a book
Star Maker
Olaf Stapledon · 1999 · 232 pages
recommended by 3 people
sourced from public statements
Andrej Karpathy
“I wanted to like this book a lot, but unfortunately I struggled to finish reading and ultimately emerged disappointed. The book is ambitious in its grandeur but falls short of delivering a punch. We get confronted with many alien worlds and ideas but none of them intrigued me simultaneously with inventiveness and plausibility. The book gets more and more abstract and religious towards the end. Wait, the stars and nebulae have their own minds and consciousness? I'm not prepared to accept this proposition based on a few vague paragraphs. I reject the idea. I reject the rest. I thought I was reading a scifi book but found myself inexorably reading something much closer to the Holy Bible remixed by someone drunk on the scale of the cosmos. In addition to critiquing the inclusions and choices I could also critique plenty of glaring omissions. For instance, we didn't get to see a single synthetic species? I understand that the book was written in 1930s, but it still bugs me. 2/5: It was okay.”↗
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