Last and First Men (SF Masterworks, #11)

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Last and First Men (SF Masterworks, #11)

3.81 of 5 stars 3.81 · rating details · 1,460 ratings · 102 reviews

"No book before or since has ever had such an impact upon my imagination," declared 2001 author Arthur C. Clarke of this masterpiece ofscience fiction.An imaginative, ambitious history of humanity's future that spans billions of years, this 1930 epic abounds in prescient speculations. A must-read for scholars of the genre....more

Paperback, 307 pages

Published June 10th 2000 by Gollancz (first published 1930)

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Oct 25, 2009 Kaput rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: really-enjoyed, 2009

This book is dense with detail, exhaustively so at times. I couldn't read more than a chapter before my head was full to the brim with stern ominous sentences and dry relentless visions. It was worth it though, because Stapledon took the time to imagine the potential future of man over billions of years and dedicated delicate, intricate thought to this.

The near future as he imagines it is not so good and for seventy pages or so I switched effortlessly between interest and frustration as Stapled...more This book is dense with detail, exhaustively so at times. I couldn't read more than a chapter before my head was full to the brim with stern ominous sentences and dry relentless visions. It was worth it though, because Stapledon took the time to imagine the potential future of man over billions of years and dedicated delicate, intricate thought to this.

The near future as he imagines it is not so good and for seventy pages or so I switched effortlessly between interest and frustration as Stapledon tries to predict the coming political world. It doesn't really work until we are far enough away from the conception of 'our world' and coming into the world of the next species of human. This is mostly because his conception of 'our world', rooted as it is in the attitude of the 1920/30's, is quite archaic to us now, but there is still some interesting ideas here when he is not trying to be political. Regardless, the rest of the book more than makes up for this. It just gets better and better as it hurtles towards a fantastic conclusion.

This book is about the spirit of mankind and the struggle between our potential and our failings. It's about how we reconcile our imperfections with our environment, how our artistic nature manifests itself and the conflict between the individual and society. For our future the book considers changes to our physical evolution, our physical environment, our personality, our flaws, the way those flaws may be thought of, how we view sex, what our achievements might be, how we may view religion or science, our general outlook, how we might feel, what we might value, how our senses may evolve, how we might relate.

Simple and beautiful ideas crop up, like how we might evolve to view a new colour on the infrared spectrum, or evolve a flaw that nearly kills us, or how the continents shift, or how we eke out an existence during an ice age, or what might wipe us out.

My frustration with this book stems from the fact that it is very much a product of its times. This is understandable if Stapledon wrote this book to comment on the world as he saw it but I wondered whether it suited the scope of the book. A book that projects itself so far in to the future would benefit from a more timeless quality I think.

As I say, it's attitude is very rooted in the 1920/30's and this doesn't change throughout. He does try to play with these attitudes and turn them on their head but it still feels inescapable. I guess also that due to the scope of the book humanity and our habits are often reduced to caricatures and generalizations and this also makes it obvious when it was written. If there is anything good to say about this it's that Stapledon appears frustrated with his era, he hates nationalism and desires universal consciousness and the idea of the world as one, which is quite endearing.

There is so much more to say about this book, the ending which certainly puts humanity in its place in the cosmos and the fact that some of the ideas tossed casually into this book have generated whole books and films - planet of the apes, giant brains, viruses, fuel shortages, fighting aliens, telepathy, time travel, genetic engineering, the music of the spheres and so on it's all there and much much more.

Having finished it it does feel like I've just returned from some insane journey far far away.(less)

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Apr 18, 2009 Manny rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

Stapledon tells you the story of the human race, starting now and ending with its demise, well over a billion years in the future. People change in all sorts of unexpected ways; during some periods, they have godlike intelligence, during others they aren't even sentient any more. The book has obvious flaws, but there's just nothing else like it. Some of the images are impossible to forget.

Despite the fact that it's not very well known (none of my 115 GR friends have it on their shelves), an impr...more

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Dec 26, 2012 Alfred Searls rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed

Eighteen distinct species of human being, that’s what you’re in for with ‘Last and First Men’ (1930). Not all at once of course, I mean it takes two billion years and 300 extraordinary pages from Olaf Stapledon to create this seminal landmark in literary science fiction. In fact this wholly remarkable work is so brave and so audacious in its scope that it leaves you dizzy at the sheer scale of the writer’s triumph of imagination.

The early part of the book begins with usual geopolitical speculat...more Eighteen distinct species of human being, that’s what you’re in for with ‘Last and First Men’ (1930). Not all at once of course, I mean it takes two billion years and 300 extraordinary pages from Olaf Stapledon to create this seminal landmark in literary science fiction. In fact this wholly remarkable work is so brave and so audacious in its scope that it leaves you dizzy at the sheer scale of the writer’s triumph of imagination.

The early part of the book begins with usual geopolitical speculative fiction of the kind that H.G. Wells so thoroughly bores his readers with, only here it is done with much greater success. The great empires of the day are as familiar to us as their petty squabbling’s and within a few pages they are at each other’s throats. They ally and scheme, and dream and fight and then very quickly, and quite simply, they are gone. All that is familiar to us, the empires of mind and mammon, nations and names, the languages of Shakespeare and Tolstoy, are simply swept away by the passing of the years; slipping first into obscurity, then passing into mythology, before finally succumbing to oblivion. This is both clever and shocking as it simultaneously allows Stapledon to free his narrative of the shackles of contemporary perception, and ruthlessly demonstrates the utterly unsympathetic nature of the passage of time. Everything dies and everything will be forgotten.

From this point on the reader is adrift upon the churning sea of Stapledon’s seemingly boundless imagination. The years roll by and humanity persists, sometimes soaring to great and noble heights, sometimes sinking into the abyss of savagery and barbarism. Hundreds, then thousands and finally millions of years drift by; years in which mankind is repeatedly subject to near extinction level events, events that are sometimes natural and sometimes self-inflicted. The race spreads its wings and other sentient forces are encountered and different species of man evolve and de-evolve, many of them simultaneously. All the while both evolution and revolution promote different branches of the human family and in time antennae, fingers and fins will all stretch out towards the light of the sun before succumbing once again to the evolutionary night.

