From my notion template

The Book in 3 Sentences

A lovely relaxing memoir written by a good friend of mine. I’ve known the author for decades now and our personalities and tastes have always contrasted and complimented each other quite well. In the past I’ve mentioned to him that he is using his “singlehood” (for lack of a better term) the best of anyone I know. This is his memoir of leaving compressed modern life and walking the continent. He remains the friend who always has the best answer to “So, what have you been up to since we last saw each other?”

How I Discovered It

The author told me, more authors should do that.

Who Should Read It?

People who spend too much time contemplating their compressed modern lives and wonder what something different would look like.

Highlights

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” M. Aurelius.

Technically, this was a safer choice than biking solo across the country. But to call it safe would be a stretch. This is far more involved and tedious. Yeah, it was just a walk through nature, but it was still fraught with peril.

Ever consider how much time is actually invested in just owning shit?

One I surely would not survive if not for the Whippet. A hybrid trekking pole/ice axe that I carry. (a tool I recommend every hiker carry)

Named the “Lost Coast” after depopulation in the 1930s, its name remains due to its inaccessibility, sparse population and rugged geographical features. The first night we spent there was in a little town called Shelter Cove.

The Redwood Forest is an extraordinary place. Thousands of 350 ft trees towering over you, blocking out much of the daylight.

For the following hour and a half, I’d attempt, successfully, to capture this indescribable spectacle in a photograph.

Snow is just frozen water why not use that? Why? 1. Because it doesn’t melt as quickly as you’d think. Nor does it provide much water. What looks like a lot of snow, once melted produces very little water. You could use your stove to melt it but then you’re wasting gas. Good in an emergency but only as a last resort. 2. Snow is just frozen, naturally distilled; water and distilled water is bereft of the minerals needed to absorb said water. It’s better than nothing but melted snow alone does not hydrate you sufficiently.

At an average of 18 inches wide it is quite difficult to find once separated from it.

As matter of fact, after only 6 months of meeting Karen I was able to quit my job cooking and make a living off the band income alone.

Previously, as a musician, most of my life I just played the drums. Contributing very little in the creative process. It wasn’t till I had hiked 1000 miles that I had the confidence to do what I did with Karen and the others. I managed, directed, created, wrote music and played the drums. All these things I found came very naturally. This was the first time I voluntarily took the leadership role in a creative endeavor. Then for it turn out highly successful made losing it quite painful.

Megadens, was a television show that remodeled private residences for the DIY network. One I had the privilege of working on from 2011 till 2016.

My theory is this. We as humans were born with an inherent ability to perceive multiple dimensions. And over time lose it. Perhaps because of diet or vaccines, air pollution, chemicals in the water or even television programming. Maybe radio waves or radar waves, microwaves, LED lights, WIFI, Bluetooth, 4g, 5g. Take your pick. It’s well documented that many children seem to be able to see spirits, apparitions or they have invisible friends. Watch or read any true stories about the paranormal and see for yourself. Animals sense them as well. You can see this in countless videos and testimonies. Cats, dogs, horses, even deer.

We’re not necessarily gifted the virtue of patience only opportunities to practice it.

Within days she was gone. Sept 11th 2021. She experienced no pain or fear. Which I am thankful for. She didn’t suffer like dad. We were told it was C19.

Meditation is mandatory. Quiet the mind. And then creative ideas rise to the top. Like wax in a lava lamp.

“It is the creative potential itself, in human beings, that is the image of God” Mary Daly

I don’t believe in coincidences anymore. I believe in omens. I call such curious encounters “landmarks” on a spiritual journey.

It seems the more one sheds the need for material possessions and desires, the more life’s journey plays out more on a spiritual level and less a physical one. And often it is rife with oddly synchronistic events.

The higher you climb in elevation, the cooler the air gets. About 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit every 1000 ft of elevation. But the air also gets thinner (less oxygen). Effecting your pace negatively. So, there’s some give and take.

