonian thought.

Once the investigator grasps Flammarion and Lowell, along with the whole of late Romantic plurality discourse, in this way, much of the peculiarity in their exposition begins to make sense. When Flammarion seems to adhere to a Darwinian vocabulary, making free use of the term evolution, he never means what Darwin or Darwin’s materialist followers meant by the term. On the contrary, the evolution that concerns Flammarion is that of mind, which he regards as the self-articulation at the microcosmic level of the macrocosmic consciousness—Dieu dans la Nature. In a Times story for 10 November 1910, Flammarion told the reporter, “I believe there are denizens on Mars, and that they are superior to us.” Flammarion opines that the Martians “ought to resemble [what humanity] will be several million years hence, inasmuch as Mars is a much older planet than the earth.” Flammarion believes that the Martians have made several attempts to communicate with humanity, the first one “hundreds of thousands of years ago” and the last one “a few thousand years ago.”

Lowell, who knew Flammarion, writes in the same vein. In his three-part Atlantic article from the summer of 1895, he argues that the phenomenon of the canals “points to a highly intelligent mind behind it.” Martian sentience must take the form of “a mind... of considerably more comprehensiveness” than the human. Such things as “party politics,” Lowell insists, “have had no part” in the elaboration of the system of planetary irrigation—the canals whose courses Lowell had so painstakingly mapped.

According to Lowell, the very study of Mars exerts a spiritually transforming effect on him who undertakes it. He learns to “look at things from a standpoint raised above our local point of view,” to “free our minds at least from the shackles that of necessity tether our bodies,” and to “recognize the possibility of others in the same light that we do the certainty of ourselves.” As Lowell writes in Mars as the Abode of Life, “Turning to Mars with quickened sense, we witness an astounding thing,” a globe “where life at the present moment would likely be of a high order.”

In the plurality discourse of the fin-de-siècle, then, the reader will detect the stubborn persistence of a cosmological view that modern science tells us is an outmoded and distinctly unscientific way of comprehending the universe. This late Medieval way of thinking cosmologically sees the universe as creation; it sees the heavens as instinct with symbolic significance, pervaded by mind in the form of the plural, extraterrestrial humanities, and as responsive—at least potentially—to the effort, not only to establish contact with those humanities, but to come into communion with the sum and total of their shared consciousness.

III. Last and First Men

Flammarion’s trope of contact corresponds rather nicely with Stapledon’s themes of First Contact. In the “Introduction by One of the Last Men,” the owner of the first person insists that, “this book has two authors, one contemporary with its readers, the other an inhabitant of an age which they would call the distant future.” A bit later on: “Thus a future epoch makes contact with your age.” A bit later again: “Listen patiently; for we who are the Last Men earnestly desire to communicate with you, who are members of the First Human Species. We can help you, and we need your help.” The “Last Men” are the Eighteenth Men, inhabitants of Neptune two billion years from now when a swollen red sun has swallowed up the inner planets and forced humanity from Venus, its refuge after the destruction of the earth, to the remote reaches of the solar system. As an evolutionary parable, only Back to Methuselah and one or two titles by H. G. Wells can compete with Last and First Men, but Stapledon outdoes his precursors and imitators, particularly in his development of the temporal involution that permits his story to be told. Under the sway of Stapledon’s framing device, a passing remark at the beginning of the book that readers might fail to note takes on great importance as events unfold.

The narrator divulges how “the first, and some would say the greatest, achievement of your own ‘Western’ culture was the conceiving of two ideals of conduct, both essential to the spirit’s well-being.” According to Stapledon’s text, “Socrates, delighting in the truth for its own sake and not merely for practical ends, glorified unbiased thinking, honesty of mind and speech.” Complementarily, as the exposition would have it, “Jesus, delighting in the actual human persons around him, and in that flavor of divinity which, for him, pervaded the world, stood for unselfish love of neighbors and of God.” Where “Socrates urged intellectual integrity,” Stapledon writes, “Jesus [urged] integrity of will.” The First Men prove too coarse in their mental and spiritual constitutions to live up to such ideals. Indeed, recurrent prophetic articulations of the Socratic and Christic motifs invariably bring down upon their enunciators among the First Men the same savage spite as befell the Philosopher and the Savior. The greater significance of Socrates and Christ emerges, however, with the chapters devoted to the Fifth and Eighteenth Men, the two sublime acmes of humanity in Stapledon’s narrative sequence.

