Olaf Stapledon

It's really hard thinking of stuff to write.

Well anyways, if you see the bookshelf on the right, you will see the book 'Star Maker'. I'm going to talk about that book.

It starts with some guy. He's sitting on a hill, when, all of a sudden, his immaterial consciousness flies off into space. He starts hopping around planets, eventually finding one.
This planet is inhabited by these people. He keeps on jumping around them for a year, before he finally finds one he stay in. They both fly off into space together, and find various alien races. There's plant men, who eventually go extinct because they slept for too long, and symbiotics.

These symbiotics are made up of some sea thing and some land thing, and they go into space and build planet sized starships and stuff.

Then, they try to build an intergalactic ship the size of a solar system. The stars are unhappy (they are sentient!), and go supernova, killing almost everyone.

Then, some he-larious capers occur and every being in the galaxy bonds together as one consciousness. They die out due to the stars dying, being replaced by little white-dwarf worms that feed off dying stars. These all bond together into one, universal, consciousness, and go off to meet the Star Maker (a god). The star maker shoots them down or something, and the guy has a sudden revelation about the nature of the universe, called the 'Ultimate Moment of the Cosmos'. Then he goes back in time, and meets some nebula, and then goes back home.

The End.

Along the way, he also mentions another of Olaf Stapledon's awesome books, Last and First Men.
All in all, it's a very good piece of fiction and an excellent portrayal of alien culture.

☆☆☆☆☆


--Thomas