In early 2010, prior to my divorce, I came down with a thing called diverticulitis. A potentially lethal condition. Small pockets in the digestive tract called diverticula become enflamed when eating certain foods or too much food in my case. These can potentially burst, leading to sepsis and a slow torturous decoupling from this plane of existence.

Practically harmless to humans, there are a variety of species of tarantulas native to Arizona.

I’ve yet to encounter a place with forests so dense. As beautiful as it is here, it feels prehistoric. Almost supernatural. The forests seem to be a separate world from the surrounding area. Once you set foot in them, under their thick dense canopy, It’s like entering another dimension.

You could spend your life thinking it’s all just a series of problems and curses. Brought on to you by society or your mom or dad or religion, government, gen x, gen z, or boomers. But it is you who is responsible for how your life unfolds. The mainstream media will have you convinced otherwise. They are wrong.

After months of hiking through the mountains and desert I’m learning more and more to be present in the moment.

The Book in 3 Sentences

1. I actually finished this book ten or fifteen years ago – I was looking through my highlights trying to find some bits about his prodigious imagination and ability to visualize objects and concepts. I did not find that, I guess I did not highlight it. The book is interesting throughout. I will probably reread it at some point in the future – putting this review into existens for the sake of completeness. A good, honest autobiography, as these things go. These days he would totally be diagnosed with several spectrum disorders, probably accurately. His descriptions of his imagination and visualization is what stands out. I will probably reread purely for that part. It’s always interesting to hear genius describe itself.

How I Discovered It

The Kindle auto discover feature.

Who Should Read It?

People interested in that era. I think the original impetus was hearing The Handsome Families “Tesla’s Hotel Room” from their “Last Days of Wonder” album. I’ve always found the phrase captivating – such a pleasant way to hint at a since of an earlier time of insight and beauty. To “bask in the light of an older heaven” as Stapledon would say.

How the Book Changed Me

I suppose the bits about Tesla’s imagination had an impact – some people really have “spikey” talents in some or fashion and that is why we hear about them a century later. It’s also odd – he was all engineering, no science.

Highlights

Genius is its own passport, and has always been ready to change habitats until the natural one is found. Thus it is, perchance, that while some of our artists are impelled to set up their easels in Paris or Rome, many Europeans of mark in the fields of science and research are no less apt to adopt our nationality, of free choice. They are, indeed, Americans born in exile, and seek this country instinctively as their home, needing in reality no papers of naturalization.

give us, through ripening years, of many deep problems; but when a man springs from a people who have a hundred words for knife and only one for bread, it is a little unreasonable to urge him to be careful even of his own

Government Telegraph Engineering Department at BudaPest. His salary was small enough to please those who hold that the best endowment of genius is poverty,

Emerson has said that steam is half an Englishman; may we not, in view of what such men as Edison have done, add that electricity is half an American?

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain. Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs.

Speaking for myself, I have already had more than my full measure of this exquisite enjoyment, so much that for many years my life was little short of continuous rapture. I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am,

for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers. Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts.

Altho I must trace to my mother’s influence whatever inventiveness I possess, the training he gave me must have been helpful. It comprised all sorts of exercises–as, guessing one another’s thoughts, discovering the defects of some form or expression, repeating long sentences or performing mental calculations. These daily lessons were intended to strengthen memory and reason and especially to develop the critical sense, and were undoubtedly very beneficial.

and make it visible. Such an advance would revolutionize all human relations. I am convinced that this wonder can and will be accomplished in time to come; I may add that I have devoted much thought to the solution of the problem.

This I did constantly until I was about seventeen when my thoughts turned seriously to invention. Then I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind. Thus I have been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas, which is radically opposite to the purely experimental and is in my opinion ever so much more expeditious and efficient. The moment one constructs a device to carry into practise a crude idea he finds himself unavoidably engrost with the details and defects of the apparatus. As he goes on improving and reconstructing, his force of concentration diminishes and he loses sight of the great underlying principle. Results

at the sacrifice of quality. My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. There is no difference whatever, the results are the same. In this way I am able to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything.