When I read this book I developed the distinct feeling that Stapledon may have pushed the human mind as far as it can go, in terms of what it can conceive of in relation to its place in time. I’ve personally not read anything since to dissuade me of that and rarely have I seen the treatment of ideas and concepts given such free rein as they are in ‘Last and First Men’. In the novel Stapledon subverts the usual trite literary conventions. Traditional characters are replaced by the various species of man and the idea of plot, along with the endlessly proselytized story arc, is made redundant, ridiculous even, by the sheer relentless march of time.

Stapledon himself gave up a career in academia to write this book, in the hopes that he could reach and influence a wider audience. After 82 years ‘Last and First Men' is still in print and widely credited as being a powerful influence on successive generations of writers. Job done Olaf, bravo.
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Apr 17, 2013 Palmyrah rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is famously one of the classics of science fiction. At the time of its emergence in 1930, its scope and audacity were without precedent. However, it has been thoroughly pillaged by other writers since then, and its themes and tropes are now the everyday stuff of SF. Stapledon was a prophet and perhaps a kind of genius, but Last & First Men is a victim of its own success.

Also, it is very much a product of its time. Its physics and cosmology appear naive to us today. At times this works a...more This is famously one of the classics of science fiction. At the time of its emergence in 1930, its scope and audacity were without precedent. However, it has been thoroughly pillaged by other writers since then, and its themes and tropes are now the everyday stuff of SF. Stapledon was a prophet and perhaps a kind of genius, but Last & First Men is a victim of its own success.

Also, it is very much a product of its time. Its physics and cosmology appear naive to us today. At times this works against the suspension of disbelief, to the detriment of the reader's pleasure.

In social and political terms, too, the book is largely concerned with issues that were prominent in between the World Wars but which today seem of little import.

Most tellingly of all, we, whom Stapledon calls the First Men, the primitives of humanity, have already achieved nearly all the great feats of science, technology and exploration that in his book take eighteen successive species of humanity some hundreds of millions of years to accomplish. Apart, that is, from the colonization of Venus and Neptune, which we now know to be impossible.

I don't usually object to anachronisms. One should always keep in mind the historical and social context in which a work was written, accepting these in order to appreciate the work more fully. But you can't do that with Last & First Men; its plot and subtext depend far too heavily on the outdated science and political thought of its time. Even the obsession with flight (by means of aeroplanes, genetically engineered wings or the direct control of gravity) is one that was at its peak in the bomber-obsessed 1930s.

The novel is also repetitive in terms of the cycles of human civilization and achievement. This is, of course, part of the Hegelian lesson the author is trying to teach us, but it makes for a boring read.

On the positive side, the author's resonantly academic style of writing is often elegant and eloquent, and its ponderousness is actually well suited to the material.

A great book, certainly, but a deeply outdated one.

ABOUT THE SF MASTERWORKS EDITION
This edition contains an appreciative but stupid and small-minded introduction by the physicist and SF author Gregory Benford, who urges American readers of the book to skip perhaps the first third of it. This is the part which deals with what Stapledon calls the 'Americanized' future world of the First Men.

Stapledon was a socialist who despised capitalism, and he was suspicious of America and Americans. Benford seems to feel that American readers should be spared his criticisms and jibes. That would be a pity – because what Stapledon points to as the follies and faults of American culture are very much the same ones the rest of the world sees in America, now as then. Some of his comments are remarkably percipient and I think it would do many American readers good to learn how others tend to see them. (less)

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May 11, 2013 David Roberts rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I am reviewing the novel Last And First Men by Olaf Stapledon which is one of the best science fiction novels I have ever read and which I bought from Amazon. Reading this book was a life changing moment for the great science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke. Olaf wrote this book in 1930 and got the immediate history but the rest of it is brilliant especially when you consider Olaf had never heard of the genre science fiction and certainly hadn't read any prior to writing this book. Equally the bo...more

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May 07, 2013 Bjorn rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It's certainly impressive - both in concept and in execution. I can't really say I've read anything like it; I'm reminded of Asimov's Foundation "trilogy", only with a scope much grander, or of... some book I read back in my SF days... something by Aldiss, perhaps? Something about mankind millions of years into the future, living in space stations underground... it's fuzzy. Also of Swedish sf/non-fiction astronomy writer Peter Nilson, whom I absolutely adore, but who is mostly untranslated AFAIK...more It's certainly impressive - both in concept and in execution. I can't really say I've read anything like it; I'm reminded of Asimov's Foundation "trilogy", only with a scope much grander, or of... some book I read back in my SF days... something by Aldiss, perhaps? Something about mankind millions of years into the future, living in space stations underground... it's fuzzy. Also of Swedish sf/non-fiction astronomy writer Peter Nilson, whom I absolutely adore, but who is mostly untranslated AFAIK.

Anyway. This might be the first novel I've ever read where the foreword urged me to skip the first few chapters - and it's easy to see why, even if I wouldn't recommend it. Because even if he gets some guesses about the 20th-21st centuries VERY wrong (and bases them almost entirely on national stereotyping which I hope is supposed to be satirical) he actually gets a few things right - if not in detail. The dominance of an increasingly nationalistic and religious America, for instance, or the rise of a China which adopts capitalism but not democracy...

But it's after all that that things get really interesting. One thing that strikes me is how far we've come since 1930; Stapledon is a pessimist when it comes to humanity's (or if that should be humanities') ability to live in peace with each other or others, but when it comes to technology he's already been overrun - his mankinds need millions of years to develop things such as space flight, nuclear power or genetics, but Stapledon's own contemporaries needed less than 20 years. If I had any main problem with the story, it's exactly this; things take TOO long, as if he needed to find some way to stretch it to 2,000 million years - and so we have species-wide civilizations lasting millions of years with no great changes, we have evolution simply "taking a break" from time to time, etc.

