Last And First Men (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

The Night Land's original style was almost unreadable. I tried so hard. And The Night Land: A Story Retold may have removed several of the author's philosophical points, mostly having to do with Edwardian beliefs about gender roles persisting so far into the future that the Sun had gone out, but it didn't take a socialist writer's work and rewrite it to say that human civilization essentially collapsed because people refused to attempt to economically succeed on their own and fell into a leisure-induced society-wide coma, which is the impression one gets from the rewritten first chapter.

Long story short, I'd have appreciated more warning of the rewrite and what it entailed. One star for a gratuitous rewrite of the first few chapters in an attempt to make the work more palatable to modern readers. ZERO stars for listing this edition on Amazon with no indication that the early chapters have been anonymously!

In my opinion, as of , this was a mistake of epic proportions. Unfortunately, the lack of transparency on the product page[s] makes that impossible at this time. I absolutely loved this. Plant people, composite minds, intelligent stars - and an exploration into some of life's biggest questions.

This book is a history of the universe, told by an Englishman who mysteriously floats into the sky one night while contemplating its immensity. It does not contain many of the traditional elements of a novel. For example, there are not many "characters" in the traditional sense. But what it does have is a beautifully crafted series of interwoven alien histories, sci-fi-type hypotheses, and spiritual and philosophical musings.

One thing that surprised me is how specific some of the answers to these big questions get toward the end.

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It's not just some vague notion of the "unified spirit," it's much more detailed than that. I suspect that not all readers will like these answers, but I found them to be compelling and fascinating possibilities. I also think this is a must read for any sci-fi fan. It was first published in , at the dawn of sci-fi's Golden Age, making the ideas expressed all the more impressive and important. The final pages of the book tie its themes back to what was happening in Europe when it was written, which I found brilliant and poignant at the same time.

This was not a problem for me once I got used to it, but if that sort of thing bothers you, you might want to get the paperback. See all reviews. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway. Last And First Men S. Set up a giveaway. Customers who viewed this item also viewed. What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?

Brian Aldiss , in his preface to the edition, acknowledges the deep impression on him—and considerable influence on his own later writing—of Stapledon's book, which he encountered in while a British soldier fighting the Japanese in Burma — "An appropriately unusual period of life at which to encounter a vision so far outside ordinary experience". Aldiss also mentions James Blish as another writer deeply influenced by Stapledon. Lewis in his own preface to That Hideous Strength , notes: If I am mistaken in this, Mr.

Stapledon is so rich in invention that he can afford to lend, and I admire his invention though not his philosophy so much that I should feel no shame to borrow". The reference to "objecting to Stapledon's philosophy" was no accident. In particular, the Christian Lewis objected to Stapledon's idea, as expressed in the present book, that mankind could escape from an outworn planet and establish itself on another one; this Lewis regarded as no less than a Satanic idea — especially, but not only, because it involved genocide of the original inhabitants of the target planet.

Clarke has said of Stapledon's book Last and First Men that "No other book had a greater influence on my life Lovecraft held the book in very high regard though he did not say whether it influenced any of his own stories , saying in a letter to Fritz Leiber [5] "no one ought to miss reading W. Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men Probably you have read it. If not, make a bee line for library or bookstall!

Its scope is dizzying—and despite a somewhat disproportionate acceleration of the tempo toward the end, and a few scientific inferences which might legitimately be challenged, it remains a thing of unparalleled power. As you say, it has the truly basic quality of a myth, and some of the episodes are of matchless poignancy and dramatic intensity. 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: 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 mean, look at it! 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. View all 3 comments. My brain is currently quite broken.

Or, at the very least, my sense of proportion. In this book, Stapledon - pour yourself a strong one for this - tells the future history of 18 consecutive species of humans over the course of 2 billion years. So you start reading and initially you follow along; sure, years in the future, I get that. Then it's 1, years, still with you. This guy gets space. It's huge and slow and mostly uninteresting. You know, like the actual history of humanity so far. This book is about humanity's quest to overcome its base passions and become pure mind. Having said all that, this novel can be dull. It would be a whopping five-starrer if it wasn't so egregiously boring at times.

One can open this book at random and always find an idea that has been subsequently used in any number of sci-fi stories, all the way from Dune to biopunk. This is a must-read for all serious science fiction fans. The first American edition of this book, by SF Masterworks, opens with a regrettable foreword by Gregory Benford, in which he nonchalantly remarks: It makes you realise how mightily insignificant our present is in the greater scheme of things. Are we holding him up to the standards of a prophet?

Seriously, this foreword is nothing but a puddle of runny arse gravy.

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Jan 18, ashley c rated it it was amazing Shelves: Exploratory, awe-inspiring, existential crisis-inducing. I have never read anything like this. Actually, I had to refer to the wiki to write this review because for the love of god I cannot remember every single descendent of men — there are a lot of details in this giant book. I think it takes away the magic.

I have not read something so bold, so richly descriptive, and so imaginative before. He has imagined some descendants that are truly, vastly different from the First Men, but has somehow managed to retain in them a piece of humanity that all of us can resonate with. The striving to be better, more intelligent, the race to cheat death and discover immortality, the deep need for exploration. In the end, all humans were selfish and cruel, they were great in their achievements by working as a collective, they were astoundingly short-sighted in the way they treat each other, they were capable of grand plans spanning thousands of years.

