There is not one line of dialogue in this entire book. I checked, more or less, flipping back through once I finished, because it felt true and I wanted to confirm it. An unnamed Englishman is having a bad night, walks up a hill near his house, and his consciousness just leaves his body and starts touring civilizations across the universe, joining with alien minds, watching whole species rise and go insane and die, all narrated in this flat, almost textbook register that has no business being as gripping as it is. Stapledon’s academic background is all over the sentence structure, and if you go in expecting a story with a protagonist you’ll bounce off it in the first thirty pages, the way a few readers clearly did.

Once I stopped waiting for a plot and let it be what it is, a philosophical survey with the scope of Dante except the increasing spheres are literal star systems, I was completely won over. The recurring theme across every civilization he visits is suffering as the price of anything worth having, community always in tension with the individual, and by the time he reaches the actual Star Maker at the end, not quite an old man with a white beard but close, it lands as more moving than I expected from a book this dry on the sentence level.

It’s a hundred and thirty some pages and it took me longer to read than books twice its length, which I mean as praise, every page is doing density work. Not for a night you want something easy. For a night you want to feel small in a good way, hard to beat.