Olaf Stapledon is the great unsung hero of twentieth-century science fiction. His stories are cast on scales of time and space so vast as to inspire nothing short of vertigo or terror. In Star Maker, his hero, in a ‘hawk-flight of the imagination’, journeys through the cosmos and eventually meets the Creator in his workshop. The Star Maker, it seems, is still perfecting his art. Our own cosmos is only provisional. Previous essays in Universe construction litter the room like trash. These essays come in all shapes and sizes, suggesting that we need not live in a great, expanding hypersphere, infinite in all directions.
Our conception of the shape and size of the Universe is based on timescales. The familiar ‘light-year’ is a unit based on the time it takes for a beam of light to get from A to B. But there is a reckoning that is purely geometric, or, rather, trigonometric. This is the ‘parsec’, short for ‘parallax arcsecond’, the distance at which the separation of the Earth and Sun (1 Astronomical Unit) would subtend an angle of one second of arc. A parsec is equivalent to just over three light-years.
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