During that period I contracted many strange likes, dislikes and habits, some of which I can trace to external impressions while others are unaccountable. I had a violent aversion against the earrings of women but other ornaments, as bracelets, pleased me more or less according to design. The sight of a pearl would almost give me a fit but I was fascinated with the glitter of crystals or objects with sharp edges and plane surfaces. I would not touch the hair of other people except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver. I would get a fever by looking at a peach and if a piece of camphor was anywhere in the house it caused me the keenest discomfort. Even now I am not insensible to some of these upsetting impulses. When I drop little squares of paper in a dish filled with liquid, I always sense a peculiar and awful taste in my mouth. I counted the steps in my walks and calculated the cubical contents of soup plates, coffee cups and pieces of food—otherwise my meal was unenjoyable. All repeated acts or operations I performed had to be divisible by three and if I mist I felt impelled to do it all over again, even if it took hours. Up to the age of eight years, my character

knowledge make modern existence hazardous in many ways. Most persons are so absorbed in the contemplation of the outside world that they are wholly oblivious to what is passing on within themselves.

taken in as whiskey or produced in the stomach from sugar. But it should not be overlooked that all these are great eliminators assisting Nature, as they do, in upholding her stern but just law of the survival of the fittest. Eager reformers should also be mindful of the eternal perversity of mankind which makes the indifferent “laissez-faire” by far preferable to enforced restraint.

me. I was fascinated by a description of Niagara Falls I had perused, and pictured in my imagination a big wheel run by the Falls. I told my uncle that I would go to America and carry out this scheme. Thirty years later I saw my ideas carried out at Niagara and marveled at the unfathomable mystery of the mind.

I had a veritable rnania for finishing whatever I began, which often got me into difficulties.

But instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile.

When natural inclination develops into a passionate desire, one advances towards his goal in seven-league boots. In

less than two months I evolved virtually all the types of motors and modifications of the system which are now identified with my name. It

machines, I determined to try my fortunes in the Land of Golden Promise. But the chance was nearly mist. I liquefied my modest

“Is this America?” I asked myself in painful surprise. “It is a century behind Europe in civilization.” When I went abroad in 1889 – five years having elapsed since my arrival here – I became convinced that it was more than one hundred years AHEAD of Europe and nothing has happened to this day to change my opinion.

time. We crave for new sensations but soon become indifferent to them. The wonders of yesterday are today common occurrences. When

My project was retarded by laws of nature. The world was not prepared for it. It was too far ahead of time. But the same laws will prevail in the end and make it a triumphal success.

not less menacing than those born from want and suffering. If we were to release the energy of atoms or discover some other way of developing cheap and unlimited power at any point of the globe this accomplishment, instead of being a blessing, might bring disaster to mankind in giving rise to dissension and anarchy which would ultimately result in the enthronement of the hated regime of force. The greatest good will comes from technical improvements tending to unification and harmony, and my wireless transmitter is preeminently such.

because of the directional character of the circuit. This was perfectly self-evident, but came as a revelation to some simple-minded wireless folks whose experience was confined to forms of apparatus that could have been improved with an axe, and they have been disposing of the bear’s skin before killing him. If

This invention is a logical outcome of observations begun in my boyhood and continued thruout my life. When

Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment and merging of races, and we are still far from this blissful realization.

As I view the world of today, in the light of the gigantic struggle we have witnest, I am filled with conviction that the interests of humanity would be best served if the United States remained true to its traditions and kept out of “entangling alliances.” Situated as it is, geographically, remote from the theaters of impending conflicts, without incentive to territorial aggrandizement, with inexhaustible resources and immense population thoroly imbued with the spirit of liberty and right, this country is placed in a unique and privileged position. It is thus able to exert, independently, its colossal strength and moral force to the benefit of all, more judiciously and effectively, than as member of a league.