But the main story here, of course, is the development of Man. Or Men. And even if I think it suffers from hardly having any characters whatsoever - it does get a bit same-same-but-different after a while when all numbers are counted in millions - and even if Stapledon goes on to apply the same national stereotyping he uses on The First Men to...um... species-related stereotyping later on, it's a fascinating, if rarely thrilling, read. The sheer imagination it takes to pull something like this off; the plausibility he, despite some romantic naivite both when it comes to society and biology, manages to add to his broad strokes of the brush... Plus, he's occasionally VERY funny. I'm not sure if some bits are intended as satire on the First Men or if he's writing it all as straight-faced as he can, but since they are all to some extent human - and we are all too human - it certainly works as such from time to time.

As someone who always prefers character to plot, I was surprised at how much I liked this. It has its faults, and it rarely kept me turning pages breathlessly, but... I've never read anything with the same approach, and I find myself wishing there were more books like it. (less)

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Apr 17, 2013 Nikolai Kim rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: The Emotionally Stable, and yet Curious

Recommended to Nikolai by: I can't recall.

Shelves: sci-fi

Although LSD was discovered only in 1938, while this book was published in 1930, "Last and First Men" is just about the trippiest book you'll pick up this side of the white light that ferries you to your next incarnation, unless you read Joyce's "Ulysses" backwards. Either Olaf Stapledon's brain produces endorphins and organo-opiates at an unusually high rate, or else it must be assumed that the writer and his wife maintained a substantial and quite esoteric mushroom garden.

Get ready to take th...more Although LSD was discovered only in 1938, while this book was published in 1930, "Last and First Men" is just about the trippiest book you'll pick up this side of the white light that ferries you to your next incarnation, unless you read Joyce's "Ulysses" backwards. Either Olaf Stapledon's brain produces endorphins and organo-opiates at an unusually high rate, or else it must be assumed that the writer and his wife maintained a substantial and quite esoteric mushroom garden.

Get ready to take the red pill.

The journey for which Stapledon is our guide is nothing less than the Evolution of Man, not from the past to the present, but from the present to the far, far, far, far, very, very, very, almost nuttily far future. There is no standard plot. And the story is told retrospectively.

This future odyssey begins with a recounting of a near-doomsday war between Asia and the West; and so, for the conspiratorially minded, you are likely to suspect... what else?... a sort of conspiracy about deliberately fomented wars intended to affect the arc of the Evolution of Man. But these suspicions disappear in due course as the result of an obliterating level of dilution as Stapledon's "future history" of Man grows wilder, more fantastic, frothily awe inspiring and disorientingly tragic.

For some, this book will test your emotional stability. For others, it will open up pathways in your imaginative capacities to the greatest degree possible without the aid of chemical assistance.

If I had taken the same mushrooms as Stapledon, I would certainly have given this book five stars. However, because I remained largely sober through this volume, I can only offer up 4 with another half-star for Stapledon's willingness to write a novel with no real characters and barely any dialog, but with a fluidity of imagination similar to that of a toddler, though the topic itself is phantasmagorically sophisticated; and yet, all of this overwhelming structurelessness nonetheless holds together, forcing one to turn the page though the clock advises you that it is nearly dawn. Therefore, be sure to start this book on a Friday or Saturday evening. The question of inebriants or other pharmacological accelerants to help you on the way, I leave entirely to you, your God, or that significant other to whom you have entrusted your emotional and neurological well-being.(less)

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Feb 26, 2013 Helmut Barro rated it 4 of 5 stars

Blick in die Vergangenheit

Ein ambitioniertes Projekt: Der Blick des letzten Menschen in die Vergangenheit, der Jahrmilliarden überbrückt, um die Geschichte der Entwicklung der Menschheit zu erzählen. Veröffentlicht zu Beginn der 1930er Jahre, wird ausgehend vom Ersten Weltkrieg über die Vernichtung Europas, der Zweiten Menschenrasse und so weiter bis hin zum letzten Menschen ein unglaubliches Panorama der Evolution des Menschen aufgefächert. Riesengehirne, Flugmenschen, Marswesen und Fastausrott...more Blick in die Vergangenheit

Ein ambitioniertes Projekt: Der Blick des letzten Menschen in die Vergangenheit, der Jahrmilliarden überbrückt, um die Geschichte der Entwicklung der Menschheit zu erzählen. Veröffentlicht zu Beginn der 1930er Jahre, wird ausgehend vom Ersten Weltkrieg über die Vernichtung Europas, der Zweiten Menschenrasse und so weiter bis hin zum letzten Menschen ein unglaubliches Panorama der Evolution des Menschen aufgefächert. Riesengehirne, Flugmenschen, Marswesen und Fastausrottung: Alles, was man sich vorstellen kann, kommt in diesem in seinem Ausblick monumentalen Werk vor. Doch zunächst zur Kritik.

Für mein Empfinden ist das Buch sprachlich wirklich eher unterdurchschnittlich; ein Stilistiker war Stapledon mit Sicherheit nicht. Stellenweise muss man sich durch seine oft gezwungene Prosa kämpfen, und wäre die Thematik nicht so spannend, würden viele das Buch bestimmt früh aus der Hand legen. Auch stößt mir die Uneinheitlichkeit der Erzählweise sauer auf: in einem Absatz werden 50000 Jahre Menschheitsgeschichte erwähnt, um im nächsten Absatz über das persönliche Empfinden einer Einzelperson zu berichten, das dann wieder in 3 Milllionen Jahren Geschichte mündet. Ein besserer Romanautor hätte hier mehr Gefühl für Erzählfluss gehabt, das dem Historiker Stapledon etwas abgeht.

