Olaf Stapledon

Nebula Maker

By Olaf Stapledon

This undated manuscript was finally published in 1976, but it obviously predates Star Maker’s publication in 1937.

1. Starlight on a Hill

2. Creation

3. The Cosmos is Launched

4. The Great Nebulae Appear

5. A Biological Study

6. Outline of a Strange Mentality

7. The Social Nebulae

8. The Martial Groups

9. The First Cosmical War

10. Bright Heart

11. Bright Heart and Fire Bolt

12. Death of Bright Heart

13. Fire Bolt

14. The Last Phase of the Nebular Era

15. Interlude

1

STARLIGHT ON A HILL

I have seen God creating the cosmos, watching its growth, and finally destroying it.

Call me, if you will, a liar or a madman. Say I lack humour, say that my claim is sacrilegious and in the worst taste. Yet I have indeed seen God. I have seen him creating, watching, destroying.

I tell myself that I must have been affected not through the bodily eye. but through the eye of the mind, that the whole experience must have flooded up within me from the hidden springs of my own imagination. But whether the teeming and fantastic events that I have witnessed were revealed by external or by internal vision, revealed they surely were. I did not construct them. They thrust themselves upon me, compelling belief.

Others have no reason to share my conviction. Therefore simply as a story I set down the record of my hypercosmical experience, confidant that, if I can present it clearly, it must by its sheer strangeness and majesty compel at least attention, if not belief.

But can human language convey even a thousandth part of the wonders that I still so vividly remember? They unfolded themselves before me with all the forcefulness and detail of perceived reality. But how can I describe them? Here is the white page, and there “in my mind” the crowded and overburdened memory of aeons past and future, and of time systems wholly distinct from ours. By what magic can I so guide my pen that from its grey trail, and from the printed pages which its course will determine, some glimmer, some pale distorted reflection, of my experience may be projected into other minds?

The vision occurred about two hours after midnight. I cannot bring myself to describe the torturing personal contact that had befallen me earlier in the night. I will say only that it had filled me with an overwhelming, a blinding sense of the beauty and the precariousness of human personality, and indeed of one person, in whom, as it then seemed to me, all sweetness and all bitterness were together embodied. So complete was my preoccupation that I had lost sight, so to speak, of the universe. I could no longer rise above my own misery by reminding myself that personal calamity, even the complete ruin of many fair personal spirits, is demanded for, the wholeness and beauty of the cosmos.

When I had left the mean little villa and the presence of the being that had so moved me, I must have hurried along the empty streets in complete abstraction, with my mind nailed still to the immediate past; for suddenly I found myself sitting on the heathery top of the hill which overlooks the suburb and the sea.