The proposed League is not a remedy but on the contrary, in the opinion of a number of competent men, may bring about results just the opposite. It is particularly regrettable that a punitive policy was adopted in framing the terms of peace, because a few years hence it will be possible for nations to fight without armies, ships or guns, by weapons far more terrible, to the destructive action and range of which there is virtually no limit.

What It’s About

A precursor to Star Maker – it’s interesting, and entirely about the evolution of the cosmos at the nebula stage. Stapledon is the unrivaled master of slipping the reader into some sort of cosmic point of view in an entirely beautiful way.

After reading this book and a few others by him, I think I’ve discovered the method, to wit (and very roughly):

1. Protagonist starts in an ordinary situation
2. Protagonist is suddenly thrown into some very different situation, i.e. became one with a tree, or watching God at the moment of creation or the moment of the big bang
3. Posits some multistep process of how that happened
4. Explains the later steps in the process very well, so well in fact that you don’t notice he doesn’t explain the early steps at all.

Star Maker is much better, and if you can only read one, read that one. Nebula Maker was interesting though – essentially it is a small part of Star Maker – God creates the universe and the first step (after the big bang) is the formation of the nebulas who attain consciousness and awareness of each other. Religion, war and decay all follow – at some point decaying into stars, planets and people.

It introduced the concept of Glad Beholding as a religious goal which struck me as very deep in a way I can’t define yet.

How I Discovered It

The Amazon Kindle algorithm

What I Liked About It

Stapledon is just great in so many ways, he is able to write about big topics in a dramatic way like no other.

What I Didn’t Like About It

The organization left a bit to be desired, and the vocabulary was a bit much – without the Kindle word definitions I would have been very lost

Who Would Like It?

People who like Star Maker

Quotes and Highlights

By abstracting the personalities of the creatures Stapledon succeeds in making them appear stranger and more remote than could any detailed description, and the change in concept of the work required that many more recognizably “human” societies be pictured, societies with which a human reader can more easily identify. In addition, by creating a detailed history for these creatures, Stapledon originally made them appear almost human and accessible, a concept which he eventually abandoned. However, he did make use of some of the physical descriptions in the final plan.

The nebulae are devoid of senses familiar to human beings, suffer under no economic constraints, and have not been shaped by evolutionary pressures.

These personalities are Bright Heart and Fire Bolt. They represent, respectively, aspects of human personality Stapledon considered to be the most significant in human history, the Saint and the Revolutionary.

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 humor, say that my claim is sacrilegious and in the worst taste. Yet I have indeed seen God. I have seen him creating, watching, destroying.

The apparition, taken at its face value, violated the whole teaching of modern science. I know not whether I was more distressed at my derangement, or shocked at the devastatingly bad taste of the hallucination which confronted me, or tickled by the thought of the discomfiture which our scientists would suffer were it after all proved a true perception.

“It is God, it is God,” I said to myself. But I knew that if indeed there is a God he is no more visible than the theory of relativity.

Now at last I was to behold God’s latest creation. I was to attend the birth of that intricate and tragic cosmos, fashioned of nebulae and stars, in which mankind occurs.

Beneath God’s face the innumerable, shadowy, restless creative hands aimlessly fingered the pale glimmer which I knew was chaos, the formless potentiality of matter, the sleeping potentiality of mind. It seemed that in the dark spirit which is God there was not peace but restlessness, and the insistent need to create.

God gazed long upon his creature. And he smiled. And all his hands were still. Then God spoke to the dark and slumbering germ of the cosmos. And he said, “Let there be light.”

In answer to God’s command, the atom-cosmos had burgeoned not only with light but with a space and time peculiar to itself. And I, by some means or other, had gained a footing therein; but without ceasing to participate in the space and time peculiar to God.

