...our flight took us outwards towards the limits of the galaxy, and the emptiness beyond...the dark was featureless, save for...the vague flecks which we knew to be the nearest of the alien galaxies. Awed by this spectacle, we stayed long motionless in the void. It was indeed a stirring experience to see spread out before us a whole 'universe', containing a billion stars and perhaps thousands of inhabited worlds; and to know that each tiny fleck in the black sky was itself another such 'universe', and that millions more were invisible only because of their extreme remoteness...And now we sank back to bury ourselves once more in the genial precincts of our native galaxy.

- William Olaf Stapledon [1886-1950]

from "Star Maker" [1937]

Note: When Olaf Stapledon wrote Star Maker, the certain knowledge that vast systems of stars existed in an immensity beyond our own Milky Way galaxy was barely a decade old. At the beginning of the 20th century, astronomer Henrietta Leavitt identified a class of special variable stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud called Cepheid Variables, named after Delta Cephei, a well-known example of the same type located within our galaxy in the constellation of Cepheus. By 1917 another astronomer, Harlow Shapely, had worked out a preliminary calibration of these giant pulsating stars, establishing that their periods were systematically related to their luminosities. Before long astronomers began to employ them as distance indicators: following their work and using the new giant 100-inch telescope at Mount Wilson during a remarkable period of discovery in astronomy from 1924 to 1929, Edwin Hubble established beyond doubt that the so-called spiral nebulae were remote "island universes" similar to our own galaxy. By the time of Stapledon's death only 13 years after his book was published, his description of the Milky Way and intergalactic space in Star Maker still conformed fairly closely to what was known at the time. Since then, of course, our view of the Universe has flowered tremendously in size and clarity. Yet even with his ample imagination, he was being over-conservative in his description of the Universe: even Stapledon - who was no stranger to hyperbole and a grandiose style of writing - would have been stunned to learn that galaxies like our own modest Milky Way actually contain hundreds of billions of stars, possibly millions of inhabited planets, and that we are at present - a mere half-century after his death - at the threshold of being able to view the entire observable universe containing an estimated 100 billion galaxies.

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