Gewisse Ideen konnte der Autor, gefangen in seiner eigenen Zeit (was ich ihm nicht vorwerfen kann), trotz seines weitschweifenden Geistes nicht ablegen: Die Vorstellung von Rassen unterschiedlicher Qualität, die ständige Bewertung von Zivilisationen in "hohe" und "niedrige" anhand willkürlicher Kriterien wie Architektur etc., die Aufteilung in "dunkle Zeitalter" und "zivilisierte Zeitalter", die Intelligenz als Hauptkriterium für Fortschritt und die Vorstellung von einer zielgerichteten Evolution lassen das ansonst visionäre Werk oft genug verstaubt und antiquiert wirken. An manchen Stellen ist der Autor außerdem von der Wirklichkeit eingeholt worden: Es fällt schwer zu glauben, dass für Fortschritte, für die der Mensch "in Wirklichkeit" nur 50 Jahre brauchte (als Beispiel die Gentechnik oder die Raumfahrt), für die späteren Rassen Jahrtausende gedauert haben. Abgesehen davon, dass mir die Vorstellung, dass einzelne Experimente Jahrhunderte oder Jahrtausende andauern, schon an sich als unwahrscheinlich vorkommt: Die Erklärung, dass sich ein Mentalitätsunterschied herausgebildet hat zwischen der ersten und den folgenden Menschenrassen, lässt aber vieles zu; man muss seinen Jetztmenschen-zentrierten Ansatz dazu aber aufgeben können, was oft schwerfällt.

Trotz aller Kritikpunkte muss man die enorme Breite von Stapledons Vision anerkennen - nimmt man die melodramatischen Teile heraus, legt er eine ungemein spannende und in höchstem Grade faszinierende Spekulation über die Zukunft der Menschheit vor, die in ihrer Kraft und ihrem Mut den Leser begeistert. Viele Utopisten und Dystopisten begnügen sich mit einem Ausblick auf die nächsten paar Jahrhunderte; Stapledon lässt den Blick derart über Jahrmilliarden schweifen, dass einem schwindelig wird und bleibt dabei doch schlüssig. Betrachtet man schließlich die Zeittabellen am Ende des Buchs, wird trotz der Äonen der Menschheitsgeschichte dies nochmal in einen noch größeren kosmischen Rahmen gesetzt, was dem Glauben der eigenen Bedeutung den endgültigen Todesstoß versetzt. Eine sehr interessante Erfahrung.

Ein absoluter Klassiker der Science Fiction, dem man seine Mängel gerne nachsieht: Nie vorher oder nachher hat ein Autor etwas ähnliches gewagt. (less)

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Aug 07, 2012 Edward Scott rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The vast time-scale of this novel alone is enough to earn it some admiration. Across eighteen different human species and two billion years, Stapledon tells the tale of mankind, starting around the 1930s. Though some of his early ideas proved incorrect, he is surprisingly accurate in his prediction of a polarised global society, in which the cultures of the USA and China are the two rival superpowers. Seemingly by the day, this vision becomes more poignant.
However, the 20th or even the 30th cent...more The vast time-scale of this novel alone is enough to earn it some admiration. Across eighteen different human species and two billion years, Stapledon tells the tale of mankind, starting around the 1930s. Though some of his early ideas proved incorrect, he is surprisingly accurate in his prediction of a polarised global society, in which the cultures of the USA and China are the two rival superpowers. Seemingly by the day, this vision becomes more poignant.
However, the 20th or even the 30th century is but a glimmer compared to this book's size - it asks to reader to enter a different 'mode' of reading, where a million years must be considered a small amount of time. It opens your mind up to the true enormity of time and space, and our insignificance within it all, especially at this primitive point in our species' evolution. I would twin this book with Stephen Baxter's 'evolution', which deals with the same subject in a more biological fashion - Stapledon is more philosophical, his topics are culture and the 'tidal' nature of societies, each rising and reaching an ever-increasing pinnacle before collapsing under its own achievements. That's not to say there isn't a good dose of schoolboyish 'alien' ideas here - the Last Men, for instance, are particularly extravagant in their physiological description, and the Fourth Men - giant brains constructed by the Third Men - are terrifying in their wirey, electrical super-intelligence. These ideas are not as feasible as Baxter's, though, and are most likely an attempt to convey the puny nature of us, the First Men.
One thing Stapledon does excellently is realise the fact that the world we experience is entirely borne of our own senses, and that life need not be restrained by the body-type we happen to have evolved. When one reads the contents page, and sees a chapter about the Martian invasion, it is easy to assume a 'War of the Worlds' type scenario, but the nature of the Martians in this book is fascinating and extremely alien. The same can be said of the dominant species of Venus.
My only criticism of this book could in fact be a compliment - it all comes down to that mystery of the author's intent. There are no real spoilers to reveal, for I think we all know the ultimate fate of man has to be his inescapable downfall. However, in describing this event, the grandeur of the novel's scale seems to just fizzle out. Though the Last Man, the narrator, tells us of a utopian society, capable of moving planets and communicating with the entire species at once through a kind of 'psychic internet', I began to find him a bit annoying, almost patronizing with his constant digressions that "I cannot begin to explain such-and-such to a mind so small in comparison to my species". It feels a bit like a cop-out on Stapledon's part. But then, we must wonder if Stapledon was simply attempting to preserve some mystery, as well as avoid exploring topics of literally no significance, such as other art forms we as a species are yet to develop.
So, all in all, I would highly recommend this book, as its scope is rivalled perhaps only by Stapledon's other great work 'Star Maker' (so I've heard.) I honestly believe if everybody read this, it might give an impression of our insignificance - it actually made me quite proud to be a part of the human species. Though I was a bit disappointed by its final section - The Last Men - it's final CHAPTER moved me very deeply, and reminded me of Carl Sagan's image "A pale blue dot", in which a satellite leaving the solar system captured a picture of Earth, a tiny blue dot hanging in immense blackness. (Those of you who have read the book will realise this is flawed, as the Last Men do not inhabit Earth... but hey, the image still stands for our species.) It promotes a kind of humanism, a non-religious call-to-arms for love, as well as examining the long, winding and blood-stained road to achieving such a society. Truly epic.
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Jul 12, 2012 Ian Dennis rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

now this is a tale unlike any other I have read. the scope is absolutely epic, projecting farther into the future than I have ever read. also, the story telling was unique. almost without exception, there was no real character in the story, except perhaps that narrator itself. the way the story is told more closely resembles the style of historians, and even though that makes it pretty dry some of the time, it is definitely appropriate. some of the phases are s little difficult to get into, beca...more

