Last and First Men

For I while I had difficulty reading this book because the font size but after increasing it I really enjoyed this book. The ideas in the books were very creative, far more than I expected. I loved the way he described the various life-forms and everything else in great detail. And how he put a lot of historical ideas in his book like bigotry toward others people.

Truly a masterpiece. This single book will take you on a trip the likes of which will stay with you for a long time. I have read and reread this book, passed it on, recommended, gifted, etc. for many years.

What a wonderful book. Much like it's predecessor (First and Last Men) it has a view of humanity that is as far reaching (if not more) than anything I've ever read... A truly different perspective for a novel.

Interesting piece of speculative science fiction that impressed me as a teenager 50 years ago. This edition has many formatting flaws and extraneous info such as meaningless page numbers from a previous edition, but I find it readable.

Timeless and epic, this work is a masterpiece. No lover of Science Fiction should wait another moment to read it.
The Rings of Concord

This is a classic?

Written between WWI and WWII, I found the Last and First Men interesting only in that the author completely missed predicting the future. Example: Germany becomes a 'peacenik' state. Then there is the boring writing style. This novel read like a laundry list--first this happened, then that, then they did this, etc. It was a completely detached perspective with no sense of connection to the story, no compulsion to find out what happens next. Someone described this as a history book, but history books are more interesting than this.

I gave up after a couple chapters.

Skip this and go straight to Starmaker. This is a look at 18 species of man covering about 2 billion years. It is terribly boring......but you can tell he was flexing his creative muscle for his masterpiece Starmaker

I tend to avoid early twentieth century science fiction because of the vapid plots, hollow characters, and abject cheesiness of the material. Case in point: E.E. "Doc" Smith's The Skylark of Space (1928)--hated it. When I hear about a recommended book from the same era, I tend to file that suggestion in the trash bin. However, when I read Brian Aldiss' Farewell, Fantastic Venus (1968) anthology, I was floored by the imagination of one particular story, an excerpt from Last and First Name. I had known the name of the author, Olaf Stapledon, but never thought it sounded good--vapid, hollow, and cheesy are the words that instantly sprang to mind. Reading the excerpt smashed that ignorant assumption of mine.

Thankfully, I was in the right time at the right place when I found a brand-new edition of this book for a mere ninety-six baht (US$3.10). I snapped it up and filed it away on my overloaded bookshelf to one day be read. As a long holiday neared (October 20-23), I opened the book during my commute, then during my lunches, then in the evening in bed, then on the bus to my destination. I was hooked.

Rear cover synopsis:
"Evolution is an astonishing thing.

Over the next billion years human civilisations will rise and fall like waves on the shore, each one rising from savagery to an ever-advancing technological peak before falling back and being surpassed.

This extraordinary, imaginative and ambitious novel is full of pioneering speculations about the nature of evolution, terraforming, genetic engineering and the savage, progressive nature of man."

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Brian Aldiss has called this book "great classical ontological epic prose poems" (vi) and inspired the minds of great men; among them: Arthur C. Clark, Freeman Dyson, and Winston Churchill. I'll respect Aldiss' advice! My Gollancz edition (UK, 2009) has a forward by Gregory Benford (v-vii), an author who I have little interest in after the disastrous reads of In the Ocean of Night (1977) and Timescape (1980). His 3-page forward, while moderately insightful, offers the following advice:

"[S]imply skip the first four parts and begin with The Fall of the First Man [Chapter V]. This eliminates the antique quality of the book and also tempers the rather repetitive cycle of rise and fall that becomes rather monotonous." (vii)

Audacious! This is terrible advice, which confirms my already dislike for Benford. Considering its publication in 1930, the first four chapter of Last and First Men are an amazingly prophetic portrait of the world after World War II with the continuation of the Americanized world into the twenty-first century and America's bipolar relationship with China. Consider these prophetic words:

"In the Far West, the United States of America openly claimed to be custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man's existence. By this time every human being throughout the planet made use of American products ... the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph and televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought ... What wonder, then, that America, even while she was despised, irresistibly moulded the whole human race. This, perhaps, would not have mattered, had America been able to give of her very rare best. But inevitably only her worst could be propagated. Only the most vulgar traits of that potentially great people could get through into the minds of foreigners by means of these crude instruments. And so, by the floods of poison issuing from this people's baser members, the whole world, and with it the nobler parts of America herself, were irrevocably corrupted." (21-22)

Those are true words for this American expat, who renounces most of American television, political rhetoric, slovenly dietary habits, and the obsession with consumerism. Olaf Stapleton in his preface (ix-xii) to Last and First Men says, "American readers ... may feel that their great nation is given a somewhat unattractive part in the story. I have imagined the triumph of a cruder sort of Americanism ... May this not occur in the real world!" (xi). Sorry Olaf, your worst fears materializes much sooner than you prophesized! Further, "Some readers, taking my story to be an attempt at prophecy, may deem it unwarrantably pessimistic. But it is nor prophecy; it is myth, or an essay in myth" (xi). Sadly, what started as an exercise in moldable myth became a monopole of reality.

The first four chapters aren't as weighty as Benford suggests; they are rich with insight and chock full of ominous signs for the next few hundred, thousand, million and billion years of human evolution.

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Chapter I: Balkan Europe
Compounded pride and ignorance, ever the silent pusher in human affairs, claim the lives of many in the Anglo-French War. Thereafter, nationalism is seen as a swarthy agent of a nation's demise, yet, when fingers are pointed they point both ways. With global interests of economy, America plays a tepid role in affairs, unacting themselves yet always nosy in the mind's eye of the population; thus, the poisoning of the Russo-German war.

Chapter II: Europe's Downfall
After Europe's bickering divided the continent, America fills the vacuum of power. Globalizing the world with American products, America is "respected for their enterprise" yet "universally feared and envied" (21). Suspicious of competition and resistance, America makes its military pressure known with airbases and flyovers, one of which happens at the wrong time at the wrong place; thus, leading to a European megadeath and global fear of simply criticizing the powerful nation.

