The main reason I watch all your videos isn't for good recommendations: It's because watching you express your thoughts and feelings with such clarity is somehow cathartic. I LOVE these videos.
If you want to reread _Star Maker,_ despite it being boring, I would recommend seeking out his _Last and First Men_ instead, which has similar evolutionary, cosmic themes, but on a smaller, more manageable scale (just the solar system, instead of the entire universe). It's a future history of Humanity as new species of Men replace old ones in an almost endless cycle. It is, like _Star Maker_ almost all world-buiding. But its presentation as a history gives it a narrative frame which feels a bit lacking in the later book. Arthur C Clarke read and admired Stapledon, who was clearly an influence on his more cosmic stories.
4th recommendation. Agree with all of the above. Last and First Men I read first, really enjoyed (being in my 20s, not sure if I would now I'm half way through my 40s), Star Maker I read second. Both pretty mind blowing books!
Was quite impressed with Last and First Men as a teenager, but I haven't gotten around to read more by Stapledon since. His works are now waiting on my Kobo, hopefully I'll find them as interesting as the book back then.
I read Starmaker in the 1990s when it was out of print - my local book shop, which had such a service to look for works in the second hand market, thankfully found a copy for me. The reason I asked for it was I had just read Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove's history of SF "Trillion Year Spree" which gushed over it. Thus I probably treasured this book a bit more than I should have! Sure, it's not really a novel. Where's the plot? Sure, it's expositional. But.... ....Every chapter kinda blew my mind. I loved the movement from damp hillside to multi-universal overview, always bigger and more expansive the more you got into it.. And. so. many. ideas. I was in deep SF at the time, and this almost felt like the closest to my bible. Nowadays, I don't know if it would still have the same effect. A lot of the concepts are out there, partially instigated by Stapledon and his influence on other writers as you say. Thus I don't think I would fervently recommend this book to anyone, because it is such an outlier. Still have lots of love for it!
John Clute's Illustrated SF Encyclopaedia did the same thing for me during the late 90s and early 00s. Discovered so many new SF authors and had moved from small town to big city so could scour second hand book shops with huge SF sections. Golden period of my life and love of SF
I'm glad you finally read Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon is my favorite author by far. I have often found myself going back to revisit specific sections of Last and First Men and Star Maker. In addition, several of his other books are companions to these like Last Men in London and Nebula Maker, which was a kind of early draft of Star Maker
The Drowned World reminded me of some of Ray Bradbury's fiction -- characters moving through an environment that is richly imbued with symbolism, to the extent that the barrier between internal psychology and external reality seems quite permeable. The main standoff between "British backbone" and a corrupt and decadent form of colonialism felt like something straight out of Joseph Conrad.
I'm really enjoying the subtle addition of the b-reel interpositions with only diegetic sound. It's something that I didn't know I wanted or needed from these reviews, but I'm so glad they are here now. Feels like I'm witnessing a booktuber transform into a book short filmmaker in real time. Great video, as always.
I have bought two books because of your videos: "Fire Upon the Deep" & "Orphans of the Sky". Look forward to reading both of them. Thanks, great channel.
Just finished The Word for World is Forest. I had added it to my list after seeing it on your channel and wanted to come back and see your take. This was my first Le Guin and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Great to see how much of an impact can be pinched into about 30K words. The writing style was fluid, sitting within the mind of the POV, then a quick real-world action, then back into the thoughts of the character. Next is Downward to the Earth. Thank you Bookpilled
The bookstore around the corner from my apartment has a Star of the Unborn copy behind their front desk priced at $75. This is your doing, Matt. (luckily i found my copy there the day after you posted your review at the same store for $3)
Your review of Starmaker is almost exactly how I felt about it. It's both enthralling and incredibly tedious. It's like the driest textbook you've ever read full of some of the most interesting information you've ever seen. Stapledon was incredibly ahead of his time, thinking up concepts like Dyson spheres (Which Dyson himself said should have been credited to Stapledon) and planetary hive minds decades ahead of other writers. He's evidently far better known and read in his native England but it's nice to see him get some greater recognition these days. As others have recommended, First and Last Men is a more approachable novel that has a lot of similar themes that is helped by limiting his scope. I would also definitely recommend Sirius, a lesser known work of his. It's very much a more 'standard' novel that mostly focuses on 3 characters set in a WWII analog setting where a set of experimental dogs with human level intelligence have been created. It also features a love triangle that reads like something you'd come across in one of the seedier corners of AO3.
love star maker. I read it a couple years ago after i heard it was the origin of the dyson sphere. really enjoyable book. it felt like a sci-fi reimagining of the divine comedy.