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Apr 22, 2012 Jean-marcel rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A supremely interesting book, without a doubt. Stapledon projects his imagination as far into the future as it can possibly go, beginning with his own time (late 1920s/early 1930s) and slowly taking his readers on a journey that details the rise and fall of civilisations, man's evolution through a dizzying array of ages, climates, evolutions, worlds...there are wars, invasions, disasters, triumphs, incredible scientific discoveries. The whole thing is just so fascinating, because while on the su...more A supremely interesting book, without a doubt. Stapledon projects his imagination as far into the future as it can possibly go, beginning with his own time (late 1920s/early 1930s) and slowly taking his readers on a journey that details the rise and fall of civilisations, man's evolution through a dizzying array of ages, climates, evolutions, worlds...there are wars, invasions, disasters, triumphs, incredible scientific discoveries. The whole thing is just so fascinating, because while on the surface it all seems like some wild and improbable flights of fancy, Stapledon has put considerable thought into these "visions", and used the latest (at the time) scientific and sociological theories, as well as extrapolations based on politics and the global situation in 1930. It amused me how close he came to the truth in his projections of the "near future" in some areas and how far off the mark he was in others.

There's one thing that held me back from really liking this book as much as I thought I would, though, and it is the reason that any adjectives I use to describe Stapledon's work here are always synonyms of "interesting", or "engrossing". This is not a novel. This reads like a textbook for some far future civilisation, the descendants of humankind. It's very, very dry. There are no characters, there is no plot, there is literally nothing to grab on to and run with except the "far out" ideas, which admittedly are being fired at you all the time and on every page of this book. The book stimulates your imagination in an unusual way though, in that Stapledon does try pretty hard to describe what things must have been like for people living in the various far-flung futures of Earth and other worlds. Sometimes it helps to just stop reading for a while, sit back and imagine the sort of scenes for yourself that Stapledon couldn't write about, given the nature of the book. That's the thing, really: Stapledon could not have written this book in any other way, if he wanted to keep its idea in tact. Even as it is, the book feels paradoxically very long because of its dry, disconnected style, and very short, because it is out of necessity compacting millions of hypothetical years into a few hundred pages, which feels as though it should be an impossible feat.

So, as long as you go into this one knowing what you'll be reading, you ought not to be disappointed. Read this one for all the crazy science and absolutely fantastic visions of the future. I'll say this for Mr. Stapledon: today we have thousands of science fiction films, television shows and books trying to show us various futures and what they might be like. Most of them just project people a few hundred years forward and go about telling their story, assuming that humanity will pretty much be living as it does now, only with some fancier gadgets, or no gadgets at all assuming there's been some great global disaster. Almost all of these populist projections seem kind of mundane and trivial when placed next to Stapledon's. I suppose that's high praise, after all. I respect this book quite a lot. I just don't love it because, well, it isn't really a story now is it? Seems more like a worthy experiment to me; I'm almost surprised it got published, but if Ole Olaf had given me this manuscript to read back in his day, I would certainly have devoured it and then praised his visionary imagination to the heavens.(less)

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Mar 16, 2012 Nick rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I did not love this book. I thought I would. I think Arthur C. Clarke is the greatest author alive, and this is his influance. I LIKED this book a great deal, I appreciate the intellegence and craft that went into it, and this stapledon has more raw imagination on 2 pages of this book than most authors have in every book they have ever written, but I did not love this book.

I freely admit that I was in a rough patch at work, and that may have colored my 3 star rating. This book had everything I t...more I did not love this book. I thought I would. I think Arthur C. Clarke is the greatest author alive, and this is his influance. I LIKED this book a great deal, I appreciate the intellegence and craft that went into it, and this stapledon has more raw imagination on 2 pages of this book than most authors have in every book they have ever written, but I did not love this book.

I freely admit that I was in a rough patch at work, and that may have colored my 3 star rating. This book had everything I thought I would love, no central character, no storyline in the traditional sense, vast swaths of time. But I never found myself swept up in it like in a Clarke Story, or even some of Stephen Baxters better stuff. This was the book I read when i was going to sleep and on the metro ride in, no more. I wanted it to be more. But I never once reached for it outside of my traditional reading times. I finished, so it isn't boring, but it was not special to me.

Couple things I did like. The extermination of the Venusians. I think modern people, sci-fi authors in particular, get so wrapped up in progress and frankly more liberal values, that they forget that death is a major part of life. Humans didn't attain the earth by signing peace accords with Lions or Sabre-tooth tigers, we killed them. And to many sci fi authors I feel would rather see humanity go extinct than hurt an animal here or on another planet. I LOVED that stapledon correctly portrayed the darwinian struggle for survival, it is either kill or be killed often in nature and our future human ancestors did what they had to do. The other thing I liked is that I feel his portrayal of the America-China dynamic is pretty sport on. The only real difference in real history to his future history is that the UK and france did not become adversarial again after the great wars. I suspect much of that was the invention of nuclean weapons, which was 15 years after Stapledon wrote this book, so he oculdn't have known.

Good book, definately read if you are a sci-fi fan, but not the page-turner I was hoping for.(less)

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Dec 19, 2011 Richard rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Rating: 1/2* of five

I cried "uncle" on p59 of this book, which was part of a group read on LibraryThing; it was written in 1930 or so, it's true, but nothing as ephemeral as passing time can excuse the line, "A century after the founding of the first world state a rumour began to be heard in China about the supreme secret of scientific religion, the awful mystery of Gordelpus, by means of which it should be possible to utilize the energy locked up in the opposition of proton and electron."

*buzz*...more

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Nov 28, 2011 Nicolas Dante rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Over the course of hundreds of millions of years Olaf Stapledon creates an intricate and detailed overview of 18 species of men. In his book Last and First Men he starts with the very first men which is the common 20th century and earlier man. His book is very philosophical as it touches upon the reasons why we cannot obtain a higher level of consciousness and understanding. Through a narrator one of the “Last Men” they go through Golden and Dark ages throughout these 18 species of men. I really...more

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Aug 10, 2011 Akshay rated it 5 of 5 stars

Ive been a fan of scifi for a long while now - I read practically everything but scifi is my greatest joy when written well and this one turned out to be the grandfather of them all!

