Last and First Men

A vision of future humankind's lives.  Source: Here 

“We all desire the future to turn out more happily than I have figured it. In particular we desire our present civilization to advance steadily toward some kind of Utopia. The thought that it may decay and collapse, and that all its spiritual treasure may be lost irrevocably, is repugnant to us. Yet this must be faced as at least a possibility.” 

Future histories are settings ripe for exploration. Whether that be as a backdrop to your story or to act as a form of oracle and try to chart the way human society might go, there's something about the concept that lets the imagination loose. 

Not so loose as to completely shirk convention, mind you. Even the strangest sci-fi books also have some basic components we all take for granted - a story, a cast of characters, clearly delineated acts and so forth. So what happens when you get a book that doesn't have those? Enter Last and First Men. Written by Olaf Stapledon in 1930, it covers a fictional history of humankind from the then-present day to 2+ billion years in the future, covering a multitude of different types of humans and their subsequent rise and fall.

Beginning from the 20th Century (which isn't even a quarter of this book) Stapledon sets out on a quest whose scale has yet to be replicated. Setting out from the First Men, we see humankind's evolution take very strange paths indeed as they set out across the Solar System, beset by crisis upon crisis only to emerge stronger than ever until the journey concludes at the Eighteenth Men - the Last Men, one of which turns out to have been our narrator dictating back this future history. From the skies of Venus to the seas of Neptune, there is plenty of diverse setting to enjoy (though perhaps not as cosmic as modern readers are used to).

Any of the individual races of man covered could very easily have gotten their own book but each play their own part in humankind's continued rise and fall over a span of billions of years (with apparent influence from the Hegelian Dialectic), Stapledon briefly pausing at each to sketch out general trends and key events. Along the journey we meet giant vat brains, flying hominids, telepathically linked cyclopean giants - imagination is not in short supply here. A very key theme is the cyclical nature of human history:

"...all the main phases of man's life on earth were many times repeated on Venus with characteristic differences. Theocratic empires; free and intellectualistic island cities; insecure overlordship of feudal archipelagos; rivalries of high priest and emperor; religious feuds over the interpretation of sacred scriptures; recurrent fluctuations of thought from naïve animism, through polytheism, conflicting monotheisms, and all the desperate "isms" by which mind seeks to blur the severe outline of truth; recurrent fashions of comfort-seeking fantasy and cold intelligence; social disorders through the misuse of volcanic or wind power in industry; business empires and pseudo-communistic empires-- all these forms flitted over the changing substance of mankind again and again, as in an enduring hearth fire there appear and vanish the infinitely diverse forms of flame and smoke."

In many ways, Stapledon was ahead of his time when it came to the themes in his books, tackling ideas on the risks of genetic engineering, terraforming, resource scarcity, aliens that are actually alien, but it's that repeated rise and decline of humanity which dominates the book. If you approach Last and First Men expecting a conventional narrative you will be disappointed, with characters replaced by the different forms of human and the plot being the endless march of Time, either grinding humans into dust or uplifting them to heights never before reached.

Yet even in spite of the immensity of time spanned the sheer thought that went into this tale can easily be seen. Stapledon doesn't place humanity at the centre of the universe, but they're not wholly insignificant either. He writes with a detached, comforting voice noting the successes and failures, the quests and roadblocks that future humanities face and how small it seems with the passage of years - though no less significant.

Last and First Men functions as a philosophical treatise seeking to explore and perhaps even answer questions like the nature of humanity and the true meaning of life. The prose can be a bit dry but to the avid S.F. reader this is an unmissable read. Only his own Star Maker exceeds this book in sheer scale. If this First Man began this review, let the Last Man's words conclude it:


"Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievement, small, but actual. Too soon, seemingly, he comes to his end. But when he is done he will not be nothing, not as though he had never been; for he is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things."