Mitchison offered her own criticisms of the manuscript; she found the God-figure too traditionally male, and was amused by Stapledon's myth-making, which jarred with his self-image as a man of practicality and pragmatism.

The narrator immediately sees the face of the creator – an ever-shifting mask of constant change, human then alien, demonic then angelic.

Two individual nebulae, Bright Heart and Fire Bolt, who embody the human types by which Stapledon was most, namely the saint and the revolutionary.

With Bright Heart dead, and Fire Bolt crumbling into senescence, the remaining nebulae attempt to bring about universal peace and harmony, but a quarrel over how to do this once again results in war.

The history of the nebulae is thus one of tragedy, and as they dissolve into the stars and planets of our own cosmical time, the narrator wonders at the creator who could author such a complex dance of hope and futility.

Stapledon retained some elements of the history of the nebulae for the penultimate chapters of Star Maker, though the material was greatly changed and the concept of inter-nebular war removed completely.