"The Word for World is Forest", I read also as a story of how a new behavioural pattern or a new possibility of life is forced to come into existence, through the relentless misuse delivered by the hands of the humans (led by Davidson). Killing or murder for the first time (in living memory), becomes a behavioural pattern available on Forest via the sacrifice of one of the natives.
I have received so much from your videos in the two months I have been a member. You are an example of emotional, philosophical, intellectual, and existential curiosity that I find refreshing, nourishing, and encouraging. Thank you.
I just found your channel via a comment by another booktuber. I really love how brutally honest you seem to be about the books. It gives me a good idea if certain faults could be something that I can work through and still enjoy the book.
Accidentally, I am reading the Star Maker right now. Rarely have I seen such a gem. It is deeply philosophical and, dare I say, deeply spiritual. Highly recommended.
I remember hearing about Star Maker because, according to Wikipedia, it is one of the earliest examples of a Dyson sphere in literature, and (if Wikipedia is to be believed-which, yeah, who knows), directly inspired Freeman Dyson’s paper, for whom the Dyson sphere is named.
Maybe I wasnt spoiled by conventions, but when I read Starmaker in my twenties, I found it lacking all resistance, it just flowed, maybe its my Aspberger like personality...
Great to hear your reviews again, though no juicy take-downs this time! The Word for World is Forest is the only one of these I've read, and I think I've always read it directly after The Dispossessed or Left Hand. It is pretty uncompromising. Found an audio version of Star Maker on Audible - as a philosophy graduate, I'm looking forward to this one!
Star Maker is certainly something unique. I loved it. The stuff that was cut/heavily revised, and then posthumously released as Nebula Maker is interesting, but nowhere near as special as Star Maker.
Starmaker was my favorite book for a few years, and has only recently been overtaken by Book of the New Sun. I got through Starmaker in just a couple days. I think the prose is so beautiful and its descriptions are so eerily clear, that it makes up for the lack of any real plot. Well, it’s not that there is no plot. There is a progression as we expand and eventually find our way to the Starmaker himself, and I found that sometimes looking at chapter titles ahead helped me to retain my powerful interest.
Great video, good to see you again. I first read 'Star Maker' in my early adult years - on a hot summer night, I sat on my porch, opened the book and was utterly mind-blown. It probably helped that I had read 'Last and First Men' beforehand and mobile phones were a thing of the near future. 'Sirius' is lovely, if you've not read it. Nowhere near as heavy as Stapledon's usual vibe.
Stapledon was a huge influence on Arthur C Clarke. What you said about the gathering of the consciences sound very much Childhood's End. His first novel, Against the Fall of Night has some Stapledon handprints as well!
A bit off topic but I finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep recently and I have to agree with your take on the ending. I think Mercer takes away a bit from the action and character development of the story, but I can appreciate the vision Dick had for the book overall that I can somewhat look past the religious allegories. My opinion is that Dick was trying to use Mercer as a tool to explain the different ways that God can manifest through both collective belief in a communally shared vision of a deity, while also being a reflection of individual people and their own attachments to God as a guide for their ethical and moral considerations. TLDR I liked the book but I would’ve liked it more if i was religious.
Funny, what I like most about PKD are precisely the religious allegories. Not that I'm religious, it's just that I see religion as --- in part, at least --- a way of dealing with how our minds interface with reality, a kind of protocol for relating with 'what lies beyond', so to speak. I think that, in a way, PKD had a similar understanding, which is why he explored different kinds of religious expressions(even though he eventually chose to follow Gnosticism.)
So many love Ursula LeGuin but I've always had trouble getting into her stories and sticking with them which is why I've only managed to push myself through a couple of them.
