Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon

Read 1998 July 11 - October 9

Reviewed 1998 November 5, 7

ISBN 0-14-00.3506-0

In readings about the mining of asteroids in Lewis and others, reference was made to Last and First Men as one of the early inspirations for this type of thinking. I tried to acquire the book through Amazon.com but it had been out of print for many years. They could get me an antique in good condition for over $300. I declined. Mentioning this to Chuck Lahmeyer at work, he offered that he had a copy that he had picked up at a garage sale. It appears to have been a reject, however, the first 30 pages are missing and so I have no information on the copyright date or anything about the author. I think it is from the early 1930s.

Beginning on page 33, literally in the middle of a word ("-anism") I was immediately thrust into what is not an action packed sci-fi thriller but a text that reads like a history of mankind, and a pretty dull history at that. Due to the trouble of borrowing the copy and allegiance to the ideal of figuring out what it was all about, I waded through a few score pages waiting for something interesting to happen.

There are not many individual characters and when there are some they are not given names but are only described in a distant third person, kind of like newspaper reporting, but not as interesting or accessible. Most of the text deals with the great masses of society as if they were somehow homogeneous and single-purposed. This consistent theme through all the many versions of "man" was too much for me to suspend disbelief over. I can more readily accept warp drive and the transporter than the notion that a few dozens of people can be single purposed about anything, much less many billions.

Reading along like a dull history, we pace through a fairly accurate sounding projection of what would be WW II, then off to the future where we are and where everybody lives in pylons and flies airplanes for sport and transportation, a great society in which flying skill is the greatest thing and the religious and science casts battle each other for the worship of the people of the world. And then there is the unification that occurs leading to the first world government. Without going into much detail, I was about to quit on this and give the book back to Chuck when I turned the page late one night, ready to put the bookmark in and fall to sleep and the next section was on The Martians.

Interest revived, I read all about the green cloud Martian beings and the features of their invasion of earth. And this was pretty interesting, but it was still an objective history without character in which humanity was a homogeneous mass deciding by debate what to do then following their leaders without questions. Blech!

Stapledon had them spend centuries working on things like genetic engineering without making much comparable progress in comparable technologies like space flight. His guess, I guess. Generations of workers would go up a dead end of research, then regroup without any cut in funding and try something again. This happens over and over through all the versions of man. They apparently do not get their funding from an ignorant legislature as we do.

You see the heritage of lots of good and bad science fiction here. The fourth men are big bodiless brains that live in huge buildings attended by acolytes. "The Brain." The seventh men live on Venus (it had oceans and tribal fish beings of it's own, which the men all agreed had to go and killed off systematically, Sure!). The seventh men are also physiologically equipped for flight. Their only self actualization is flying but then when the trends go against them and the pedestrian eighth men ("Eighth Man?") start to take over, they all decide to commit racial suicide and do so by flying one after another into a volcano. Oh sure they do! What kind of numb butts are all these races of advanced "men" anyway?

Between the first and second men there was a big atomic-like destruction of the earth that left only the polar regions inhabitable. Later (around the tenth men or something like that) there was a Christ-Like figure and the same sorts of things developed around him. Skipping to the end, the sun changed state, but mankind was able to go inhabit Neptune. The eighteenth and last men lived like 50,000 years apiece in sexual groups of 96 people and had a group consciousness that nearly turned into something worthwhile. Then some nearby star started turning purple and after some eons so did ours and this meant the end. They had a "seeding" project to try to get the essence of humanity out to some other place, but that started to falter, then the men started to dumb down and they had to go back to inefficient bureaucracies for society.

The reason we know all this is that one of those last men was in touch with one of ours, Olaf himself. They developed (somewhere along about the fourteenth men or whatever) an ability to go into the past, not physically, but by entering the consciousness of a being that had already lived. At first it was random and fatal, but after many generations of focused racial effort, it got easy and safe and was used for research (the rewriting of history, etc.). Ultimately, they even obtained some capability to communicate back to the past, but you can imagine how mysterious and "beyond us" that all was.

And so we have the book. At the end we see the race losing to the purple sun and assume that all has ended. They sterilize everybody as the new form of racial suicide (these are not the survivors who defended the Alamo by a long shot!) and so a "last person" is born. He then assumes messianic significance and works on things as the youngest person at the end, but all is finally lost.

Last and First Men consumes half of the volume. Last Men in London is the other half, and it is contained in its entirety. I have a slight interest in reading it too, but I fear it is more of the same thing. In fact, he begins the first chapter by saying how this is not a story with characters but is another of those dry histories written from some unimaginable future. Life is too short to wade through all that again, and in London to boot. I'm returning the volume to Chuck Monday.

Having been held up as seminal literature to futuristic ways of thought, I expected something different from Last and First Men, but having read it, I now see why such claims are made about it. Stapledon's politics elude me, but whatever it is, his world view on how people behave in a society is completely wrong, for lack of a better word. I suppose he believes that higher enlightenment and intelligence will make things work in the way he foresees but this is not particularly upheld by any real experience of the race. He does have some interesting ideas for which this backdrop of an insanely heterogeneous humanity provides a background, and those ideas are the interesting parts.

I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone except a historian of science fiction or futuristic thinking and, if I had read this review before beginning (surely an eighteenth man could have done that somehow....) I wouldn't have read it at all. Perhaps I should post the review to Amazon.com, but the $300+ price for an antique in good condition will probably ward most people off so, why bother?