Chapter III: America and China
Though as Americanized as the rest of the world in regards to media, language, and habit, China arises to become America's chief global counterbalance of influence. Cultural differences divide the populous nations of China and India, yet America allies itself with Russian mysticism and China allies itself with the rigorous Germans. With the globe divided by the influence of the two nations, conflict can be sparked form noble beginnings and be fueled by patriotism.

Chapter IV: An Americanized Planet
Nearly four hundred years after the European War (Chapter I), a World State and its President of the World are established. Science, empirical thought held in such high regard it borders on mysticism, impregnates the daily life of each citizen who all revere the mysterious greatness of the ancient Chinese scientist Gordelpus, the Prime Mover. However, having expended Earth's sources of oil, they are left to rely on Antarctica's veins of coal.

Chapter V: The Fall of the First Men
With the utter eclipse of the World State and, with it, the knowledge and pride, so too befalls the glory of Man in progress. The Dark Ages settle in for many millennia yet geological processes continue unabated, without care for Man or his progress. From the fragments of Man rise a fledging civilization in the landmass of the once South Atlantic who rediscover their ancestor's greatness and, with it, its power for destruction and cruelty.

Chapter VI: Transition
Only twenty-eight hearty, intelligent souls survived the megadeath of the epic subterranean blast and found purchase on an inhabitable tract of land in northern Siberia. A schism physically divides the settlement--one half of the survivors staying on the coats and the other half crossing the seas... only to slowing devolve to barbarianism. Even the cultured and learned settlement found itself helpless to their natural state of inbred infertility and inflexibility.

Chapter VII: The Rise of the Second Men
From the dregs of the First man's ultimate Dark Age arose a passive species of its very descent. Meanwhile, across the great continental divide of mountains, a lesser form of man had devolved among simians which developed superior intellectual capacity; yet, these capacities were limited when compared to the great Siberian intellect. Jealousy leaves a rift and the demise of both races, regardless of a zenith for sexual revival, soon approached.

Chapter VIII: The Martians
Near a village in the Alpine peaks, a green cloud-cum-jelly descended from the sky to temporarily terrorize the curious and unfortunate. The cloud, actually a supermind of ultra-microscopic Martian entities, soon depart for unknown reasons, but the alien mind of the Martian individual and group psyche are as irrational as the minds of men. While advanced and industrious, the Martians are also flawed by a type of monomania.

Chapter IX: Earth and Mars
Millennia pass as recurrent intrusions by the Martians, each time being defeated by the crafty Second Men, but each time diminishing Man's will to fight. Eventually, complete colonization of the Earth is accomplished by the Martians and further study of the humans reveals their intellectual capacity. Self-confidence is found in Man who then defeat the Martians, but not before lassitude, lingering Martian saboteurs, and starvation change Man's nature.

Chapter X: The Third Men in the Wilderness
Freed from the yolk of Martian overrule and ushered into diversity from a glacial period, the Third Men evolved to become of special aural talent. Keen hunters yet also keen manipulators, the Third Men found a particular pleasure in the godliness of pain and considered its affliction upon lesser beings high excellent as it brought about "vivid psychic reality" (166). Fond of music, objective versus subjective harmony resulted in a chasm of displeasure.

Chapter XI: Man Remakes Himself
Savvy of manipulating germ cells and with a maniacal drive to create the most supreme mind, the Third Men are able to create a superior mind with a vestigial body then, simply, a massive mind capable to incredible intellectual feats... and only that. The Great Minds then produces further Great Minds, thus producing the Fourth Men. Exterminating the pests and peasants of the Third Men, the Great Minds create their own version of human perfection, mobile yet brilliant--the artificial Fifth Men.

Chapter XII: The Last Terrestrials
Telapathically linked as a whole, death much distressed the Fifth Men, whose lifespans reached upwards of 50,000 years. they yearned for the truth of an afterlife and found that the past was still tangible, thus began their obsession with remotely viewing the past. Never deceived, the Fifth Men also had to look forward to the terraforming of Venus because Earth's destiny was to be sealed by its fateful dance with its orbiting moon.

Chapter XIII: Humanity on Venus
With the native Venerians destroyed, the Fifth Men were slowly able to evolve, with much hardship, into the Sixth Men, a species which highly valued the beauty of flight. Their unremarkable, depressing existence gave way to the most splendid , rapturous species of Flying Men--the Seventh Men. Through gaiety and bliss, their short lives focused little on the sciences, so they bore the Eighth men--sturdy, intelligent, diligent, and unexpectedly unprepared to settle the planet Neptune.

Chapter XIV: Neptune
Ill-equipped for the barren wastelands of northern Neptune, the Ninth Men quickly suffered and devolved for millions of years, only occasionally arising to a brief flicker of intelligence. So went the proceeding Men, failures of their own success, until the Fifteenth Men, who "set themselves to abolish five great evils, namely, diseases, suffocating toil, senility, misunderstanding, ill-will" (251). Aware of their flaws, they created the Sixteenth Men, who devised the Seventeenth Men...

Chapter XV: The Last Men
The Eighteenth Men are the best adapted, longest living, and most conscious of the past, present, and future, yet they also know that they are to be the Last Men. They have lived the reality of a billion years of trial and error toward "harmonious complexity of form" and "the awakening of the spirit into unity, knowledge, delight and self-expression" (275). Life their evolution, the cosmos is very beautiful yet also very terrible and tragic.

Chapter XVI: The Last of Man
Inevitable cosmic disaster bestows the Eighteenth Men with a great task: continue the two billion-year music of Man's evolution or return the entire effort to stellar dust. Though slipping into anarchy and tribalism, the Men strive to produce intergalactic spore of Man which may seed a planet and continue mankind's tragic history, though the possibly remains remote. The certain blaze of oncoming death, however, spurs a final brotherly effort to reconcile.