The Fifth Men, for example, who struggle culturally to an Olympian height, incline through profound wont towards “vigorous... sexuality and parenthood.” Naturally telepathic, they experience the semimystic “laying of mind to mind” as a regular experience, and as individuals enjoy a persistent sense of “some slight acquaintance actually with the whole race.” The refined and subtle intimacy of the Fifth Men results again in a “spiritual multiplication of mental diversity.” In their cosmology, the Fifth Men arrive at a fundamental “psycho-physics” one tenet of which is that “the most fundamental relations of the physical universe were... of the same nature as the fundamental principles of art.” Thus the Fifth Men are intimately in contact with the cosmos, just as they are intimately in contact with themselves at the social level. But here a stronger word than contact seems necessary. That word would be communion.

While in their nonultimacy the Fifth Men can intuit “no shred of evidence that this aesthetically admirable cosmos was the work of a conscious artist,” they maintain an attitude towards existence that partakes strongly of worshipfulness. When their telepathic ability permits them to explore time, they do so by what Stapledon dubs “a partial awakening, as it were, into eternity,” permitting “inspection of a minute tract of the past through some temporal mind in the past, as though through an optical instrument.” Indeed, the individual explorers of time who enter into rapport with their precursor-partners come away with a conviction that past and present obtain their reality only in fusion, as a metaphorical “everlasting tree of existence.” The Fifth Men dedicate themselves to communion with mind in the universe—the four-dimensional universe of space and time—even though they fail to detect anything like a mind of the universe. Ironically, the telepathic ability of the Fifth Men derives from the tragic contact of the Second Men with the Martians. While mainly an item of elevated anthropological speculation, Last and First Men also boasts features of a plurality narrative. The Fifth Men must deal with the sentient beings of oceanic Venus—in another tragic encounter. As a plurality narrative, Last and First Men deals mainly in the morally dismal failure of contact. It will be seen that the Fifth Men successfully incorporate the Socratic and Christic impulses that the Eighteenth Men regard as the finest expressions of spirituality among the First Men, with the one exception that they cannot, as Socrates and Jesus did, feel the presence of God.

The nonultimacy of the Fifth Men brings into focus the theological theme of Last and First Men, taken in the sum of all its episodes. Ultimacy belongs to the “astronomically minded” Eighteenth Men, whose cosmotheology differs somewhat from that of the Fifth Men, and who, as the narrative device declares, have also mastered the exploration of time, so as to come into intercessory and solicitous contact with the First Men. The Eighteenth Men command a power of “racial awakening” through telepathy more highly developed yet than that of the Fifth Men; based on the psychic intimacy of their complex family and marriage relations (“sex is with us essentially social,” the narrator says), the individual of the Eighteenth Men regularly “wakes up to be a group-mind,” during which he “experiences all the bodies of the race as ‘his own multiple body,’ and perceives the world equally from all those bodies.” Beyond the “group mind” lies the “supreme experience” of “the mind of the race.” By means of this “system of radiation that embraces the whole planet,” the Eighteenth Men have revised the theory of their cosmic status. Previously they regarded themselves as alone in the universe, the Martians and Venusians having long since gone extinct. Now however they have discovered in their own galaxy, at points in space and time, “some twenty thousand worlds that have conceived life,” some which “have attained or surpassed the mentality of the First Men.”

One arrives at an extraordinary subtlety of Stapledon’s text. The Eighteenth Men cannot say whether “the beautiful whole of things is the work of some mind,” but they cannot say that it is not, either. They believe, however, that despite their impending demise in a solar catastrophe, the tendency of the cosmos is towards that “spirit” which can “awake to gather all spirits into itself.” By means of the temporal involution, such a “spirit” has already doubly appeared in Socrates and Christ, both of whom articulated their wisdom on a profound awareness of divinity, that is, on something beyond the sum and total of minds. Since, for the Eighteenth Men, “the Beginning” is also “the End,” that double intuition of a justifying Logos behind “the beautiful whole of things” might well be among the diversa that the Last Men, as they say, need from the First Men. Thus in Last and First Men the hypothesis of extraterrestrial intelligences draws theology into itself ever so slightly.

IV. Star Maker

Stapledon’s Star Maker jettisons most if not all of the quibbling, hesitancy, and requirement of scientific validation. Startlingly and centrally, Star Maker incorporates the theme of marriage. What Moskowitz describes as “the entire history of the universe, from its creation to its end,” in which “the two thousand million years covered in Last and First Men become little more than a sentimental episode in the perspective of the cosmos,” begins with an autobiographically tinged invocation of rancor in domesticity: “One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill.” From his lonely elevation the narrator (“O. S.”) can see a prospect of “suburban streetlamps” and away in the direction of the sea, “a lighthouse.” Overhead, however, looms “obscurity.”