There now came to me a vivid and terrifying realization that between me and the human world which was my true concern there lay aeon upon aeon of cosmical history, and nearly all of it inhuman. “Oh God,” I cried, “let me be again among my own kind. Blot out from my mind the memory of all this irrelevance. Let me play out my little past oblivious of the immensities. Let me take up once more the threads of a life distressed, bewildered, futile, but my own. Let me watch the spectacle of my own world. Futile it may be, tragic it is, but I am shaped for it. And in it there are little creatures like myself whose lives intertwine with mine.” Thus I prayed. But then I remembered the thing that God was, and I knew that it was useless to pray to him; useless, and also, in some manner which I could not comprehend, base. With a heavy heart I settled myself to the task of watching the bleak and intricate unfolding of the physical cosmos, not as yet feeling its perfection, not as yet realizing that some insight into these remote events was needed to prepare me for insight into the passionate themes which were to follow.

These undulations, these ubiquitous light rays, were actually visible to me. Seemingly they were for me illuminated by that other, swifter, more searching and more revealing light, which cast by the lucent person of God himself, pervades and drenches all things.

Each feathery ball, I noticed, was slowly shrinking. And as it shrank, it whirled more rapidly. And as it whirled, it was flattened. And as the flattening continued, there appeared in the center a bright and swollen core. The outer parts of the nebula were flung by their own movement far out into space; but seemingly the tugging core still kept a hold on them, so that they developed into an attenuated disc around the heart of the nebula, and were torn into streamers and spreading convolutions. So might a dancer, pirouetting, halo her bright head with far-flung, tangled whirls.

Could these lifelike creatures, I asked myself, be mere vortices of radiant gas? But I reminded myself that the briefest of the movements which I now witnessed must in fact occupy millions of terrestrial years, and that this impression of vital activity was an illusion. Age upon age must pass, I knew, before these clouds would condense into stars, and further ages before the rare meetings of stars should produce habitable worlds.

The living nebula has no need to gather energy from the world outside its own substance. Its font of power lies in the very matter which is its flesh. Its hunting ground and its prey are within its own intestines. It feeds upon its own secretion. For the primal beings within it provide by their myriadfold ejaculations a lavish source of power.

Since they have no need to seek food abroad or to avoid being preyed upon, none of the young nebulae save those significant few which grow up in enduring groups, develop organs of external sense. For the lone nebula, experience is entirely of events within its own body. But of those internal events it develops a very poignant and subtle awareness. It has an urgent need to be sensitive to the fluctuations of its internal energies, so that it may control and organize their expression and prevent them from damaging its tissues.

Since a nebula is so large that the cosmical light takes many thousands of years to travel across it, its nerve currents, though moving at the speed of light, are in a sense very sluggish. The whole tempo of nebular life is therefore, from the human point of view, fantastically slow. Passages of thought which a human brain would perform in a few seconds would take the huge nebular brain many years.

To understand the mentality of the nebulae, one must bear in mind three facts which make them differ through and through from human beings. They do not succeed one another in generations; they are not constrained by economic necessity; the great majority of them have reached maturity in ignorance of other minds. On Earth, the individuals of a race procreate and die, handing on the torch of evolution and of tradition to their successors. But with the nebulae there is no distinction between the growth of individuals and the evolution of the race. The life and memory of each nebula reaches back to the racial dawn. The race consists of the original host of individuals that condensed more or less contemporaneously after the explosion of the atom-cosmos. When the last of these dies, the race dies with it.

Another important consequence of the absence of generations is this. The nebulae are in a sense “nearer to God” than any man can ever be. The human child, in spite of our great poet, trails but dim and tattered clouds of glory. He embarks upon life, not fresh from God’s making fingers, but warped by the misfortunes and blunders of countless ancestors; and, no sooner is he born, than he entangles himself further by learning from the example of his elders. But the nebulae wake with the divine lust keen and unconfused within them, and they pursue it untrammeled either by errant instinct or by perverse tradition. Never need they suffer from mistakes not their own, or be led astray by the half-truths of teachers whose very obscurity lends them a baneful prestige. Thus the nebulae, at least in their youthful phase, have been able on the whole to follow the light within them with a steadier will than man, though with less diversity of expression.