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Consider the wise words of Thich Nhat Hanh: "Civilisations have been destroyed many times, and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different." This modern Buddhist philosopher's words echo what Olaf Stapledon, a British philosopher from decades earlier. By Chapter XIV, Stapledon begins to wax lyrically about the petty existence of Mankind in terms of the lifespan of the cosmos: "[T]he whole duration of humanity ... is but a flash in the lifetime of the cosmos" (244), and yet, even at the crescendo of consciousness which bestow the wise Men of the Last Men, Man still lies prone to all disasters which maybe come, be they cosmic or man-made:

"At any stage of his career he might easily have been exterminated by some slight alteration of his chemical environment, by a more than usually malignant microbe, by a radical change of climate, or by the manifold effects of his own folly." (281)

Doris Lessing, in her afterword (295-297), cites four authors who admired Olaf Stapledon's work: Brian Aldiss, Arthur C. Clarke, Stanislaw Lem, and Theodore Sturgeon. This impressive list of admirers is flattery enough, but, as Charles Caleb Colton had said, imitation is sincerest form of flattery. Three books epitomize this flattery:

(1) Aldiss's own flattery in the form of imitation comes from his collection Starswarm (1964) where Man has settled 10,000 new worlds over one million years. These myriad "descendants of the inhabitants of Old Earth" (Signet, 1964) exhibit radical changes in society, in culture, and in physical form.

(2) Jack L. Chalker, best know his endless series of quests, wrote a quadrilogy entitled The Rings of the Master, which starts with Lords of the Middle Dark (1986). The proceeding three books explore Mankind which had been deliberately dispersed by Earth's Master system and the cast's attempt to retrieve the necessary rings to disable the System. Each world is home to an exotic form of Mankind, forcibly evolved to adapt to the planet's climate.

(3) John Brunner's A Maze of Stars (1991) is an amazing stereoscopic view of mankind's evolving and devolving amid "the six hundred planets" which "had been seeded with human stock by the greatest feat of technology ever achieved" by The Ship. The Ship's duty is to visit, time and again, each of the worlds it had seeded, for better or worse.

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Regardless of its 83-year age, this book has stood the test of time, rendering it a testament to imagination to a magnificent scale, foresight on an epic scale, and intuitiveness of a grand scale. The decades haven't been as kind to some science fiction books as is has been to Last and First Men--Asimov's Foundation (1951) has a terribly dated feeling and Clarke's Childhood's End (1953) now feels limp and lackluster.

Disregard Gregory Benford's simple-minded advice of ignoring the first four chapters of Last and First Men (a sixth of the entire book) because Stapledon's ingenuity starts even before the first chapter, it starts in his preface; disregard people who dislike a book without a protagonist or central character because Mankind's potential is the highlight here, and disregard my own opinion... this needs to be read.

This review is based on the regular Kindle version of the text - not the illustrated version.

I have mixed feelings about the book. On the positive side, it was enormous in scope, covering the 2 billion year history of mankind from us (the first men) through a total of 18 permutations of the species. Humanity has quite a journey including fighting a war with Martians, escaping a dying Earth, and living for a while on Venus before finally ending up on (and ending on) Neptune. I thought it almost unique that the author didn’t presume FTL travel, and indeed had even the last men getting sick in the vastness of space. I also liked that each successive species was not necessarily an improvement over the one before and that civilizations arose and collapsed continuously over the eons, with dark ages and golden ages.

On the downside, the writing is rather dry and reads a bit like an encyclopedia, as opposed to an actual story. There are no characters to get attached to, as the book is entirely about history and philosophy. What made me crazy was that throughout the book, (particularly in the last third) when things got interesting, Stapledon would say things along the lines of, “I can’t pause to describe what happened” or, “It is impossible for me to give any idea of the…experience” or, “Whose nature it is impossible for me to describe” or, “Of this obviously, I can tell you nothing.” If the author can’t be bothered to do this, why tell the story in the first place?

After reading and thoroughly enjoying Last and First Men I had to read this other rated classic by Olaf Stapledon and I was not disappointed. If the scope of the first book was staggering then this book blows that away by several orders of magnitude. In this book he turns away from the history (both past and yet to come) of the human race and examines the possibilities for life on first an interstellar, then galactic and finally on a universal scale.

On scope and imagination alone this is a fascinating read, but delving deeper there are some brilliant ideas which kept me glued to the pages. Unfortunately it's not an easy read. While it does contain the character of the narrator and encounters with other individuals this isn't story that simply follows the events of the plot. This is more an exploration of ideas, although I would say that it's a little less dry than the author's earlier work.

It suffers from a few other issues. The most obvious is the gulf of understanding that has changed since this book was written. Some of the science is very outdated (as you would expect) and while it is noticeable it doesn't undermine the scope of thought the book invokes. Although I did find the repeated assertions that something was beyond human understanding a little tiresome.

Another issue for me was the last section. I'm actually in conflicted opinion about this section as it stands very different from the bulk of the book. On one hand it's an excellent modern (ish!) take on Paradise Lost (which is my favourite story of all time) while on the other the nature of the Star Maker is at odds with the more scientific leanings of the earlier chapters.

It's a difficult book to rate as I can see why people would struggle with it. However based on the ideas that it inspired in me while I was reading and the outstanding journey it took me on I would say that this easily deserves its classic status. It's one not just for science fiction fans but anyone that holds an interest in life and its place in the universe.

This story is truly epic in scope. It covers two billion years of man's existance and evolution. His rise and fall happening time and again. We are considered the First Men. The Last Men are the eighteenth.
It was a truly fascinating and yet boring read. I had to look up how long this book was from a couple of different sources. All say that it is around three hundred pages but it really felt like it was a thousand. I would have moments where I would be glued to the story, but this would be very short followed by page after page of what I would normally call filler but really it was the writing style of the times, which was about a century ago. There are concepts in there that are truly dated, such as the view of women, and I was a bit perturbed by a couple of things Stapledon said but I had to remind myself that he was from an altogether different time.

As I mentioned previously, there were moments that I was glued to the story. It was with each of these moments that others must have been fascinated as well. It is said that this book has lent itself to be the inspiration for innumerable other stories. I would encourage any avid science fiction reader to take this book on. Like me, you will probably come across many instances where you are reminded of stories you had read prior - the probable inspirations for those authors.

Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men was written in 1930 before the term science fiction had come into common usage. Stapledon was often amazed that his work had been categorized in this new genre, but such was the uniqueness of his vision combined with the sudden acceptance of this new literary scene when it had achieved enough mass that Last and First Men quickly became a SF classic. Arthur C. Clarke often cites this work as one of the most influential books of all time. It is hard not to see why. The creative thought on the page is nothing less than Stapledon describing the history of the universe from start to finish... and what an imagination he has. It is virtually unparalleled by anything else out there, highly original, all which make it popular and such a mentally exhaustive and deep read.

Last and First Men finds it hard to get a reception by modern SF audiences because of the style of the work. It lacks characters or even a focus outside of evolution and civilizations, but that is what makes it such a brainstorming bombshell. Instead of the usual character driven accounts, Last and First Men is written as a history lesson of the universe from the view of humans who evolve through over eighteen forms, through several civilizations, on several worlds, in a universe that also changes with them. This is hard science fiction, but science fiction that should be read.

If you are a seasoned SF reader who needs a personality orientated story and doesn't have time for history, then this book is not for you. For those who don't mind an account of a series of events, as a historical narrative, spanning densely through some 300 pages, then it would be a shame to avoid this classic epic. The best time to read this work is when you have some grounding in the development of civilizations, how they compete and some knowledge of biological evolution. If these things can hold your interesting then go for Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men as soon as you can. This work has a tendency to impress scientists, historians, cosmologists more than seasoned fiction readers. It is virtually a fiction passing as a non-fiction presentation. It will make you think outside of the box.

Stapleton's tale encompasses Balkan Europe, Europe's downfall, America and China, an Americanized planet, the fall of the first men, transition periods, the rise of the second men, the Martian attacks, earth and mars, the third men in the wilderness, man remaking himself, the last terrestrials, humanity on Venus, Neptune, the last men and the last of man. One of the most memorable scenes is of humans who have evolved into rodents because of environmental catastrophes but have retained human hands, later evolving back into humans again. Others include winged civilizations committing mass suicide by flying into a Volcano or the development of a huge brain to understand the world and the cosmos and everything in it.

Stapleton's account is profoundly imaginative. He expands your awareness of existence and this is what counts. You come away feeling so small in such a vast development of everything and yet this is the kind of thinking that helped launch writers such as Clarke onto the picture. The best advice on reading this is to wait for the right time, when your brain needs to just launch itself across the full dynamics of the cosmos and everything in it. Only then can you truly appreciate the vision that is on the page.

I have been interested in the world's many religions for a long time, as well as in science and particulary cosmology and astronomy, but I don't think I've ever come across someone who's thought quite so BIG before. Sure, the Hindus and Buddhists put a lot of zeroes after their timelines for everything, but one doesn't get the impression they really know what they mean. Sure, scientists describe the cosmos in terms of billions of light years - but what about beyond the cosmos, before and after?

Stapledon on the other hand seems to have thought out the life of this, and infinitely more, universes on a scale that reflects the way 'life' itself here on Earth plays out: that is, with incredible overabundance and waste, and yet with great elegance and beauty. On the old edition I have, there is a quote on the back by the scientist John Lilly reading, "The most influential book I have ever read." If I couldn't say the same for Lilly's own books, I might echo this statement.

One of the most incredible and intimidating ideas in this book is that even as massive galactic consciousnesses bond together to create minds infinitely beyond our own pitiful conceptions, 'they' still find themselves tiny fish in the enormous cosmic sea, and almost equally incapable of fathoming its design or purpose. For all those of us who think a single human monkey-mind can get some grasp on it all, either through scientific understanding or mystical experience, this is an extremely sobering and provocative thought.

One of my all-time favorite books and very highly recommended if you like to think big, and consider the place of humans and consciousness generally in the scheme of things.

Olaf Stapledon was a Philosopher who dabbled in science fiction. He wrote several science fiction stories and books, which attempted to project future trends of his time very far into the future. One book, First and Last Men, tracks human evolution over billions of years and ends when the last human dies in Neptune, long after the Sun is dead.

The Star Maker however, is by far his finest novel. It begins when the narrator becomes aware of a strange ability he seems to have to detach himself from his body and its ordinary existence and soar into space. The mind of the narrator then proceeds to investigate the cosmos, moving from the Earth to the galaxy and finally to the entire universe and its creator.

The Star Maker attempts to predict the future and in some cases, runs as a paralell story to The first and Last Men. The scope of the Star Maker however is truely cosmic, spanning aeons of time and billions of light years of space. Almost as a side show we experience alien life forms, Dyson Spheres (stated as light traps), bizarre worlds, sentient stars, galactic clusters but the novel soars to ever more dizzying heights until the very end is reached when the universal mind reaches to the mind of the 'Star Maker' himself, who effectively is God as traditionally understood. But even the cosmic mind reels as it sees the Star Maker has only made this universe as a sort of experimental toy; rather as Liebniz imagined God to have all possible worlds present at once in his mind and actively selects and creates universes (though in contrast to Liebniz this universe is not the Star-Maker's finest creation) the Star Maker creates ever more complicated and sophisticated universes from the infinite set of possible universes, populating them with creatures whose nature ever further eludes comprehension.

The story ends with a bit of an anticlimax, but with the apparent conclusion what is most precious is each other - somewhat akin to the conclusion of Ellie Arroway after meeting intelligent aliens in Carl Sagan's story 'Cosmos.'

Brian Aldiss wrote in his history of science fiction that The Star Maker stands on its own class, a work of genius whose volume is deafening. In my view this judgement is perfectly correct. Stapleton's range and scope of vision have been rivalled by few in science fiction, perhaps except by writers such as Arthur C Clarke, Frank Herbert, or Vernor Vinge. Many of his guesses now turn out to have been right, though some do look a bit dated in light of what science has discovered. He also brings many interesting but abstract philosophical ideas to light in a concrete form, such as possible and actual words, the existence and nature of God, the existence of life elsewhere in the cosmos, whether or not life in the universe is telelogical, and also somewhat anticipated later speculations amoung science fiction writers and scientists that in the far distant future all intelligent life in the universe will merge into a cosmic conciousness which will make the entire cosmos alive, and sentient of itself.