For more than three densely printed pages the narrator meditates on his alienation from the spouse. “Bitterness,” he says, “not only invaded us from the world; it welled up also within our own magic circle.” A long paragraph follows that puts the question whether “this partnership of ours, this seemingly so well-based fulcrum for activity in the world, was... after all nothing but a little eddy of complacent and ingrown domesticity whirling on the surface of the great flux, having itself no depth of being, and no significance?”

The narrator’s sense of alienation from the earthly plane, corresponding to his conviction that “marriage in our time was suspect,” shades gradually into perceptual fixation on a solitary star emerging from the general obscurity followed by a sensation of disembodiment in “strange vertigo.” A passage in which the narrator looks down on the earthly globe from high above reflects similar imagery in Plato’s Phaedrus; it tells readers by its allusion that they have entered vicariously into a heightened mode of awareness, where the subject apperceives, to quote Stapledon, “the kind of truth that we sometimes find in myths,” and through which Stapledon’s narrator overcomes “inveterate parochialism” or as might be “primeval sleep.” As the narrator puts it, “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.” If it were so that, “Intellect, peering beyond the star, discovered no Star Maker... but only Nothing,” nevertheless “the heart praised.”

In a subsequent chapter, when the narrator has established communion with other minds that feel the same urge to praise and explore, he observes that, “the sustaining motive of our pilgrimage had been the hunger which formerly drove men on Earth in search of God.” He adds how, “We had one and all left our native planets in order to discover whether, regarding the cosmos as a whole, the spirit which we all in our hearts obscurely knew and haltingly prized, the spirit which on Earth we sometimes call humane, was Lord of the Universe, or outlaw; almighty, or crucified.”

The narrator’s first contact with an extraterrestrial being at his own level of intellectual development occurs in the early chapter concerning “The Other Earth.” One detail affirms the suspicion that Stapledon’s text alludes to Plato’s text which can also be described as a multivolume narrative describing the quest for the divine of its protagonist, Socrates. In his initial solitary state the narrator finds himself psychically drawn to a planet of humanoid creatures intuitively comprehensible by him. He discovers after some effort that he can speak to individuals telepathically but that the typical response to his self-announcement is the addressee’s conviction that he has gone mad and is unhealthily hearing voices. Resolution of the crisis comes when a peasant applies to the local wise man, “Bvalltu,” for a cure. Bvalltu, who in his curiosity never minds sharing his mental space with another entity, simply invites the narrator to take up residence. In his possession of what his fellows see only as an imp to be shunned, Bvalltu resembles the Platonic protagonist, Socrates, who also shared his consciousness with a disembodied presence. The same detail links Star Maker to Last and First Men and the dialectic of Socrates and Christ.

Eventually the narrator, Bvalltu, and their gathering host of coexplorers reinvent the Socratic formula, gnothi seauton: “In time it became clear that we, individual inhabitants of a host of other worlds, were playing a small part in one of the great movements by which the cosmos was seeking to know itself, and even see beyond itself.”

The partnership of Bvalltu with the growing community of minds redirects readers to the beginning of Star Maker and to the disrupted marriage in which the strange story commenced. Stapledon’s survey of intelligences in the four-dimensional cosmos (the explorers move not only through space but also backwards and forwards in time) is replete with images and metaphors of marriage, leading up to the encounter with the Star Maker, which itself is charged with the language of ecstatic connubiality. The narrator avows how, “at the outset Bvalltu and I assumed that we were embarking on a purely private adventure,” and how, “after a while we came into psychical contact with another group of cosmic explorers” with whom they “joined forces, entering first into intimate community, and later into that strange mental union which Bvalltu and I had already experienced together in some degree on our first voyage among the stars.” Many of the planetary races that the explorers learn to ken present a symbiotic character indicative at its own level of the marriage of minds as a cosmic telos; further, marriage customs often figure prominently in Stapledon’s ethnological descriptions of other worlds.

The so-called “Symbiotics” constitute “a partnership of two very alien races,” one of them “a fish-like stock” and the other a type of “crustacean,” whose co-evolution and convergence proceed through phases. At first “both were sufficiently human to be aware of one another as rival aristocrats in a sub-human world, but neither was human enough [to be aware] that for each race the way of life lay in cooperation with each other.” After long eras of testy rivalry the “ichthyoids” and “arachnoids” succeed in establishing “a well-integrated union.” On passing out of puberty, “each sought out a partner of the opposite species,” the goal of which is a pairing for life “interrupted only by brief sexual matings.” The narrator describes the integration itself as “a kind of contrapuntal sexuality... that was purely mental”; he adds that the partnership was always sexually dimorphic. Another world’s Plant-Men, in their daytime vegetative state, unfold their leafage towards their sun, “not in dreamless sleep, but in a sort of trance, the meditative and mystical quality of which was to prove in future ages a well of peace for many worlds.” The Plant-Men’s photosynthetic rapture approximates redemptive fusion of the alienated individual with the cosmic whole.