Not till the last phase of the nebular drama did they discover the inexorable decay and annihilation which plays so great a part in all human experience.

As terrestrial animals delight in hunting and feasting and fighting, so the young nebulae delight to conquer and tame the fury of radiation within their dense cores.

Yet an extremely complex inner life has combined with freedom from economic servitude to foster in them a kind of self-consciousness peculiar to themselves. They had no opportunity of distinguishing between “I” and “you”; but they had constant need of distinguishing between “I” and the many opposed and often rebellious processes and cravings at work within them. Though normally they could never conceive the possibility of an “ego” or a “stream of consciousness” other than their own, they thoroughly grasped the difference between the lowly and the lofty within themselves.

But in the young nebula this sense of impending revelation was not fleeting and occasional but an enduring state that dominated the whole behavior.

By its veiled creative symbolism this art, as I have said, can raise the nebular spirit to the highest reaches of religious ecstasy. In the social nebulae the dance life is of course socialized and pregnant with all manner of social symbolism. In the solitary nebulae its aim is simply the perfection of self-expression.

For the lone nebulae, being exempt from external influences, attained a perfection of physical form which was ever a source of wonder to the social nebulae. The captured solitary would of course prove quite incapable even of realizing that the shocking distortions and agonies which now beset him were caused by the efforts of other minds to communicate with him. It would very soon appear to the social nebulae that, for all his physical perfection and symmetry, the foreigner was but an abject savage, unable to appreciate the beauties of group life, and incapable even of intelligent intercourse; in fact, that he was a mere brute, physically superb, but blind, deaf, and incredibly stupid. For to the excited and babbling observers he offered no hint of the strange solipsistic intelligence and will at work within him.

Very few groups attained this perfection. Most were either too closely or too loosely knit. In the former the individual spirit was stifled by the proximity of his neighbors. He was a mere herd member, with no inner being. And because society was composed of barren individuals, social life was barren also. The dance pattern of the group was, so to speak, geometrical and fatuous. In the too loosely knit groups, on the other hand, there was no willed community at all, but only a grudging contract by which all engaged to refrain from interference with their neighbors, so as to secure the maximum freedom of individual behavior.

In some groups I found two parties identical in disposition and policy in all respects save that each considered that itself should rule and the other be a subject race. In some others, one party, through long subjection, had lost the power of independent choice and had become inherently servile. In extreme cases the subject race was so debased that they were mere cattle under the control of the master race. And often the masters themselves were by now so modified in actual physical constitution that, had their slaves deserted them, they would have been undone; for little by little they had come to effect a style of athleticism and even a physiological habit which would have broken down completely if menial service had ceased to be available. Their dance measures were so difficult, their bodily constitution and mental operations so subtle and precarious, that they needed constant assistance from the simpler, tougher, and automatically loyal “cattle” attendant on them.

In most nebular societies, at one time or other in their career, conflict between opposed parties would flare up into actual warfare. One side would seek to overcome the other either by bombarding their most vulnerable organs with concentrated radiation, or by actually grappling with them and striving to tear them into fragments. It is difficult to give any idea of the horror with which I observed these battles. Superficially the spectacle was nothing but a confused tempest of whirling gas clouds in the depths of space; but to me, who had by now learned the emotional significance of all these changing shapes, to me who moreover could experience at first hand the agony of these torn tresses and shattered cores, the spectacle was no less nerve-racking than the sight of human bodies dismembered by shellfire.

The opposing forces would be precisely matched, each individual of one troop having a special opponent in the other. Though each warrior might on occasion fight any member of the enemy force, one particular enemy was his peculiar property, his “dear enemy.” In combat with this individual he not only rose to the extreme of fury or cold hate, but also he attained a unique exaltation which might almost as well be called love as hate, since it included, along with the lust to destroy, a chivalrous and passionate admiration of the foe. This strange movement of the spirit was accompanied at its height by a violent physical orgasm which ejaculated a murderous flood of radiation into the body of the enemy and reduced the subject himself to exhaustion.