I had never even heard of Stapledon or this book before I came across it in my favourite book store and had the good luck of not reading it for months but decided last minute to take it on a recent vacation with me, where I was able to give it due time - and believe me this is a book that needs it.

Not madly long, bu...more

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Aug 20, 2010 Stephen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, sf-through-history, 1930-1953

4.0 stars. WOW, this book is in a class all by itself for originality, imagination and scope. I can not believe I have not heard more about this book as being one of the true "classics" of science fiction. Written in the 1930's, this is a future history that tells the story of mankind over a span of 2 billion years (yes billion with a B) from 1930 until approximately the year 2,000,000,000. During that period humanity evolves through what Olaf describes as 18 different species of men (our presen...more

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Sep 02, 2009 Dave rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, speculative-fiction, arkham

Prior to the publication of “Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future” in 1930, Olaf Stapledon had already published a couple of short stories, poems, including a book of poetry, a non-fiction book “A Modern Theory of Ethics: A Study of the Relations of Ethics and Psychology”, and numerous essays. However, this was his first book of fiction, and remains, if not his most famous work, than one of his two most famous works. While clearly Stapledon’s fictional work falls into the categ...more Prior to the publication of “Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future” in 1930, Olaf Stapledon had already published a couple of short stories, poems, including a book of poetry, a non-fiction book “A Modern Theory of Ethics: A Study of the Relations of Ethics and Psychology”, and numerous essays. However, this was his first book of fiction, and remains, if not his most famous work, than one of his two most famous works. While clearly Stapledon’s fictional work falls into the category of science fiction, in many ways it is unique and while it is easy to find authors who were influenced by Stapledon, it is much more difficult to find an author who has significant influence on Stapledon’s work.

The narrative of “Last and First Men” is driven by ideas, and not by characters, and in many ways this is true of all of his fictional work, though certainly novels like “Odd John” and “Sirius” have characters and take on the appearance of a standard novel. The novel has tremendous scope, the narrative being given from billions of years in the future by a member of the last race of men, i.e. the Last Men who are aware that they will destroyed and thus be the last of men. They story covers the cyclical nature of the history of the First Men, i.e. us, and the cyclical nature of many of the races of Men who follow. It also discusses the psychology and the philosophy of the races as well as some of the physical and physiological changes.

The cyclical nature of many of the things he discusses tends to make parts of the novel a bit repetitive, and so I believe that it detracts a bit from the overall effect of the novel. That being said, it is still an extraordinary novel and unlike anything else you will likely ever read, with the possible exception of Stapledon’s “Star Maker” which has a similar scope as well as an unusual narrative, but also has a different feel. Stapledon did not finish with the idea of the Last Men with the publication of this novel, as he returned to the idea in his radio play “Far Future Calling” in 1931 where he amazingly puts the novel in dramatic form, but which sadly was never performed. He also returned to the idea for his second novel “Last Men in London” in 1932, which focuses on a look back at the 20th Century from the perspective of one of the Last Men.

This book was rated 3rd on the Arkham Survey in 1949 as one of the ‘Basic SF Titles’. It also was tied for 30th on the 1975 Locus All-Time poll for Novels; 43rd on the 1987 Locus All-Time pool of SF Novels, and tied for 43rd on the 1998 Locus All-Time Poll for Novels written prior to 1990. This SF Masterworks edition includes a Foreword by Gregory Benford and an Afterword by Doris Lessing. This is the 11th of the SF Masterworks paperback series released by Victor Gollancz Books.
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Jun 27, 2012 David rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I just recently finished this.

This was actually a fascinating book, given the time it was written. The first part (the chapters dealing with the "First Men", e.g. you and me) were kind of a slog. It is here that the age in which it was written shows the most, it doesn't age well. On the other hand, he did manage to make a prediction that China and America would be the world's superpowers, which was pretty good for 1930.

It is the later chapters where this book really shines. The number of topics...more

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Sep 09, 2011 Mitch rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Mitch by: Harvey Smith

I read Last and First Men as part of a compendium of Stapledon's stories called To The End of Time. The compendium's title truly captures the sheer sense of epic Last and First Men entails.

Stapledon's vivid imagery of humanity brings forth a near-boggling wonder of human evolution. Granted, with Stapledon's story spanning billions of years, it is quite hard for the reader to grasp the true time scale of human history portrayed within the novel. I enjoyed the novel primarily because it was prese...more

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Sep 04, 2012 Perry Whitford rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Sci-fi classicists and all anthropologists.

Recognized as one of the enduring classics of Golden Age science-fiction, I discovered Last and First Men due to its inclusion amongst Gollancz's SF Masterworks, which is a fairly definitive series (A Canticle foe Liebowitz, The Stars My Destination, a few Arthur C Clarke's, the best of Gene Wolfe and Robert Silverberg and lots of Philip K Dick).
Not so much a novel as an "essay in myth", as Stapledon labels it in his preface, Last and First Men extrapolates an entire history of the human race, s...more Recognized as one of the enduring classics of Golden Age science-fiction, I discovered Last and First Men due to its inclusion amongst Gollancz's SF Masterworks, which is a fairly definitive series (A Canticle foe Liebowitz, The Stars My Destination, a few Arthur C Clarke's, the best of Gene Wolfe and Robert Silverberg and lots of Philip K Dick).
Not so much a novel as an "essay in myth", as Stapledon labels it in his preface, Last and First Men extrapolates an entire history of the human race, starting in earnest from 1930 and roughly concluding in the year 2,000,000,000, where the eighteenth iteration of Man awaits his final demise, on the planet Neptune, at the hands of a rogue star.

I enjoyed Stapledon's vision of both the immediate future (some of which is now in the past of course) and of the very,very distant future. Sure, the prognostications for the immediate future may be wildly wrong in some respects (e.g. the war to follow WW1 is between prudish England and chauvinistic France!), but the cool, generalized way in which he characterizes national identities is equally valid today (i.e. a trigger for the war between England and France is the incendiary nature of the mourning that attends the violent death of a popular English princess!). It is also full of choice phrases, such as these two about America, which he describes as "essentially a race of bright, but arrested, adolescents", where an "outworn religious dogma was championed with the intolerant optimism of youth".

