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:
“Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.”
—Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915)
“The universe is the externisation of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth, and the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue of that Being we have.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“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)