The stars themselves turn out to be sentient creatures, who regard planetary life in its stage of technical civilization as parasitical, until, just before impending catastrophe, telepathic contact between the two types of intelligence occasions a new remarkable marriage-like amity. The primeval nebulae from which the galaxies condensed, as the telepathic exploration of time attests, turn out to have been sentient in a doglike gregarious way and to have relished close contact with one another.

Stapledon’s cosmos reveals its entelechy: The gradual psychic unification of all sanely sentient races in the galaxy, and finally of all the minded galaxies, in a cosmic utopia whose project is to make itself known to and then communicate with the supreme intelligence or Star Maker that every consciousness intuits as a basis and destiny of creation. Stapledon writes, “As the spirit wakens, it craves more and more to regard all existence not merely with a creature’s eyes, but in the more universal view, as though through the eyes of the creator.” The mental and spiritual consolidation of the minds formalizes and completes itself, however, only in the physical senescence of the universe, close to the moment of absolute entropy. The narrator tells how “very few of the galaxies were now in their youth,” how “most were already far past their prime,” and how “throughout the cosmos the dead and lightless stars far outnumbered the living and luminous.” Populations dwindle; races adapt themselves biologically to live in the interiors of the dead stars, “each imprisoned in its hollow world, and physically isolated from the rest of the cosmos.” This image, too, corresponds to the overarching marriage metaphor of the story.

During his wanderings, although separated from his wife in time and space, the narrator has often thrown his mind back to her in poignancy, recalling the connection even in separation. Despite the retreat of the humanities into the dead stars and the resulting hermeticism of late-universal existence, telepathic communion persists, as the cosmic humanity readies itself for what Stapledon calls the “Supreme Moment.” At the very beginning of his odyssey, when he first became disembodied, the narrator worried whether he had died. The retreat into the dead stars resembles burial. The life of the cosmos thus reiterates the common Socratic and Christic insight that one must die in respect of the body to be born again in respect of the spirit.

Star Maker at this point joins elements of fin-de-siècle plurality discourse with medieval cosmology and even Ionian metaphysics. In describing the Supreme Moment, Stapledon’s narrator, who now speaks in the first person on behalf of the sum and total of linked minds of the universe, falls back on what he confesses is a totally inadequate vocabulary, what he calls his “rude accent and clumsy diction,” reliant on metaphor and other figures, and necessarily indirect. “Sensually,” he writes, “I perceived nothing.... But through the medium which in this book is called telepathic I was now given a more inward perception.” When the “veil [had] trembled,” the narrator says, “the source and goal of all, the Star Maker, was obscurely revealed to me as being indeed other than my conscious self, objective to my vision, yet as in the depth of my own nature; as, indeed, myself, though infinitely more than myself.” The Star Maker manifests himself in two modes: “As the spirit’s particular creative mode that had given rise to me, the cosmos; and also, most dreadfully, as something incomparably greater than creativity, namely as the eternally achieved perfection of the absolute spirit.” The narrator feels “appalled” before the Star Maker, “as any savage is appalled by lightning and thunder.”

The Star Maker shines forth like “a blazing source of the hyper-cosmical light” or like an “effulgent star [that] was the center of a four-dimensional sphere whose curved surface was the three-dimensional cosmos, and “the very source of all cosmical light and life and mind.” Imagining himself, in his corporate identity, as “the Church Cosmical, fit at last to be the bride of God,” the narrator spreads his wings to ascend to the Star Maker “only to be blinded,” as he says, “and seared and struck down.” The narrator in his erotic flight has met with no “welcoming and kindly love,” as he expected, but only with the “aloof though passionate attention of an artist judging his finished work... recognizing at last the irrevocable flaws in its initial conception.” The Star Maker has fashioned innumerable worlds, discarding them when they have served his purpose; and he will fashion innumerable worlds to come after he has discarded our particular creation.

V. Conclusion

It becomes evident why Fiedler named his chapter devoted to Star Maker “God Is not Love.” Fiedler sees the book’s final vision as “a bleak anti-faith based on the denial of two major tenets of Christianity, [first] that God loves us and [second] that believing in him we shall live forever.” Brian Aldiss in The Trillion Year Spree (2001) on the other hand sees the same vision as “atheism [that has] become a faith in itself, so that it inevitably approaches higher religion.”