The second respect in which nebular militarism differed from our own was this. The nebulae, since they could not propagate their kind, could not rely on an inexhaustible supply of the raw material of slaughter. The average group had only a few hundred members. It was impossible, therefore, not to regret the killing of an enemy, since, once killed, he could never be killed again. It was even regrettable that an enemy should ever be permanently maimed, since as a cripple he could never again be a worthy foe.

The martial groups were not typical of the social life of the nebulae. They were definitely freaks, whose strange perversion was due to peculiarities in their early history. But though rare, and seemingly doomed to self-destruction, these perverts were to play an important and a baleful part in nebular history.

But this rejoicing concluded only the first and local phase of the First Cosmical War.

It would be tedious and unnecessarily harrowing to describe in detail this darkest age of nebular history. Everywhere I “heard” familiar cries, though in nonhuman speech. “Civilization in danger! The war to end war! Wars will never end; you cannot change nebular nature. Reduction of armaments is impracticable. Peace, with security.”

Thus it was that the nebulae, though beings who were by nature exempt from economic necessity, were trapped into the lust of a power which was useless to them save for mutual destruction. Could anything, I asked myself, be more mad, more barren, more tragically incompetent than this trumped-up greed and mutual fear? But then I remembered my own world.

The struggle became desperate. The weaker was mangled into insanity. The stronger floated off in proud but guilty self-absorption, seeking in vain to return into solipsistic bliss. Eventually he was butchered for ammunition.

To this Bright Heart replied, “No one is past saving. The underlying principle of glad beholding is in each one of us, striving for expression. That great principle, that spirit which conceived the cosmos, demands that all shall participate.”

When he was at the point of death he cried out, “Look! Look! The great Maker who made all nebulae in his likeness watches us from outside the world. His heart is bright. His tresses can brace the cosmos.” I, myself, half expecting to see a divine eternal nebula beyond the hosts of mortal nebula, looked. It was a strange shock to me to see, peering through the veil of innumerable nebulae, the almost human face of God, remote, inscrutable, intent, kindled (as it seemed to me) to ecstasy by the creatures of his own artistry.

Moreover a strange “crumbling disease” was beginning to attack him, a disease increasingly common among the minute “satellite” nebulae, and by now not wholly unknown among the normal nebulae.

Fire Bolt, in fact, was growing old. He was beginning to pass over from being a nebula to being a globular cluster of stars, a minute galaxy. But inwardly he was still almost his old ardent self, though tired, utterly tired.

Surely it was a supreme duty to organize a worldwide mission to the lone nebulae, so as to emancipate them from their solipsistic prison cells, and kindle them with the gospel of community, and the holy zest of the cosmical dance.

The advocates of mechanical power argued that although a few lone nebulae might, with infinite trouble, be educated to take a humble part in the cosmical dance, the great majority were clearly too far gone in solipsism to appreciate the beauty of communal life.

Throughout the nebular era two slow but irresistible changes, independent but interacting, were setting a limit to the life of any possible cosmical community of nebulae, and to the lives of individual nebulae also. The first of these was the continued expansion of the cosmos, the second was the senescence of the individual nebulae.

For by now the “crumbling disease” which had destroyed Fire Bolt was a widespread plague, especially among the social nebulae, whose more active life seems to have worn them out more rapidly than the solitaries.

A strange passion of loneliness seized me. Like a prisoner I could have battered on the walls of the cosmos, had there been any walls. But I was imprisoned in a boundless finitude. Around me the dust of a dead world stagnated in the ether.

In addition to inspiring or influencing writers such as Brian Aldiss, Stephen Baxter, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanislaw Lem, Stapledon’s work gave the field such enduring tropes as hive minds, Dyson spheres, genetic engineering and terraforming. It is arguable that only H. G. Wells has made a more significant contribution to the field. Olaf Stapledon died in 1950.