I hope your (understandable and relatable) struggle to get through Star Maker doesn't hinder your project. I look back and clearly see works that turn me away from a genre for long amounts of time. VALIS did that to me almost a year ago. I haven't touched a scf-fi/fantasy novel since (which is odd since there wasn't much of that in it). It's nice to have multiple literature rabbit holes to fall into.
I've always found Stapledon a tiresome reading experience despite his obvious imaginative scope- except for 'Sirius', which I enjoyed. As for Ballard, 'Drowned' is the second in his Disaster Tetralogy and despite its fame and my love of JGB, I feel 'The Drought' (the third in this thematic sequence) is the finest of the four, as it clearly seems (to me at least) to point toward the tone of his Urban Trilogy of the 1970s. He wrote 'The Wind From Nowhere' quickly while on a fortnight holiday to earn enough money to make the jump to full-time writing and produce 'Drowned' -and he suppressed 'Wind' for many decades and the Ballard estate still refuses to reissue it, which is a shame. One reason of many why 'The Drowned World' remains epochal is its status as the beginning of the Gollancz Yellowjacket SF line as a steady, regular publishing programme, during which time Gollancz quickly established themselves as THE premiere hardcover SF house in the Uk, even though they had issued some SF prior to that book.
@@Bookpilled 'Wind' is collectable in any edition, as it hasn't been in print anywhere since the early 70s. 'Crash' will raise Ballard for you, though I would argue for a UK edition of 'The Terminal Beach' next (the US has totally different content) and/or 'Vermilion Sands' to contextualise what you've read so far in his early novels-the short stories are arguably as if not more important. 'Crash' is a whole different ball game. Loved your video setting, by the way, as you know, I like outdoor shoots myself.
Great video as always Matt. I’m pretty sure the term for low poly computer visuals in movie making is called “Pre-Viz”. I remember seeing a BTS of Peter Jackson’s King Kong where he was showing the actors how a scene would play before they’d shot it. I might have to look at that Le Guin book. I’m intrigued.
Your reviews remain excellent, top quality insight with each upload here a treat to watch in and of itself! (I suspect I'm only echoing many previous comments in saying this, no preamble straight to the point and wonderful combination of "autodidact high articulation", you're an excellent SF literary critic! keep it up!) You've got me super intrigued to read Olaf Stapledon now, as I'm typing this out at my local library it turns out both Last and First Men and Star Maker are available on hand. I've got a copy of Le Guin's novella too, with the Tor reprint cover artwork of the forested/water planet. Drowned World is on the list too, no doubt. Great stuff, enjoy your travels sir!
Never read the drowned world by Ballard but I've heard that he used the climate change and reversion of evolution as a symbol for the fall of the british empire. Because climate change wasn't having causes associated to it back then and the fall of the british empire also didn't have causes associated with it for most people.
I loved all these three books. I agree with the sense of the weaknesses of these books. I read a piece by LeGuin where she says she regretted the anger in "The Word For World". Apparently it was a response to her white hot anger of what the US was doing in Vietnam at the time. I love the mood of The Drowned World, but felt it went off the rails a bit at the end. Stapleton I read a long time ago and was just amazed by the depth of vision. I remember thinking the ideas were just really cool. I would be curious what I would think now.
Spoiler alert: I Robot gets unexpectedly pancaked in this one. For a minute there I thought I had stumbled into a Denny’s. Fun fact: I love your videos, and I also love Denny’s!
Just finished A Case of Conscience after you turned me onto Blish, loved it. Have just got to finish a Lem and a Strugatsky from the library and then I am 100% starting Star of the Unborn! At my current rate I'll hopefully have it done by Christmas...
Star Maker's the ur text of contemporary sf imo. Can't think of too many other books that express so many interesting ideas and how they relate to human perception with such beauty.
Hello!! You might enjoy Sirius by Stapleton more in terms of easier to consume --- I enjoyed it, but i havent read starmaker yet. I felt same way about Drowned World, symbolic and metaphorical yet boring. It has made me hesitate to pick up more by him. As always, nice to see an update from you.
Yo! I am curious to read Sirius and Last and First Men. The one Ballard book I'll fully go to bat for is High-Rise. I hear from many people that his later novels are more focused. Good to hear from you Whitney.