While this novel now sometimes shows its age, it well deserves to be considered a great classic of science fiction whose influence continues to this day, alongside great writers such as Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells and Arthur C. Clarke.

Olaf Stapledon was an immensely deep-thinking philosopher who utilized science fiction for his expansive ruminations on the place of humanity in the universe. The two books combined here are an excessively heavy read and are considerably more dense than his two well-known character-driven novels - the also weighty Odd John and Sirius (the volume combining those two classics is highly recommended). Last and First Men and Star Maker could be faulted for reading less like novels and more like philosophical tracts, but this is not a sign of weakness because Stapledon's philosophy is robust enough to make the method work. Meanwhile, reviewers who harshly criticize Stapledon's political leanings are members of ideologies that are inherently hostile to creativity and deep thinking. Stapledon was a philosopher, not an ideologue, and his fully developed conceptions of the small place of humanity in the cosmos ultimately revealed his humanist faith. He achieved these philosophical insights with a science fiction vision of an immensity that has never been equaled in the genre.

Last and First Men (1931) gives a future history of the human race that is incredibly far beyond the few thousand years that most sci-fi writers can come up with. Stapledon maps out human progress and evolution over a whopping two billion years, with a narrative scope in which all of human experience as we know it can be glossed over in a single paragraph. Though Stapledon's predictions of future progress are hokey at times (for instance, he was a few hundred million years off on the first human space voyage), his vision is stupendous in its range and depth. The spirit of humanity survives through 18 different species, many near-extinctions and evolutionary dead-ends, and three different homeworlds.

Star Maker (1937) has, amazingly, a vision of universal history that is orders of magnitude beyond Last and First Men. That story's two billion years become but a single paragraph here. Via thought experiments in dream-like omniscience, Stapledon presents the history of the cosmos as a tragedy taking place over hundreds of billions of years, with the rise and fall of galaxies and dimensions serving as the action. Eventually Stapledon envisions the universe as a sentient deity of a vastness and complexity that even his nearly-omniscient narrator can't put into words. Stapledon's works are essential for big thinkers who are obsessed with understanding their place within the billions of years and trillions of light years of the vast infinite universe. Stapledon's ability to shed light on mankind's inconsequential yet fully worthwhile place in the uncaring cosmos was profoundly astonishing. [~doomsdayer520~]

This is definately not a conventional book, sci-fi or otherwise. For brevity, I'll just talk about the First and Last Men, though much of the same could be said of Star Maker. If you're looking for easy-reading, fast-flowing modern entertainment, don't read this book. It's slow at times, has almost no individual characters and is in many ways unrealistic. On the other hand, it has better than average prose, is broader in scale than almost any other book (being a history of eighteen successive species spanning billions of years), and can be very enjoyable if you can get into it. I'm a sci-fi fan and was looking for some more unusual books when I came across this. I enjoyed it very much but I don't think the average reader would. If you're constantly judging the material, or anticipating goal-oriented plot/suspense points as you might in a more modern novel, you'll probably find it unreadable.

Star Maker isn't really a novel in the conventional sense, but it is deeply thought-provoking. The central premise is that the main character discovers, one star-lit evening, that he can travel through the cosmos using only his mind. As he voyages, he encounters many other intelligences; indeed, he eventually joins with a collective intelligence comprised of beings from all over the cosmos. As the novel unfolds, we learn that the stars themselves, and even whole galaxies, can be "minded," i.e., intelligent. Stapledon spins out countless examples of different kinds of intelligences, including various sorts of symbionts. His imagination is so prolific that one comes to feel that thousands of other novels might have been "spun off" from the practically innumerable scenarios that Stapledon offers up. At times, the book does become a bit repetitive, as S. pursues slight variations on his theme, but it is also awe-inspiring in the sweep and intensity of its vision. My wife and I read this aloud with our eleven year old son (who is very bright and science-minded) and he was fascinated throughout. We had many interesting (vocabulary-building!) conversations as we tried to tease out exactly what Stapledon was saying, and what the implications of his imaginings might be. Oh, and this review would not be complete if I didn't also mention that the book is deeply concerned with the social and spiritual state of the human race. It was published in 1937, in the lead-up to World War II, and you can feel how strongly Stapledon is motivated by his deep need to try to think through, and beyond, the crisis--or perhaps psychosis--that seemed to have the world in its grip. Laying the groundwork for the optimistic creed that would be so important to the eventual success of Star Trek, Stapledon envisions a grand project of profound spiritual evolution. Even so, he cannot help also envisioning a thousand ways in which that project might fail. There is wonder and creation here, but also cruelty and sadism, as the Star Maker (I'll leave you to encounter that mysterious entity for yourselves!) carries out his multifarious plans.

Last and First Men

by Olaf Stapledon

This extremely strange book, published by an philisophically minded englishman around 1932,
doesn't really qualify as a novel. There are only a few lines of dialogue, and most characters stick
around for maybe a paragraph or two. Last and First Men is best thought of as a future history.
Not the history of America or Western Civilization, but of the human species. Two billion years
of it.

<I>Fair Warning: Stapledon, an intellectural pacifist and survivor of the hideous spectacle of
World War One, lets his prejudices and peculiarities show in the first five or so chapters of
the book. He predicts a second (and further) world wars, but gets the details spectacularly
wrong. America gets its knocks, but for reasons that are entirely unfair; Stapledon's beliefs
about american society are bizarre and off-base. He later apologized and admitted that
these early chapters were rather weak. So . . . if you get this book, you won't hurt your
enjoyment of the story if you skip to the section entitled "The Americanized World" and go
from there. Now that that's out of the way . . .</I>

Last and First Men is written about the big picture. It follows Western civilization until it
succumbs to an energy crisis and intellectual stagnation. A successor culture based in Patagonia
arises, but an experiment with atomic power blasts it, and much of the land mass of the Earth,
into oblivion. A few arctic explorers survive, but by the time humanity regains a technological
civilization it has evolved into a sturdier, larger species . . . the "second men." These potentially
superior creatures find themselves threatened by an invasion from Mars . . . and such martians
they are! Mass-minded creatures composed of millions of airborne cells, they and humanity are
simply too alien to comprehend each other. Stapledon spends chapters discussing the social,
moral and spiritual nature of the Martian swarms, comparing their odd society with humanity's.