Crossley, in his biography of Stapledon, writes with reference to the climax that Star Maker “enacts a search for meaning in a de-mythologized universe,” resembling “a contemporary Grail hunt,” but he omits to state whether he regards the meaning as found or the hunt as successfully completed. Assessing which of these interpretations stands closest to truth requires three gestures—integrating the climax of Star Maker with its dénouement, integrating the novel in its entirety with Last and First Men, and putting the result in communication with the characteristica of plurality discourse.

As for integrating the climax of Star Maker with its dénouement—one might remark that from the “dread mystery, compelling admiration,” as glimpsed in the appalling moment, the narrator, undiscorporating, to coin a usage, wakes, to himself, on the hill near his house in the same place where his adventure began. “The street lamps of our suburb outshone the stars,” as Stapledon gives him to say; and he hears “the reverberation of the clock’s stroke... followed by eleven strokes more.” In the moment of the narrator’s reincarnation, “the littleness, but the intensity, of earthly events” strikes him with its affective import; he repeats the identical phrase in the next paragraph, like a refrain. Stapledon’s text never permits readers to witness the actual reunion of the estranged spouses, but the narrator does characterize his marriage, previously flavored by “bitterness,” as “the one rock in all the welter of experience” and as “alone... the solid ground of experience.” As to integrating Star Maker with Last and First Men—one might remark that Star Maker assumes and elaborates the theories of time of the Fifth and Eighteenth Men in Last and First Men. The Fifth Men believe that, “The passage of events is real, and time is the successiveness of passing events; but though events have passage, they have also eternal being.”

The Eighteenth Men likewise believe that past, present, and future stand relative to “the sphere of eternity.” The Eighteenth Men have identified anomalous “singularities” among the past minds with whom they communicate. The text implies that Socrates and Christ belong to the category. The narrator of Star Maker refers to “the Christs of all the worlds, the human Christs, the Echinoderm and Nautiloid Christs, the dual Christ of the Symbiotics, the swarming Christ of the Insectoids.”

One might ask the question hesitantly whether the vision of the Star Maker abolishes the truth of the earthly Christ and “the Christs of all the worlds.” One might answer hesitantly that the vision of the Star Maker does not abolish the truth of the earthly Christ and “the Christs of all the worlds”; that, like Plato’s Laws, Stapledon’s novel hints obliquely at a God (or something) beyond the demiurge.

As for putting the results of these first two gestures into communication with the characteristica of plurality discourse—one might remark the prominence of the marriage theme in early planetary romance and beyond that the slightly odd intrusion of the same theme into the literarily sophisticated science fiction of the second half of the twentieth century, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars (1912), Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles (1950), and Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961).

Lowell’s detailed maps of the Martian canals, Pickering’s equatorial heliograph, Stapledon’s epiphanies of the plural Christs and the Star Maker, and Lem’s cagey suggestion that the impulse behind SETI is a literalization of the openness to grace: these milestones map the pathway along which what remains of Christendom in a technocratic age has quested and still quests after its celestial match. Men of the medieval faith built Gothic cathedrals to come into communion with the Divine Logos. Modern men who make a fetish of their faithlessness build radio-telescope arrays to detect the signs of the extraterrestrial intelligence whose existence they have classified, in a multibillion-dollar, 50-year wager, as certain prior to all scientific evidence and therefore as inevitable. Modern faithless men who make a fetish of their faithlessness also believe that cybernetic algorithms will facilitate the finding of a helpmeet and spouse. Should the evidence that the SETI technicians anxiously await ever materialize (but “materialize” is perhaps the wrong verb), it shall probably do so via some other medium than a giant microwave antenna pointed at Zeta Reticuli.

No one of the logically positivistic temperament, that is, no SETI technician, will recognize the annunciation when it happens or admit its existence should tantalizing hints suggest, as Flammarion would have had it, that it has already happened. Like the self-regarding healthy-minded “Other Men” in Star Maker, the scientific mentality will regard claims of visitation as symptomatic of psychic derangement or as indicative of a deficiency in education—as they already have since 1947. The scientists will be the first to denounce such claims, when they occur, even while they continue to fine-tune their receivers. Who then is deranged?

As Stapledon, Burroughs, Bradbury, and Lem assert, modern man is deranged: he is so in his estrangement from the selfsame cosmos in which he has his being. Modern man’s self-perpetuated loneliness is the chief sign of his estrangement, so much so that he cannot properly interpret his own longing for the cosmic “other.” “We have given our hearts away—a sordid boon,” as the poet wrote. Only through an arduous reconciliation with spirit will modern man “have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; / or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”

Thomas F. Bertonneau lives in Oswego, New York.