Citação fantástica (59)

On every side the shadowy hills or the guessed, featurless sea extended beyond sight. But the hawk-flight of imagination followed them as they curved downward below the horizon. I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the life of the stars. 

Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937)

Citação fantástica (39)

All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy. When it was over, the host of the planetary systems still lived on, with here and there a casualty, and here and there among the stars a new planetary birth, and here and there a fresh disaster.

Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937)

Julgar o livro pela capa (8)

O espectáculo prodigioso do início - do fim? - do Universo a desenrolar-se diante dos olhos do espectador solitário no cimo da colina é o motivo de capa de Star Maker, de Olaf Stapledon - por sinal, uma das melhores de toda a colecção SF Masterworks, da Gollancz (e a colecção tem capas excelentes).