Star Maker

No other book has influenced me so deeply. Arthur C. Clarke wrote it is "probably the most powerful work of imagination ever written." As I now reread Star Maker, published in 1937 when I was three years old, I still find passages so profound that they send my mind into orbit. The book takes us through time and space to a future when that entire conscious cosmos yearns to meet its creator. It ends with a prophetic awareness that “the struggle of our age was brewing” and the hope that our species can make it “before the ultimate darkness.”

I decided I couldn't write a list like this without at least one classic. I could have recommended H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds (1898), the mother of all first contacts, but just about everyone already knows the story, even non-sci-fi folks. Instead, I'll recommend Olaf Stapledon, an early 20th Century British philosopher, who isn't satisfied with just one first contact. How about thousands? In Star Maker, published in 1937, he travels the galaxies telepathically, discovering intelligent life everywhere, strangely familiar and unfamiliar beings, as he searches for the ultimate creator, the Star Maker. The scope of this… show more.

This is everybody’s classic for world-building, and with good reason: Undertaking a vast out-of-body experience, the narrator explores remote civilizations across the universe and mind-melds in panpsychic ways with numerous entities, including stars, galaxies, and the cosmos itself. Star Maker inspired big creative ambitions when I initially read it and continues to afford revelations about time, myth-making, and the brief season of our humanity. The scale of the book emboldens us to think big.