And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? There is no plot, no characters, no reason to get invested in the story other than being human, and for me personally, the insatiable urge to know how we will fare 2 billion years into the future. This is a philosophical experience. I once again am made aware of how immersed I am in my own experience, in the reality I think of as absolute truth, that I am stunted any time I try to imagine otherwise. This book is a needle that bursts your reality bubble.

The universe is a sandbox full of all sorts of possibilities. 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. It was totally worth it. Neither does the star system. Not all at once of course, I mean it takes two billion years and extraordinary pages from Olaf Stapledon to create this seminal landmark in literary science fiction.

The early part of the book begins with usual geopolitical speculative fiction of the kind that H. Wells so thoroughly bores his readers with, only here it is done with much greater success. 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. The years roll by and humanity persists, sometimes soaring to great and noble heights, sometimes sinking into the abyss of savagery and barbarism.

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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.

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. Job done Olaf, bravo.

This is truly an astounding novel, which ambition is to tell the story of mankind from the near future to the end of our species, some two billion years into the future. The beginning of this book can be easily skipped since it's an outdated projection of historical events from the time when Stapledon was writing around the 's. It is when he imagines the distant future of humanity that his fertile imagination starts to take flight. The narrator of this human chronicle is actually one of the This is truly an astounding novel, which ambition is to tell the story of mankind from the near future to the end of our species, some two billion years into the future.

The narrator of this human chronicle is actually one of the last men, who sends his account back to us over the millions of centuries through the writing of Stapledon. And this is what this far descendent of our time reveals: Until finally the human race reaches it's tragic ending. This whole voyage is, in a way, similar to that of Stapledon's later novel, "Star Maker", but instead of traveling in the farthest realms of space, this is a trip into the furthest reaches of time.

Also, Dante came to my mind when reading this book: The very last part is perhaps the most beautiful and moving: Man, at last, has reached an understanding of the Universe that opens spectacular vistas into the cosmos. And this, sadly, is his swansong. Jun 23, Palmyrah rated it liked it.

Last and First Men

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

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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. 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 s. 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. 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. The Emotionally Stable, and yet Curious. Although LSD was discovered only in , while this book was published in , "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 Although LSD was discovered only in , while this book was published in , "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. 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.

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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 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. Apr 22, Jean-marcel rated it liked it. A supremely interesting book, without a doubt. The whole thing is just so fascinating, because while on the su A supremely interesting book, without a doubt.

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 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.

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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. 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. Sep 20, Derek rated it liked it.

It is made up of the dry, textbook material that other authors would show rather than tell, or thunk heavily in a preface or appendix. It has no characters or plot as such, concentrating on the large sweeping trends that become larger and more sweeping as it proceeds, and it periodically dives into issues of national or racial character and motivations rather than actions. Stapledon's vision is undeniable, though a reader today may quibble about overgeneralizations of nation That Or, in fact, that it deals with European and world history, and plugs into established history at the time of writing.

I found it eye-crossingly boring and almost unreadable, only smoothing out after the establishment of the lunatic World State and later Patagonian Empire. The mood greatly resembles The Silmarillion and indeed much of the Middle-Earth canon. Each civilization, each human species of Man, is beset by the same tragic cycle of bloom and decay, where the nature of the collapse is baked into the nature of the species itself. The collapse is usually but not exclusively total, where all wisdom and knowledge of the predecessor has been crushed flat to be rebuilt from scratch. Where's that sixth star when you need it?

I am in awe of this book and the mind that produced it. In my youth, I'd spotted this on the shelves in the local bookstore and my curiosity was piqued, but I never got around to reading it. Ah, if only I'd known what lurked inside those covers It's easy to see why. Published in , when science fiction a Where's that sixth star when you need it? Published in , when science fiction as a genre barely existed, before the existence of computers, when molecular biology was, at best, in its infancy, when we'd barely discovered Pluto and were only just beginning to grasp the true size of the universe, this mild-mannered man, Olaf Stapledon, a student of history and philosophy and a teacher working in adult education, wrote a book outlining a speculative future history of mankind spanning the next 2 billion years.

It wasn't intended to be a piece of science fiction, in fact Stapledon wasn't even aware that such a thing existed. In the foreword to the first U. This advice is misguided. The earlier parts of the book deal with Stapledon's predictions for the immediate future post As such they are an easy target for criticism by the too-literally minded; his Second World War and the alliances between nations and further subsequent wars that follow are rather different to the way things actually turned out. A word about the science.

Stapledon's knowledge of physics comes across as slightly dated in places, having an air of victoriana about it with his references to 'Aetheric Vibrations', and he's clearly a bit confused about antimatter, appearing to have been informed by the older victorian theories of antimatter rather than the newer ideas espoused by Dirac in Stapledon's estimates of the speed of mankind's future technological development and evolution also seem somewhat conservative. His timescales would feel more believable if you divide by a factor of ten, or even more in certain places.

A word of warning. This isn't a book full of action and excitement, though there's plenty of drama. It's an epic, sweeping history, in which millions of years sometimes flash by in an instant.

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Stapledon occasionally zooms in on scenes involving individual characters - some of which come across as more allegorical than literal. The writing might be thought of as rather dry by some. It's a thinker's book, not a piece of pulp sci-fi. Despite its flaws which are actually a part of its charm, in my opinion there is only one word to describe this book, given the context in which it was written - genius.

Remarkable book, filled with enough ideas to generate hundreds of SF novels, which it probably has.