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Star Maker inverts the compliment commonly given to nonfiction books: "It's so good, it read like fiction." Olaf Stapledon's 1937 novel reads like nonfiction--cerebral, dry, and academic nonfiction sans drama, sans conflict, sans characterization, and sans humor composed of many paragraph-length sentences. And yet, the awe-inspiring cosmological, astronomical, anthropological, xenobiological, hyperdimensional, sociological, and ontological ideas contained in Star Maker are staggering and myriad. More than 95% of the events in this book are told rather than shown, but the vision and originality here far exceeds any I've found in so-called golden age sci-fi stories of the 1940s (as do my favorite Stanley G. Weinbaum and Donald Wandrei tales from the 1930s). Stapledon's brilliant inventions in this book are John Coltrane's saxophone on Love Supreme and Dave Mustaine's riffs on Rust in Peace, though unlike those artists who employ the standardized frameworks of a jazz quartet and a metal band, this author eschews most of the aspects of a traditional novel.

Stapledon's inexorable investigations illuminate alien cultures akin to mankind, alien cultures very far removed from mankind, inscrutable communal intelligences, besmirched and self-conscious astral bodies, symbiotic evolutions, metaphysical communities, and artificial planeteers. My favorite sections deal with disruptive solar events (rare moments of tension), the space "perverts," and the alien civilizations. These aren't green, one-eyed martians, but very exotic aliens: The weirdly evolved plant men are fascinating as are the symbiotic relationships between arachnoids and ichthyoids. The bizarre progenitive rites of the nautiloids are unique, and the composite avian species is brilliantly conceived. And how about a cosmos with no spatial dimensions, but only sonic ones wherein live musical notes? Each race is worthy of its own book or movie, but is just a single chapter or page in this creative cornucopia.

At one point, Stapledon mentioned the perils of a worm falling half an inch on world with incredibly high gravity, and I could not help but think of Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity, the novel often credited as being the first hard sci-fi novel (and recommended by me as well). I don't know if Clement was inspired by Stapledon, but the point I'd like to make is that this idea---a lone sentence not even amongst top five best ideas in that chapter--was a fertile enough seed to grow an entire novel. And other key concepts in this book appear in Childhood's End, my favorite book by Arthur C. Clarke. I see connections to Robert L. Forward and (my #1 favorite sci-fi author) Greg Egan as well.

Star Maker is a distillation of the "genre of big ideas" down to just its "big ideas," and it is a vast, highly inquisitive, and mind-expanding journey.