The Second Men fall, and are replaced through natural evolution by Third, who create the Fourth
. . . and so on, through interplantary migration, cosmic disaster, terraforming, hideous wars,
spiritual triumph and decadence, until the Seventeenth Men arise on Neptune and face the end of
human history.

This is one of the most deeply considered pieces of science fiction every written, and a must-read
for any serious scholar of the genre. It is dated in spots, and oddly colored by pre-war Lefty
english politics, but these minor flaws do not greatly detract from its scope and majesty.

Hey, the store.com! Carry the Dover omnibus edition (includes Starmaker).

Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
As if Last and First Men were not enough, Stapledon takes on the history of an entire galactic civilization in Star Maker (published 1938). The book -- again, not so much a novel as a sort of narrative history -- begins with the narrator fleeing a domestic argument and walking to the top of a hill to gaze at the stars. He finds himself "astrally projecting" and soon discovers another world, populated by roughly humanoid creatures. After telepathically joining with a sympathetic native, he explores the world and its troubled civilizations.
After disaster and folly doom the planet, the narrator and his guide find themselves whisked to another troubled world, and another, and so on, each populated by stranger and stranger creatures with more and more esoteric mental and spiritual natures. Star Maker soon turns from the fate of individual worlds to the big picture; the two-billion year long history of humanity rates about two paragraphs. In a series of dazzling chapters Stapledon describes the construction of artificial worlds, space travel by wandering space colonies, and spectacular interstellar wars. Strife and religious bigotry lead to genocide through rtificially induced novas; lesser races fall prey to technologically advanced but spiritually misguided "pervert" races. After several millenia, a true galactic civilization arises and begins organizing itself into a Galactic Mind to root out the deepest questions of existence. This final quest -- to confront the Prime Mover behind the existence of the universe and reality -- requires a rather long time; at one point further progess seems threatened by the heat death of the universe.
What the Cosmic Mind -- the combined mentalities of all living creatures since the birth of the galaxies -- eventually
discovers is bleak and terrible and wondrous.
Reading Star Maker is an exhausting and humbling experience. Stapledon rattles off ideas and concepts that didn't make it into mainstream SF until the last decade or so. It is mighty difficult to be impressed by mainstream science fiction after reading this book.

Last and First Men is probably the ultimate book of human evolution. First published in 1930, Olaf Stapledon writes a "history" of mankind's future over a period of two billion years.
The book starts with an introduction by one of the Last Men. He has projected his mind two billion years into the past and taken control of the mind of one of the First Men, represented as Olaf Stapledon.
Through the writer we get an account of mankind's progress, with his triumphs and achievements, his highs and lows. We alternately go through phases of enlightenment and barbarism, as the book describes eighteen different species of Man. The First Men (homo sapiens) are the most primitive.
This book is written rather like a textbook. There are no actual characters, as you would find in a novel. Because the story goes over two billion years, it's a book you can read at a slow, relaxed pace. It took me over a month to read. This is not a book you can rush through. Sometimes you have to read carefully, to understand what the "possessed" writer is describing.
Last and First Men makes you feel very small and insignicant. The first few chapters are badly dated, which Gregory Benford advises the reader to skip, but after the collapse of the First Men, the book begins to take off. It's like an incredibly long journey: full of twists and turns, unexpected diversions and unfamiliar scenery.
This book has been an inspiration to such authors as Arthur C. Clarke and Kim Stanley Robinson.

There's a moment in Star Maker where the narrator is experiencing the sum history of the Universe and it goes on for pages and the entire history of mankind as established in Last and First Men takes an entire rather small paragraph. Sort of puts us in our place, wouldn't you say? The genius that coupled these two masterpieces together should be rewarded because one really can't be read without the other, they complement each other in a way that few books of today rarely do. Last and First Men is the slightly less interesting of the two if only because we're less interesting than the rest of the Universe and a good sized chunk of the beginning is Stapledon's prediction for this and the last century, most of which are horribly off. Skim past those chapters and get to the real meat of the "story". This isn't a typical novel, more like a history book but what a textbook, summing nothing less than the entire history of mankind. There's a depth to his imagination here that few other writers have even approached and while his extrapolations of humanity are probably not correct, they are certainly awe-inspiring to think about. He doesn't bother with technology and such, preferring to let us know about their spiritual and moral character, giving us something that we can relate to with these far future people. Still, as good as Last and First Men is, Star Maker surpasses it in every possible way. Having a bit more of a plot this time out (a man finds his consciousness flung across the Universe and together with others tries to find the Star Maker), we're propelled along worlds and ages that we can barely conceive. The narrative retains a bit more compassion and humanity to it while we can only sit there and watch as stars live and die, as planets evolve and collapse, as creatures beyond our imagination join a single telepathic mind as everyone tries in the last dying days of the Universe to find the bloke who saw fit to create all of this. And when the answers start coming fast and fierce, if you don't feel some sense of awe as Stapledon reveals a picture of the Universe of such scope and wonder, then frankly you must be dead. In a day where everyone is trying to be flashy and give people instant gratification, Stapledon wins by using clear and concise and sometimes poetic writing to bring across utterly fantastic ideas that still seem plausible because of their clarity. A masterpiece of science fiction, it's not easy reading but it's thought proking and wondrous, just like the best should be.

Wow! Stapledon is an excellent sci fi writer and an excellent philosopher of the human condition.

There are no ordinary characters in this story. The protagonist is humanity, and this is humanity's autobiography. Or perhaps the story is better understood as a family saga, with each succeeding race of humanity as a new character, from the First Men (that's us) through the Last Men in the way far future.

