Science
Some of the science described in Star Maker has since been shown to be inaccurate, but much of the book is still thought to be correct. Astronomical scales would have to be adjusted by a few orders of magnitude, but the overall scale of time and space is still valid. Stapledon is an author who takes interstellar and galactic distances seriously. Some editions contain a timeline (over billions of years) for the book. It may be instructive to compare these with modern conceptions of orders of magnitude (length) and orders of magnitude (time), in particular 1 E19 s and more as well as the modern view of the ultimate fate of the universe.
Stapledon imagines alien biologies, minds and civilizations radically different from human ones. But unlike in Stanisław Lem's Solaris, all these are supposed to be fundamentally similar in the long run, since all are governed by the same Darwinian and Marxist laws of development. Some of Stapledon's ideas for alien minds, such as collective intelligence, seem far ahead of their time, anticipating recent ideas about swarm intelligence and the general fascination with networks. He also mentions the idea of virtual reality in the first and most Earth-like alien world visited, in the form of an apparatus that directly affects sense centers in the brain. The idea of entire worlds as spacecraft is used several times.
Read more about this topic: Star Maker
Famous quotes containing the word science:
“When we say “science” we can either mean any manipulation of the inventive and organizing power of the human intellect: or we can mean such an extremely different thing as the religion of science the vulgarized derivative from this pure activity manipulated by a sort of priestcraft into a great religious and political weapon.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science, because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
““You are bothered, I suppose, by the idea that you can’t possibly believe in miracles and mysteries, and therefore can’t make a good wife for Hazard. You might just as well make yourself unhappy by doubting whether you would make a good wife to me because you can’t believe the first axiom in Euclid. There is no science which does not begin by requiring you to believe the incredible.””
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)