There are some unintentionally comic assertions too, my favourite being the prophesy that about 300 years from now the world will be run by America, China, and a cadre of twelve "millionaires"(!), which is hilariously reminiscent of the outdated demands of Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies.
However, a near future where America and China are the top-dogs, sharing then competing for an empire over all other nations, both economic and cultural, is far from fanciful.
Far future events are obviously anyone's guess, but Stapledon is convincing and inventive in how he reasons and projects, with our evolution including taking on the genes of animals and aliens (Martians), telepathy replacing speech and leading to group and "racial" consciousnesses, and a combination of cosmic catastrophes and our own man-made ones necessitating an exodus from Earth.
I am less sure about the likelihood of synchronized aviation ascending to a place of religious significance in human hearts and minds, but who knows!?

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Feb 21, 2009 David rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi

The scope and imagination of this book are unlike anything else I've read. The only possible exception is Greg Egan's Diaspora, which reads more like a conventional novel, following the paths of a few individual characters. First and Last Men reads like a history of humanity as a whole. Instead of characters, it has nations and species. Stapledon's psychological generalizations about the human race of various times and places cannot help but seem dated, but the dizzying acceleration of the pace...more

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Sep 10, 2012 Joseph Clark rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Stapledon is a poor student of human nature. However, this is not a handicap with him as it would be for other authors. The project running throughout Stapledon's works is to imagine consciousness beyond humanity, particularly how a species might enhance its moral, intellectual, and spiritual standing by taking technological command of its own evolution. The plausibility of such an epoch is almost beside the point (though Stapledon does deserve credit for predicting genetic engineering, atomic p...more

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Sep 12, 2011 Bart Everson rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: re-read, octavia-sf

One of my favorite books, but definitely not for everybody, Last and First Men is a future history that reads like one. That is, it reads more like a textbook than a novel. The time-scale accelerates as the book progresses, so that subsequent chapters cover centuries and then millennia in a matter of pages. There are no individual characters after the 20th century or so. Truly, it is not a novel, but a philosophical treatise in the speculative mode.

There are some errors in Stapledon's science, s...more One of my favorite books, but definitely not for everybody, Last and First Men is a future history that reads like one. That is, it reads more like a textbook than a novel. The time-scale accelerates as the book progresses, so that subsequent chapters cover centuries and then millennia in a matter of pages. There are no individual characters after the 20th century or so. Truly, it is not a novel, but a philosophical treatise in the speculative mode.

There are some errors in Stapledon's science, some of which reflect on the fact that he was not a scientist. Other errors reflect the time of the writing, as the book was published in 1930. But his speculations on genetic engineering and terraforming were amongst the earliest.

What makes this book so fascinating, and almost unique, is the scope — the vastness of the time-scale. What's the last story you read that covered two billion years? As such, the narrative is largely concerned with the rise and fall of civilizations. New beginnings require old endings. We follow the trajectories of eighteen distinct species of humanity, rather than individual experiences. There are single sentences here so epic that another author might have developed them into a whole series of novels.

The only book I know with a bigger scope is Stapledon's own Star Maker, which covers nothing less than the history of intelligence in the universe.

Contemplating such awe-inspiring vistas is healthy, I think. Sometimes we seem to forget that our current moment of technological supremacy will not last, that in fact all empires are dust in the wind. We do well to remember.

Some will find it dry, tedious, perhaps overly intellectual. I found it vastly stimulating to the imagination. Even so things didn't really kick into high gear for me until the advent of the "Fourth Men," essentially giant disembodied brains who turn ugly. But don't expect a rollicking adventure tale. The author is primarily interested in big philosophical questions such as the nature of humanity and the meaning of life.

It's worth noting this book was hugely influential on great number of writers. I liken Stapledon to the Velvet Underground. Not many people bought their records, but everyone who did started their own band.(less)

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Jun 27, 2010 Aleš rated it 4 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jul 19, 2010 Lucas rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sf

The book is one long info-dump- future history that only bothers to introduce specific characters a few times in the earlier parts. The rest is all sweeping generalizations about civilizations of millions or trillions of humans, their sexual nature, and industrial or philosophical bent. I expected to get bogged down and not finish it, but it's not too long and it grew increasingly compelling the further I got into it.

There is a lot in common with other 'deep time' books that Stephen Baxter is e...more

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Dec 05, 2008 Evan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Remarkable book, filled with enough ideas to generate hundreds of SF novels, which it probably has. Its obsession with racial consciousness and its insistence on psychoanalyzing entire civilizations feels dated, very 1930s, as the diction. Most of HG Wells reads like it could've been written last week, but Stapledon you have to imagine in a wool double-breasted suit, eating war time rations, and listening to the BBC on a wooden radio.

And the species of human pathology and catastrophe that he in...more

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Dec 30, 2012 Rick rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

What a weird book. A future history of humanity over the next 20 million years or so. I liked it. Some of the stuff at the beginning about the near future from the early 1910's on was comically off, and it was interesting seeing how communism loomed over all of Stapledon's thinkings, but as the book gets further afield from the present it gets more interesting and better. And the ending is pretty fascinating. A worthy thought experiment, definitely worth reading. I also like that it was a novel...more

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Sep 28, 2009 Dave rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed

Man, oh man. It's been a long time since I had to renew a library book because I wasn't done reading it. I have to admit, this was a slog. Olaf Stapledon has an incredible imagination. His works inspired many of the great names and most enduring concepts in SF (Dyson spheres and racial overminds, for example). He's an unending font of insightful observation, interesting speculation, and far flung extrapolation.

He is not, however, a masterful writer. His prose soars at times, and I found myself j...more

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Jan 16, 2013 Kate Sherrod rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm not gonna lie, folks; of all the books I've tackled so far this year, Last and First Men has been the toughest challenge to my resolve to only read one book at a time. That's not to say it's by any means a bad book; it's part of the SF Masterworks Collection* for very good reasons. It's just that, well, gripping storytelling it ain't.

