Nebula Maker

by Olaf Stapledon

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

The narrator of Nebula Maker stands on a hill and sees a vision that leads him to the birth of the universe. He witnesses the creation of the nebulae and the formation of galactic communities as well as the flowering of the personalities of the nebulae. The establishment of pacific and militaristic camps and their relationship leads to events of cosmic strife, not unlike the history of our world in the twentieth century.

Release date: October 2, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 144

Sample

Though more than fifty years have passed, I can still visualize the very shelf (it was just below knee level) in the Minehead Public Library where I discovered Last and First Men. No other book had a greater influence on my life.

Olaf Stapledon’s most famous work was published in 1930, to considerable applause from a wide range of reviewers. “As original as the solar system,” said Hugh Walpole, while Arnold Bennett commended the author’s “tremendous and beautiful imagination.” It was also praised by a failed politician, now earning a living by his pen—one Winston S. Churchill. Almost at once it became one of those works that define a genre—which is somewhat ironic in view of the fact that Stapledon had never even heard of “science fiction” when he was writing his “story of the near and far future.”

Last and First Men and its successor, Star Maker (1937), are the twin summits of a literary career that began just before World War I, ended soon after World War II, and was profoundly influenced by both conflicts. One touching proof of that lies on my desk at this moment.

It is with an awe approaching reverence that I now hold in my hands the slim volume Latter-Day Psalms (Liverpool: Henry Young & Sons, Ltd., 1914) and read the inscription “Miss H. M. Barnard, with the author’s compliments. Christmas 1914.” Tucked inside is a letter to the recipient, on a single folded sheet with the embossed heading “Annery, Caldy, West Kirby (Telephone 215 Hoylake).” It is written in a copper plate, which later became the most minute but legible script I have ever encountered, and is dated 22 December 1914—four months after the guns of August started to thunder across Europe.

“My dear Miss Barnard,” it begins. “Will you please accept the enclosed small token of affection and respect, with best wishes for Christmas and the New Year. Let us hope for peace before the close of 1915…”

This first book by “Wm. Olaf Stapledon,” as he signs himself (though the W is omitted on the title page), was what would now be called a vanity edition. “Father has got it published for me, which is very good of him, as of course I could not have financed it.” This admission of dependency seems a little surprising for a man who was, after all, past his twenty-eighth birthday.

The letter continues with an intriguing remark: “I am in the midst of another and larger effort, but the war distracts one; and anyhow I cannot get it done before April, when at latest I am going to take a commission.” I wonder what that “effort” could have been; Stapledon’s next book, A Modern Theory of Ethics, did not appear for another fifteen years.

Miss Barnard was apparently a Quaker, because the letter expresses the view that the war “must be terrible for such fervent peace-lovers as the Friends. I think I shall be as fervent before I have done.” This proved to be the case; Stapledon spent three years with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit.

The rest of the short letter concerns family matters and contains a wistful reference to “the girls from Adelaide.” (Soon after the war, Stapledon married an Australian girl, Agnes Miller.) “I am longing for news. Yet I have no desire to see my cousin again till I have had my share of the war. Then we will begin a new age.”

A new age was indeed beginning, though it was hardly an improvement on the old one. And yet another was starting when an older and sadder Stapledon wrote Four Encounters, which can be dated to late 1945 or early 1946 by its reference to the atomic bomb and “prisoners of war, demolishing an old air-raid shelter.”

Stapledon was probably still working on Four Encounters when I had my only personal encounter with him, in 1948. The British Interplanetary Society had invited him to London to give a talk, “Interplanetary Man” (J.B.I.S., November 1948; reprinted in The Coming of the Space Age, New York: Meredith Press, and London: Gollancz, 1967). With shame and incredulity I confess that I recall nothing of that meeting—even though I opened the discussion and had dinner with our speaker after his talk.

But I do remember the impact of Stapledon’s personality; the two words that always come to mind when I think of him are gentleness and nobility. Though he has always had many devoted followers, in his own time and for thirty years after his death he was shamefully neglected—and even misrepresented. Now he speaks to us more clearly than he could ever address his contemporaries.

They cannot be blamed for their failure to share his vision; the space age had to dawn before the world could understand Stapledon’s thoughts and look through his eyes. It is sad that he died too soon to see the first journeys beyond the atmosphere; had he lived as long as H. G. Wells (who, aged eighty, predeceased him by only four years), he would have witnessed the birth of Apollo.

I do not know if Wells and Stapledon ever met in the flesh, but they certainly did in spirit. So it seems appropriate to end this tribute to Stapledon with his great precursor’s most famous words, which surely express the hopes and fears of both men:

For Mankind it is the Universe—or nothing.

Which shall it be?

ARTHUR C. CLARKEColombo, Sri Lanka14 May 1982

1

Nebula Maker represents the earliest record we have of the original concepts and plans that Olaf Stapledon made for Star Maker. The “Synopsis of the Book” indicates that the original plan of the work was “linear,” starting with the creation of our universe and proceeding to the age of the nebulae, the age of the stars, and on to life on planetary systems. As eventually published, the organization was drastically altered, and the origin of our universe was relegated to a position near the end of the work, the end and beginning of the universe being considered in the same chapter.

Examination of the Synopsis also indicates that many of the first chapters of Star Maker were entirely absent from the early plan and were evidently added at a later stage of the work’s development. Other differences are apparent in the concept of the work, particularly in the personalities of the narrator and the nebulae themselves. The narrator of Star Maker represents in microcosm a part of that “community” toward which all the intelligences of the universes of Stapledon strive. The narrator of Nebula Maker displays awe and disbelief as his major characteristics, and all traces of communal feeling are absent. This early narrator is rather more impersonal and distant than the narrator of the work published in 1937. A visitor to West Kirby, Cheshire, England, can still almost recognize the town as described in the first and last sections of the book. However, the suburb pictured in the original concept is rather abstract and diffuse. Stapledon added to the dimensions of the final plan by including himself in the work as narrator and inserting references which can be recognized as personal statements.

The personalities of the nebulae were altered in the opposite fashion from the early to the late design of the work. The initial concept describes creatures with a rich artistic and historical heritage; the final concept pictures rather simpler primitive creatures almost unable to communicate with one another, and having no history.

The questions naturally arise, why this change in the characteristics of the nebulae, and why was the detailed historical description of these hugest of creatures entirely removed from Star Maker? Several answers suggest themselves. By abstracting the personalities of the creatures Stapledon succeeds in making them appear stranger and more remote than could any detailed description, and the change in concept of the work required that many more recognizably “human” societies be pictured, societies with which a human reader can more easily identify. In addition, by creating a detailed history for these creatures, Stapledon originally made them appear almost human and accessible, a concept which he eventu. . .