Nebula Maker

by Olaf Stapledon

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.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Excerpted from wikipedia:
William Olaf Stapledon was a British philosopher and author of several influential works of science fiction.

Stapledon's writings directly influenced Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Stanisław Lem, C. S. Lewis and John Maynard Smith and indirectly influenced many others, contributing many ideas to the world of science fiction.

Reviews

[Nihal Vrana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nobody has reached the heights of non-anthropomorphic imagination as Stapledon yet. It is not the feat of imagining Nebulae as sentient beings; it is the details of their sentience that made me shudder. It does not have the completeness of Star Maker and towards the end, it slightly fell to the more standard sci-fi formula (with a touch of ideas from Saints and Revolutionaries book of Stapledon, which is a bad fit in my opinion). But still it is an inspiring book. I love Stapledon's "Philosophy thinly-veiled as a sci-fi novel" style; I wish more people could pull that off.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a first draft/prologue/retread of the long-history-telling of Star Maker or Last and First Men, so Bright Heart Jesus and Fire Bolt Lenin were the only new bits. It was still more imaginative than many, many people have ever been.

At one point while reading this, I thought up a new way to describe Stapledon to people who haven't heard of him: sort of like Emerson, if Emerson liked wandering in deep space and looking billions of years into the future.

From Emerson's "The Over-soul," (an idea mentioned in Nebula Maker): "We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul."

Buncha (glorious) hippies.

[Peter O'Brien · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Even now, in our human era, all are not dead. Some, like our own great galaxy, retain a smouldering core, organic and distressfully alive. In this galaxy of ours the vital core is hidden from man by huge clouds of dead and non-luminous matter; but our astronomers have already guessed its existence, though not its vital constitution. Most of the flesh of our once superb and ardent nebula, most of the sensitive and agile organs with which it perceived and created beauty, crumbled long ago into that inconceivably sparse dust of stars which now surrounds us. But the old heart, or rather brain, still maunders on to itself about the glorious and tragic past and about its present blind isolation and misery" - page 125.

Only Stapledon would have the imagination to suggest that a cloud could have sentience and could be a part of a vaster cosmic community of nebulae who go about searching for their purpose in the universe, only to discover that their endeavours are all in folly.

Nebula Maker comprises the initial section of an early draft of what Stapledon would later mould into his seminal and vastly more expansive work Star Maker. As Nebula Maker and its tale of the nebulae of the cosmos is in many ways very different to its later reconfigured version in Star Maker, Nebula Maker can very much be considered as its own piece, operating almost as a "what if" alternative to Stapledon's imaginings in Star Maker.

As Nebula Maker is only comprised of the first section of Stapledon's initial manuscript, it is only a complete story where the Nebulae are concerned and, considering just how different Stapledon's speculations on God and the expanse of reality are presented as being in this work, it leaves you wondering what tales and speculations the other sections of his initial manuscript may have told.

Stapledon had an intellect that could have shared so much more with the world and what we now retain of his body of work are only the barest fragments of his potential, but we should still be glad to enjoy those small insights of the great star gazer.

[Sol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Olaf Stapledon's rich imagination and depth of moral sense continues to astound me. In this novella, he writes a brief history of a species of being who are simultaneously alien and incomprehensible in their origins, mentality and desires, and yet human in their sorrows and failures. His explanation of how their origin, biology and growth shapes their mentality and society (or lack thereof) is wonderful. This is the prototype of part of what become his magnum opus, Star Maker, but it is much larger than what it became in the final product, a couple of pages. The nebula here are more active than in the final product, and have a far more detailed history. That in itself is a bit of a failing - sometimes it's easy to forget he's describing inconceivably larger clouds of gas that communicate via light pulses and cannibalize each other to produce fuel and weaponry. The handwavey nature of the nebular technology is also a bit of a disappointment. I imagine that these concerns might be part of why this material was so cut down for the final product, while preserving their more alien mentality.

Though it's an unfinished draft, it tells a complete story, ending on a brief "interlude", into nothing. A version of the first half of Star Maker? An opposite scale story of creatures similar to those of Stapledon's The Flames (or smaller)? There might be an answer in some journal or letter he wrote.

Finally, I was made to wonder what Stapledon might have written about black holes had he known of them - he mentions the bright heart of the galaxy, but we are now told that it contains a supermassive black hole at its centre. What part would these have played in Star Maker had he known of them? Would he have written about them if he had lived a decade or two longer?