Penned in 1930 by a philosophy professor, Last and First Men is heavy on exposition and all but devoid of character, dialogue or even plot beyond "exploring the...more I'm not gonna lie, folks; of all the books I've tackled so far this year, Last and First Men has been the toughest challenge to my resolve to only read one book at a time. That's not to say it's by any means a bad book; it's part of the SF Masterworks Collection* for very good reasons. It's just that, well, gripping storytelling it ain't.

Penned in 1930 by a philosophy professor, Last and First Men is heavy on exposition and all but devoid of character, dialogue or even plot beyond "exploring the nature of the 18 races of man from First (20th Century earthbound Homo sapiens sapiens) to Last (Neptunian superbeings who live for thousands of years) and how their society kept on evolving and devolving and evolving again." The text is presented as a sort of lecture series on the history of humanity, delivered by a Last Men scholar who doesn't quite sneer at his predecessors and their flaws but doesn't exactly hold them in reverence, either. Indeed, often the prose reads like that of a 19th century natural history text on, say, social insects, albeit very sophisticated ones.

The early chapters of the novel are best read, by a 21st century sci-fi fan, as a strange form of alternate history a la, say, Harry Turtledove; in this case, our point of departure is not long after Last and First Men's original publication date, for nothing like World War II and the Holocaust even remotely figures in this extrapolation. Stapledon possessed an acute talent for that, but humanity has always been full of surprises! One can smile indulgently at how off base he was, but to do so is to completely miss why this book is a classic of the genre; after all, the rest of the 20th century is not even the first tenth of this book, and the First Men's story covers thousands of years of struggle (sometimes genocidal) to form a world government, the creation of a scientific religion in which "divine energy" is the object of worship and the purview of a rigid guild of scientists, and the development of a culture of abundance (no disease, no want, a flying car for everybody) that values strenuous physicality (and flight) above all else, to the detriment of human intelligence. With predictable results.**

But wait! Like I said, that's not even 25% of the book. I've never read any fiction so ambitious in scope, folks. The closest I can think of is maybe Stephen Baxter's Evolution, but even it just took on the life-span of life on planet Earth. Last and First Men covers "about two thousand million years", takes us, or a future version or 18 of us to the outer solar system, and teems with phrases like "Not till many hundred thousand years had passed did..." It's truly stupefying. It's also very, very clever; to encompass so much time in just 300 pages or so, it has to be. There's a mathematical progression governing the level of detail and verbiage devoted to each iteration of humanity; I suspect, though am not really a rigorous enough person to be sure of this, that this is an instance of exponential decay. At any rate, the narrative speeds up considerably once Stapledon has dispensed with our own species, the First Men***, and keeps on speeding up until eventually a million years can pass in a sentence fragment. At one point, ten million years pass because it's a time of barbarism and stasis. Well, okay, Mr. Stapledon; it's your Memorable Fancy.

For a giant William Blakean Memorable Fancy is what this book is, a visionary and somewhat allegorical tale spun out to illustrate the writer's philosophy, hopes and fears. I would love to see an edition of this book illuminated in the way that Blake did his works. It would be an eminently lovely thing.

Along the way, we get to watch Stapledon toss off a stunning array of concepts and ideas that were quite ahead of his time and the influences of which we can find throughout science fiction: the perils of genetic engineering, Peak Oil and its aftermath, the cyclical natures of high civilization and barbarism, aliens that are genuinely and profoundly alien (i.e. not Star Trek humanoids with extra nobbly bits on their faces), the fragility of knowledge, the notion that humans can easily evolve back into animals if care is not taken...

It's easy, in short, to see how Last and First Men came to be such a very influential book. People talk about how Heinlein originally dashed off all of the sci-fi tropes with which we have become so familiar, but for a lot of them, Stapledon was there first.

I wonder what his other novels are like.

*I didn't use that edition's cover to decorate this post because I liked this cover so very, very much better! I mean, look at it!

**Think Idiocracy meets Otto from A Fish Called Wanda.

***In his forward to SF Masterworks edition, the great Gregory Benford advises readers to consider skipping the "badly dated" first 20-25% of this novel, partly for reasons I've already observed (in addition to the wrong guesses at history, this first narrative teems with racial and national stereotypes, and of course gives women the shortest possible shrift) but also to spare American readers some tart observations from a British philosopher who was no great fan of capitalism and American cultural hegemony. But to skip these chapters would deprive the reader of the sensation of being swept along through time at an ever-accelerating rate that is one of this novel's unique and most exceptional offerings. If you're going to read it, read it.(less)

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Aug 09, 2011 Ivo Crnkovic-Rubsamen rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Last and First men is best described as pretty random. It starts out interestingly, describing post-world war 1 international relations with some uncanny predictions, but an equal amount of total misses and goes downhill from there. The quote-unquote evolutionary steps that man takes are alternately ridiculous and mundane, leading to a narrative without a lot of direction. The saving grace is the inherently interesting subject matter and some relatively good writing. I had very high hopes for th...more

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About Olaf Stapledon

Excerpted from wikipedia:
William Olaf Stapledon was a British philosopher and author of several influential works of science fiction.

Stapledon's writings directly influenced Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Stanisław Lem, C. S. Lewis and John Maynard Smith and indirectly influenced many others, contributing many ideas to the world of science fiction.

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Quotes from Last and First Men

“There is much in this vision that will remind you of your mystics; yet between them and us there is far more difference than similarity, in respect both of the matter and the manner of our thought. For while they are confident that the cosmos is perfect, we are sure only that it is very beautiful. While they pass to their conclusion without the aid of intellect, we have used that staff every step of the way. Thus, even when in respect of conclusions we agree with your mystics rather than your plodding intellectuals, in respect of method we applaud most your intellectuals; for they scorned to deceive themselves with comfortable fantasies.” — 4 people liked it

“Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced by our agony? And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness. But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.” — 4 people liked it

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Last and First Men (SF Masterworks, #11)

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