Again and again, over a vast span of time, humanity waxes and wanes, flourishes and is nearly extinguished, sinks to barbarism and rediscovers a religion of selfless love. Humanity takes on new forms and moves to new planets. In the moments when humanity is capable of philosophical and spiritual reflection, it is plagued by recurring issues--in particular, by the tension between two of its greatest spiritual attainments: (1) a deep love for and identification with all life and the passionate desire for all life to continue and to be free of suffering, and (2) a dispassionate aesthetic appreciation of fate, a mystical awe at the beauty of the drama of the cosmos, including individual and racial suffering and extinction.

The story is engaging, and I was awed by how clearly articulated and how deeply explored is this basic paradox of spirituality. Like two of my favorite authors, Nancy Mairs and Annie Dillard, Stapledon takes a clear and unflinching look at the pain and angst of life in this universe and manages to find hope and beauty. Just two small gripes: it gets a little too pedantic at the very end, and the editor should have deleted about 90% of the occurrences of the word "extravagant." If you like science fiction with deep ideas, or if you like spiritual or philosophical reflection and think you can at least tolerate the sci fi genre, I highly recommend this book.

I also highly recommend Stapledon's "Sirius."

Never have a read a novel more beautiful than this. In fact I found it to be more of an epic poem, for Stapledons writing style and diction certainly share many aspects with poetry. I won't attempt an explanation of the contents of Star Maker as I could never do it justice but I will say this. If this novel, this speculative history of the life and the universe were to replace all scripture in both the physical and in the minds of every person, the human race would almost certainly enter an Age of Enlightenment inconceivable to us today

This one is something else again. My first copy cost five pence, second-hand; I was in my mid-teens and hadn't the faintest idea what I was getting into. Stapledon - who he? I read it from cover to cover that same evening, and the world changed. This book single-handedly spoiled my tolerance for about ninety-five per cent of science fiction. After watching humanity evolve through seventeen different species, three or four planets and aeons of time, I found that lasers and phasers and maidens from Mars just didn't cut it any more. The change of perspective was dizzying; the wealth of invention would dwarf an entire library of Isaac Asimov. The first few chapters may have been dated by events (the book's "future" starts in the 1930s, when it was written), but they still provide an interesting highlight on some of the author's attitudes. Once the narrative progresses beyond the first World State, though, it leaps from triumph to triumph, ever faster and more vertiginous, from the Martian invasion to the Great Brains to the Flying Men and their luminous suicide, from Earth to Venus and finally to Neptune, where the last species of humanity awaits its extinction with dignity. Stapledon wrote several other books of equal stature, including Sirius, Odd John, Last Men in London and the sublime Star Maker. Find them and grab them. In this age of Global Village parochialism and mindless heroics, we need perspectives like Stapledon's to keep our eyes open.

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 journey into the far future moves faster and faster as it continues. A fair amount of time is spent on the First Men and our future both near and far. This speeds up as Stapledon takes us through the Second through Fifth Men and faster still until he reaches the Last Men. He covers many concepts such as genetic engineering, terraforming, alien invasion, biological warfare, and so on.

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.

Last and First Men is a science fiction novel that tells the epic story of Humans from the early 1900s to billions of years in the future and everything in between.

The book was written in the 1930s, so be prepared for some 'Oh, come on!' moments. But, also be prepared for some really good science fiction that would hold its weight today. To enjoy this book for what its worth, you must understand the limits of scientific knowledge at the time. This will help ease the pain of his most mis-targeted predictions and fully appreciate his keen insight and imagination.

I personally did not like the writing style. There are no real characters and it borders on having the feeling of reading a history book. You will probably not get any real emotional connection with the story or root for the humans or anything like that. He speaks of the periods of time in large swaths that further tone down any climactic events that unfold. A typical example would be like: "and so humanity went through several million years in this social structure with many ups and downs and near extinctions". There was way too much of that type of glazing over for my taste. Granted he is covering a lot of time, but he could have written the story better.

I was quite impressed with his imagination and insightful predications about science and culture given when he wrote the book. For instance, the issue of energy depletion is a major theme in several parts of the book. He invents a rather imaginative Martian organism that has a biology and mindset completely different from our own and he backs it up with some believable scientific explanations. He envisions several stages of wild genetic engineering and this is where the book shines. He also tackles some heavy moral issues especially involving war and species dominance. However, he has some gaping oversights, unlikely events, and misguided science throughout. For instance, throughout these *billions* of years including some rather advanced human societies, humans never leave the solar system. I personally find that unlikely assuming we survive that long.

This book was a good attempt at a great idea; quite unique in the sci-fi realm. A bit hard to read but full of stuff to make you think.

While there are some redeeming elements to Last and First Men, it can barely be called a novel--there are no characters and the plot is more of an explicated timeline than anything else. As mentioned in another review, it's interesting and noteworthy for the scope of the book--ending some trillions of years in the future--as well as for its acknowledgement of the inevitable ebb and flow of civilizations. But the fact that it was published in 1930 requires the reader to overlook the many scientific insights and discoveries since then--especially in evolutionary theory, astrophysics, biology, and engineering. Ultimately, it reads like a travelogue about some interesting (future) places, but the breadth of the future human societies/civilizations it describes doesn't make up for the lack of depth each one is afforded. On a more specific note, it seems odd that the amazing technological breakthroughs described (or, more often, simply referenced) don't encompass correspondingly advanced space travel--again, perhaps a limitation of what seemed possible in 1930 (societies that could do what several in the book are capable of could certainly develop and successfully pilot a generation ship to other star systems). I'm glad to have read it, mainly because Stapledon seems to be a fairly important figure in early sf, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't already very well read in the genre.

