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There's a theory that, no matter what the author appears to be writing about, really he's writing about himself. I find this theory quite appealing, and, even though I don't believe it 100%, I think it's often a good way to try and understand why you like a book.

Star Maker is an interesting test case. In an earlier book, Last and First Men, the author described the billion-year future history of the human race. Now, he has expanded the scope into a history of the entire universe. The human race just appears for an incidental sentence or two; we aren't important in this larger scheme of things.

In Stapledon's vision, one of the most significant things that happens is the discovery that stars are living, sentient creatures. They appear to be orbiting the galactic core under the force of gravity, but really they are all caught up in a huge, slow dance that has some profound religious significance to them. Planet-bound life-forms find this out the hard way when they try to move a star out of its orbit. This triggers a savage war between the stars and the "vermin" (as the stars call them) that live on planets. The human race is an incidental casualty, and never even understands the cause of its own demise.

Finally, after billions of years of strife, stars and "vermin" make peace. It's possible for all the living creatures in the Universe to join together into a mystical cosmic unity. However, the war has taken so long that the Universe is now close to its end; the hydrogen in the stars is almost exhausted, and when they burn down all life will cease with them. But none the less, the Cosmic Mind has formed just in time. While there is still a little fuel left in the stars, it is contacted by the Universe's Creator, and is able to commune with Him for an eternal moment. This is what the Universe was for.

It's an impressive vision, and the book is quite well-written. Stapledon was apparently a friend of Virginia Woolf. I'd love to know if she read it. And going back to where we came in, yes, I do believe that really he is writing about himself. He is the Universe, and he didn't manage to get his act together until it was almost too late. I can't find any hard evidence to support this claim, but on the other hand I can't explain the strange poignancy of the final chapters in any other way.

Since reading this book, I have had dreams in which I, too, was the entire Universe. I even woke up once vaguely remembering the relativistic field equations which described my overall dynamics. (They were, needless to say, nonsense). I wonder if this is a common occurrence among people who read Stapledon?