Most helpful customer reviews
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2.0 out of 5 stars
tedious and unrewarding, Jul 18 2004
By A Customer
I rather doubt Douglas Adams "was thinking of Stapledon when he invented, in the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy [actually, in "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe"]...the Total Perspective Vortex", just as I doubt former Late Show host Johnny Carson was thinking of Stapledon when he parodied Carl Sagan with his "billions and billions" speech. Douglas Adams and Johnny Carson were quite capable of finding out for themselves, without help from Stapledon, that the universe is big and that time is vast. For that matter, it is a different thing for comics to harp on this simple-minded theme and for a science fiction writer who seems to take himself very seriously to do so. Rather than read "Star Maker" or "The First and Last Man", I suggest you read instead H. G. Wells's short story "Under the Knife", written several decades earlier. "Under the Knife" deftly and SUCCINCTLY puts the "Total Perspective Vortex" itself into perspective.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
plodding, Jul 17 2004
By A Customer
It's amazing to me that someone could call a book first published nearly a half-century after "The Time Machine" and five years after "Brave New World" "EARLY [my emphasis]...science fiction". Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" is an "early classic of science fiction", although, for that matter, the great astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler wrote a science fiction story about a voyage to the moon four centuries ago. Any way you slice it, however, science fiction had become a continuous tradition in the 1890's with H. G. Wells, and it is absurd to call a science fiction book published four to five decades later "early".So much for "early"; now about "classic": For a work to be classic it has to be (at least) 1) very good and 2) WIDELY recognized in its own time. You can have your own opinion about 1) as far as "Star Maker" is concerned, but you can't reasonably argue that it meets criterium 2). P. S.: Amazon's biographical blurb above is not quite accurate: >After spending eighteen months working in a shipping office in Liverpool and Port Said, he lectured extramurally for Liverpool University in English Literature and industrial history. Actually, after (and before) leaving the Blue Funnel Line and while teaching at Manchester Grammar School, Stapledon lectured evenings in the Liverpool area for the Workers Educational Association, NOT for Liverpool University.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A classic in more than one way..., May 26 2004
'Star Maker' by Olaf Stapledon is more about philosophy than about science fiction, but it has enough of both to make all kinds of fans happy. The author covers the history of, well, almost everything. He travels through space and time, back and forth, to explore everything from intelligent stars to the alien civilizations that rise ands fall, from simple plant-men to massive utopias. Always, he is also looking for the Star Maker, God, the Great Creator.
He even links this book to his first novel, 'Last And First Man', by talking about some periods in mankind's history, like the war with Mars. This book is all about scale. Yet while I enjoyed this book it didn't feel as well planned, as detailed as 'Last And First Man'. But I'm not sure a book of 272 pages could be said to be lacking in details. Its scope is vast and giving too many details might of limited it, framed it into too small a canvas. Olaf is using wide strokes of his huge brush to build this story.
With a forword by Brain Aldiss and a interesting glossary, I would suggest this book for both sci-fi fans, people looking for God in what seems like a godless universe and also people who just enjoy philosophy.
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