LAST & FIRST MEN
This extremely strange book, published by an philisophically minded englishman around 1932, doesn't really qualify as a novel. There are only a few lines of dialogue, and most characters stick around for maybe a paragraph or two. Last and First Men is best thought of as a future history. Not the history of America or Western Civilization, but of the human species. Two billion years of it.
Fair Warning: Stapledon, an intellectural pacifist and survivor of the hideous spectacle of World War One, lets his prejudices and peculiarities show in the first five or so chapters of the book. He predicts a second (and further) world wars, but gets the details spectacularly wrong. America gets its knocks, but for reasons that are entirely unfair; Stapledon's beliefs about american society are bizarre and off-base. He later apologized and admitted that these early chapters were rather weak. So . . . if you get this book, you won't hurt your enjoyment of the story if you skip to the section entitled "The Americanized World" and go from there. Now that that's out of the way . . .
Last and First Men is written about the big picture. It follows Western civilization until it succumbs to an energy crisis and intellectual stagnation. A successor culture based in Patagonia arises, but an experiment with atomic power blasts it, and much of the land mass of the Earth, into oblivion. A few arctic explorers survive, but by the time humanity regains a technological civilization it has evolved into a sturdier, larger species . . . the "second men." These potentially superior creatures find themselves threatened by an invasion from Mars . . . and such martians they are! Mass-minded creatures composed of millions of airborne cells, they and humanity are simply too alien to comprehend each other. Stapledon spends chapters discussing the social, moral and spiritual nature of the Martian swarms, comparing their odd society with humanity's.
The Second Men fall, and are replaced through natural evolution by Third, who create the Fourth . . . and so on, through interplantary migration, cosmic disaster, terraforming, hideous wars, spiritual triumph and decadence, until the Seventeenth Men arise on Neptune and face the end of human history. This is one of the most deeply considered pieces of science fiction every written, and a must-read for any serious scholar of the genre. It is dated in spots, and oddly colored by pre-war Lefty english politics, but these minor flaws do not greatly detract from its scope and majesty.
STAR MAKER
As if Last and First Men were not enough, Stapledon takes on the history of an entire galactic civilization in Star Maker (published 1938). The book -- again, not so much a novel as a sort of narrative history -- begins with the narrator fleeing a domestic argument and walking to the top of a hill to gaze at the stars. He finds himself "astrally projecting" and soon discovers another world, populated by roughly humanoid creatures.
After telepathically joining with a sympathetic native, he explores the world and its troubled civilizations. After disaster and folly doom the planet, the narrator and his guide find themselves whisked to another troubled world, and another, and so on, each populated by stranger and stranger creatures with more and more esoteric mental and spiritual natures. Star Maker soon turns from the fate of individual worlds to the big picture; the two-billion year long history of humanity rates about two paragraphs.
In a series of dazzling chapters Stapledon describes the construction of artificial worlds, space travel by wandering space colonies, and spectacular interstellar wars. Strife and religious bigotry lead to genocide through artificially induced novas; lesser races fall prey to technologically advanced but spiritually misguided "pervert" races. After several millenia, a true galactic civilization arises and begins organizing itself into a Galactic Mind to root out the deepest questions of existence.
This final quest -- to confront the Prime Mover behind the existence of the universe and reality -- requires a rather long time; at one point further progess seems threatened by the heat death of the universe.
Mind-blowing stuff. Species form utopias -- some benign and non-interventionist, some insane -- and travel the galaxy in flying planets. Stars are surrounded by globes of artificial habitats (the inspiration for "Dyson Spheres").
Reading Star Maker is an exhausting and humbling experience. Stapledon rattles off ideas and concepts that didn't make it into mainstream SF until the last decade or so. It is mighty difficult to be impressed by normal science fiction after reading
this book.

After 20 years of reading about Last and First Men 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 1930-2003 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 Professor Heinz Kiosk (assisted by Dr Melisande Fischbein). Of anything I would recognise as love or affection or friendship I can find not a trace.

Non hic mortalem uexantia sidera sortem
Aeternosue tulit sollicitare deos.

-- '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.

On a suburban hill, presumably on the Wirral (with the foundry beyond the estuary being Shotton or Brymbo), a man falls asleep and experiences not some mere vision of the entire cosmos but a conscious participation in the Creator's whole programme of innumerable cosmoi. This is a compulsive and utterly comfortless book. Keep a sense of humour if you are going to read it attentively, as you may need that to stay sane. It starts at a level familiar to science-fiction readers, and the details of the various alien intelligences have the sort of fascination that one gets in, say, Van Vogt (or even the work that immortally began 'Help, we are surrounded by Vugs'). The vision then advances to the collective telepathic minds developed by some of the civilisations, next to the sentient minds (individual and collective) of the stars themselves, then to similar consciousness possessed by whole nebulae, and finally to direct contact with the Creator. This Creator is not some fount of infinite love and goodness as we might understand those concepts. Our values are not his -- 'Sympathy was not ultimate in the temper of the eternal spirit; contemplation was. Love was not absolute; contemplation was.' Countless disasters and unthinkable suffering are all part of the grand design. Hell itself may be deliberately inflicted by the Creator on those he gives no opportunity to avoid it. To me this scenario seems just as likely as any religious theory of ultimate goodness, which may be basically wishful thinking. Grappling with questions like these by reasoning is like wrestling with a jelly in a high wind -- when we think we have made progress it just closes back in on us from behind. And other than reason what do we have? Belief is just belief -- things may be the way we believe or would rather believe, or they may not. 'I know not "seems"' says Hamlet. 'Seems' may be all we've got.
Back on his suburban hill in 1937, the anonymous visionary contemplates the 'reality' around him. Like many agonising intellectuals of the time, Stapledon partly fell for the monstrous con of Soviet communism. He had no grasp of Realpolitik whatsoever, and Muggeridge's account of the edifice of corruption, chicanery and strategic lying that took in Shaw and other big brains is recommended to any who have not read it. Others of Stapledon's perceptions ring partly 'true' -- '...a world wherein, none being tormented, none turns desperate' is probably a bit much to hope for, given human perversity, but we all know the lengths people will go to when they have 'beliefs', which flourish where there is injustice and oppression.
Can you face this book? In recommending it I am quite aware of the disorientation and unhappiness it may create in some. In others, if it undermines the high ground occupied by those deceptive and destructive phantoms, deeply held beliefs, it may do some 'good'. The bigger questions stay just as they were, of course.