I prefer 70's Ballard (High Rise and The Unlimited Dream Company being my absolute favorites of his) but I find The Drowned World to be a great, if somewhat tiring read. He truly manages to convey the setting in an almost overwhelming way though, and I have a very soft spot for outlandish tropical settings.
I liked The Drowned World enough to read it twice. I think I relate to the main character’s attitude toward the end of the book and the decision he makes.
I actually really liked Star Maker, more so than The Drowned World, although you're right, I would have a tough time recommending it to any of my friends, mostly due to the no characters and no dialogue thing.
I suspect Olaf Stapledon was always a hard read - long before modern SF developed conventions, before the new wave, before even golden age SF. I read both Star Maker and Last and First Men when I was around 16 or 17, mostly out of a sense of duty because of Stapledon's reputation even back then. I may have read about his books in Brian Aldiss' "Billion Year Spree". I can't say I actively enjoyed them but it did feel like an achievement, a perspective of some kind gained.
I have to read again The Left Hand of Darkness. I read it in secondary and I think I didn't understand it and I remember little of it. I picked up High Rise after I watched the film which impressed me. I can't say the same about the novel. Probably I will get back on it.
Completely agreed on Le Guin - reminds me of "alt-Westerns" of '70s-ish - noble, mysterious, oppressed "savages", cavalry fort with an evil colonel, a good-hearted lieutenant... Pretty formulaic, IMO (but still good.) FWIW, I don't think this was the main (or only, anyway) source of inspiration for _Avatar_ - I find it in _ender's Game._ In _Avatar,_ what Na'vi needed was not a "great White man" to lead them, but an outsider to do unthinkable: ask Eywa (the local Gaia equivalent) to take sides, just as Ender is Card's novella (and novel) did unthinkable: attacked the Formic's homeworld.
I found Star Maker very hard to get through - perhaps because I found the philosophy a bit trite. If I had found it mindblowingly beautiful, I could probably have forgiven how hard it was to read... But I didn't find that much that appealed to me in the philosophy. Stapledon was definitely a brilliant world builder, which made me so incredibly frustrated because he sketched and outlined so many world, with such a wild imagination - and then, as I started careing for them, he just abandoned them and moved on. Which made me just stop caring about them in the end. But... I did get through it, and I am glad I did.
OK, let's see: Read "Word for World etc." in the version that was in Again Dangerous Visions. Do not know if that is any different from the book version. No clear recollection of a piece I read 50 years ago. It's early in the Hainish cycle chronology, I remember that. Star Maker. More recollection of that than the LeGuin piece. I read the Dover Books edition, bound with "Last and First Men". If you're going to read any Stapledon, read that. A more human story. I have no recollection of having made it very far in any of Ballard's work.
In my mind LeGuin is the best sci-fi writer I've had the pleasure to read. I'm not sure who could even compete. Bradbury, perhaps, but his work is much more mystical/'weird' than hers. For those who are intrigued by her early work, she kept writing up until her death and her later stuff is as good as her classic work.
It's not my favorite LeGuin, that would be TLHoD, but I found it better than The Dispossessed. I am still trying to figure out why so many people like TD while I found it very flat.. What did I not get? Regarding Star Maker, I am a bit afrait to read that one, I really REALLY didn't like Last and First Men, took me ages to get through. Tell me it's way better please.
Unfortunately, I simply have never been able to read LeQuin's pessimism, hatred of most humanity, her obsession with the destruction of civilization, education, civil rights (everyone has civil rights, not just her favored folks), and everything else that had put an end to most global slavery except for the Communist nations. Just a non starter for me. Last year I reread The Dispossessed after 45 years, based on so many reccommendations. I still found it unpossessed of any intelligence or redeeming values that would justify the first few pages. Sorry to be so blunt. Most folks do not realize that when we pulled out of Viet Nam, The Communists mass murdered 2.5 million people in Viet Nam and Cambodia over the next 3 years. EZ to look up. Was that our problem? I don't know, but I think it was.. My calculus partner for a year in 1975 was Vin (last name intentionally blank), an ARVN soldier who escaped to the US in 1975. Vin was the best mathematician I knew in college. He told me about the war. Of course I had studied the dilemma for years, turning 18 in 1972.
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