- Paperback: 336 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; New edition edition (26 Mar 1987)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140080880
- ISBN-13: 978-0140080889
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 13 x 2.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 916,274 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Last And First Men (Sf Masterworks 11)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Olaf Stapledon's first novel Last and First Men, published in 1930, has sometimes been called science fiction's Bible--a sweeping, exhilarating history of humanity's future. Its awesome timescale, stretching across five billion years, was an inspiration to the young Arthur C. Clarke, who later wrote: "No book before or since ever had such an impact on my imagination." However, Last and First Men should come with a health warning: The early chapters, dealing with near-future politics from the viewpoint of 1930, are mired in dodgy short-term speculation and have dated badly. Soon Stapledon rings down the curtain on us "First Men" as an uncontrolled nuclear reaction sweeps the world and boils the oceans--and now his imagination takes flight. The Second Men are plagued with invasions of cloud-like Martians; the bat-eared, six-fingered Third Men deliberately create the Fourth Men who are essentially huge, immobile brains ... and so on through ever-vaster gulfs of time. Individuals, nations, civilizations, even species are evocatively shown as mayflies flickering in and out of existence in an immense, chilly cosmos that goes uncaringly on forever. Yet it's not a gloomy work: even as the dying Sun promises to become their funeral pyre, the Last Men affirm that "It is very good to have been man." Another classic choice from Millennium SF Masterworks. --David Langford
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Product Description
Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future is a "future history" science fiction novel written in 1930 by the British author Olaf Stapledon. A work of unprecedented scale in the genre, it describes the history of humanity from the present onwards across two billion years and eighteen distinct human species, of which our own is the first and most primitive. Stapledon's conception of history is based on the Hegelian Dialectic, following a repetitive cycle with many varied civilizations rising from and descending back into savagery over millions of years, but it is also one of progress, as the later civilizations rise to far greater heights than the first. The book anticipates the science of genetic engineering, and is an early example of the fictional supermind; a consciousness composed of many telepathically-linked individuals. A controversial part of the book depicts humans, in the far-off future, escaping the dying Earth and settling on Venus - in the process totally exterminating its native inhabitants, an intelligent marine species. Stapledon's book has been interpreted by some as condoning such interplanetary genocide as a justified act if necessary for racial survival, though a number of Stapledon's partisans denied that such was his intention, arguing instead that Stapledon was merely showing that although mankind had advanced in a number of ways in the future, at bottom it still possessed the same capacity for savagery as it has always had.
--This text refers to an alternate
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
32 of 33 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
After 20 years of reading about Last and First Men (they had not even heard of it in Hay-on-Wye)I have found it at last. If your idea of a novel is a book about people's relationships, it may not be for you. That particular element of novels bores me to death and this is more my idea of a compelling read. The history of mankind from 1930 to a few billion years hence is pre-written by a philosopher and fantasist possessed of a great and unquiet mind, inhuman but not inhumane as someone has well put it. On no account skip the opening chapters, whatever anyone tells you. The fact that S got the world's history 1930-2002 completely wrong is not the point -- the rest of it will almost certainly prove to be all wrong too, if we think like that. What these first chapters do is to get us into the author's weird exalted and passionless mindset. He is not so much on another planet as in an alternative universe. It is entirely to the book's advantage that he has no grasp of realpolitik and even that he has no detectable sense of humour -- when I was beginning to feel the latter as a lack I came to the only bit where he ascribes humour to any of his characters, a race of monkeys depicted in general unsympathetically and not least for their possession of this deplorable characteristic. That put me in my place I can tell you. From start to finish I got no sense of either pity or cruelty as he chronicles the the periodic near-annihilations that overtake the various successive human races, and while his account of the systematic extermination of the intelligent life on Venus filled me with a wrenching sense of tragedy that I did not feel for any of the mankinds the author himself seemed as unmoved as ever. If Wuthering Heights was written by an eagle, who or what wrote Last and First Men? Of other human proclivities I can report that sex is methodically accorded its place in a thorough and businesslike manner reminiscent of Peter Simple's great sexologist Profesor Heinz Kiosk (assisted by Dr Melisande Fischbein). Of anything I would recognise as love or affection or friendship I can find not a trace.
-- 'here he has not gone so far as to trouble the eternal gods or the stars that blight our human lot.' That comes in Star Maker. Here the 18th and last men are trapped in our solar system when final doom reaches out from the stars. Next -- Star Maker, which makes this book seem parochial.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
It is hard to fully express the effect this book has had on me. I was lent it by my grandfather, who read it close to 60 years ago and insists that it still haunts him.
