Page "Star Maker" Paragraph 52

Stapledon imagines alien biologies, minds and civilizations radically different from human ones.

But unlike in Stanisław Lem's Solaris, all these are supposed to be fundamentally similar in the long run, since all are governed by the same Darwinian and Marxist laws of development.

Some of Stapledon's ideas for alien minds, such as collective intelligence, seem far ahead of their time, anticipating recent ideas about swarm intelligence and the general fascination with networks.

He also mentions the idea of virtual reality in the first and most Earth-like alien world visited, in the form of an apparatus that directly affects sense centers in the brain.

The idea of entire worlds as spacecraft is used several times.