I can see why. Stapledon's writing, though rather stale and flat to begin with, belies a stunning imagination that not only beggers belief with its soaring vastness; but really blows a hole out the back of "accepted" morality, social values and most over, polical values.
Stapledon makes modern governments' 10-year line-of-sight feel both criminal and also charmingly, but laughably, childish.
I'm no political scientist (far from it...), but I found my atitudes towards my country, my planet and my fellow man re-evaluted through reading this work.
Highly recommended.
I can see why. Stapledon's writing, though rather stale and flat to begin with, belies a stunning imagination that not only beggers belief with its soaring vastness; but really blows a hole out the back of "accepted" morality, social values and most over, polical values.
Stapledon makes modern governments' 10-year line-of-sight feel both criminal and also charmingly, but laughably, childish.
I'm no political scientist (far from it...), but I found my atitudes towards my country, my planet and my fellow man re-evaluted through reading this work.
Highly recommended.
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book does nothing less than plot the next two thousand million years of human history. We see the extinction of our own species, and the rise and fall of seventeen others. Civilizations rise and fall, planets are laid waste, humanity repeatedly ascends to transcendance, only to fall to animality for millions of years at a time before the next species comes into its own. The exegesis (there is no other word) ends in a tragedy as the final species of Man (a five-eyed, genetically engineered giant, living on Neptune) gets a glimmer of the Meaning Of It All before a cruel and merciless annihilation. If that was not astounding enough, this whole thing was written in 1930 by a philosopher who hadn't heard of SF. Stapledon is now revered as the SF writer's SF writer. This will clearly not be for everyone. The unimaginative drones of Eng Lit will dismiss it as silliness, but don't be deterred. The prose is difficult but starkly beautiful without being remotely sentimental -- in tone, it is reminiscent of the more serious parts of H. G. Wells. The atmosphere, which H. P. Lovecraft identifies as a crucial ingredient of genre fiction, has a touch of Poe, as well as the cosmic dream sequence in horror classic House on the Borderland by Hope Hodgson. Where it is dispassionate and philosophical, it reminds you of the terrifying metaphysical conundrums of Borges. Yet Stapledon is very much his own voice: icily cool and clear, almost (dare one say it) inhuman, though not inhumane. But what sets this book apart from every other book except one is the majestic scale of the work. The book that trumps this is Stapledon's own Star Maker, in which the entire history of Last and First Men is compressed into two paragraphs. Nurse, pass the aspirins.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Fiction, Fantasy, Sci-fi, Story-telling, Future-reading and Hard-going
What can this book tell us today? Can it still be enjoyed by today's readers? These were the two questions I had lurking in the back of my mind when I got my copy of this 1930... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Sean T. Page
astonishing.
There is not a book like it. It takes you on a journey like no other. I really enjoyed this book but it left me feeling uneasy for quite a while, not sure why... Read more
Published 12 months ago by JrF
2 billion years? I feel like I've lived through them.
I'm trying to think of something nice to say about this, but the most I can generate is that at least I finished it. Read more
Published 15 months ago by Enzyme
Epic but ultimately boring
I read the synopsis for this book, thought it looked interesting, and saw that most of the reviews were positive, so gave it a go. Read more
Published 20 months ago by Andy Dufresne
Decades Ahead Of Its Time
Recently republished as part of Gollancz' `Space Opera' Collection (a gorgeously designed set of paperbacks with beautifully thought out black and white cover illustrations made... Read more
Published 21 months ago by Rod Williams
Boring, repetitive, utterly lacking in humanity
This is another of those supposedly great works ("science fiction's greatest ascent", according to Stephen Baxter) that is actually a load of pish. Read more
Published 24 months ago by D. R. Cantrell
MASTERPIECE PURE AND SIMPLE.
The only writer on this list apart from Wells and perhaps Aldiss who fully deserves his place on the Masterworks list. Read more
Published on 4 Nov 2009 by Ivor Winters
Stapledon's First Masterwork
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... Read more
Published on 2 Sep 2009 by Dave_42
Difficult but a classic
To be honest this tale whilst considered a modern classic is very difficult to get into. Perhaps it's due to the times in which it was written (1930. Read more
Published on 27 Jun 2009 by Gareth Wilson - Falcata Times Blog
Good Read
I read this book when I was a teenager. It is so far before its time its almost impossible to comprehend. Read more
Published on 16 May 2009 by C. Newham
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