Star Maker

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

Man on man. This book is slooooow. I'll get through it though. He's speaking about 1930 Europe and how everything is going to hell. He's illustrating this with other civilizations on other planets. I just wish he'd be a little sneaky with the political commentary instead of beating you over the head with it until you get a concussion.

Man on man. This book is slooooow. I'll get through it though. He's speaking about 1930 Europe and how everything is going to hell. He's illustrating this with other civilizations on other planets. I just wish he'd be a little sneaky with the political commentary instead of beating you over the head with it until you get a concussion.

I have read Last and First Men, and love the book. It is a mind blowing book.When I saw there was a illustrated version, I was expecting some amazing images to match Stapledon's imaginative history of the future. The scope for the illustrations of a decent fantacy artist would be staggering. Seventeen future man kinds, cities of Venus and Neptune. Flying men and ether ships visiting the sky factories of Jupiter and Venus. What I got was lazy and unimaganative. Some old black and white paintings that I can only assume that were cut and pasted from Google and stuck where some thought they would match the chapter title, because the images rarely match the text in the book. I guess the person cutting and pasting these picture never took time to read the actual text. No effort has been put into the illustrations and that gives this book one star. If you want to read this epic History of the Future, just get an unillustrated version and don't justify this garbage by paying money for it.

Stapledon's Last and First Men is a classic. An exploration of human nature fictionalized as far future evolutionary iterations of humankind. Worth the read. I've probably used the symbology of the 17th race of men breaking their 'union' to commit to menial tasks a hundred times in conversation.

This book is HUGE in scope. I mean HUGE, but did it have to be? I think it is an admirable work of fiction that and SF reader should check out, BUT it goes on and on and on...the scope is like nother you've ever seen or read before. Plan on NOT reading anything for about a month before tackIing this monster. I enjoyed his other work StarMaker much more.

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.

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.

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?

This book is considered by many to be a classic in the science-fiction genre and now that I've finally read it I can see why. It's an unusual read in that it isn't your typical story as it provides a history of mankind's evolution for the next two billion years. As such there are no characters to become invested in making it difficult to connect to the story.

However the sheer scope and staggering imagination of the story more than makes up for that. It starts off on shaky ground as the initial progression through our own times (it was written in 1930) is very wrong. In fact the forward suggests that the modern reader skips the first few chapters. I didn't and while it gets many things wrong those early chapters expose some of the author's assumptions and prejudices.

As the story progresses further into the future the author's imagination really shines. This is a view of the potential of humanity as well as its flaws. It's also an interesting contrast to modern science-fiction where evolution takes a back stage to technology and trans-humanism. Here we see a varying blend of the possibilities and with it an exploration of what makes us human.

It's fair to say that it's not without its flaws. As already mentioned the early part doesn't correspond to reality very well, although I viewed it as a kind of alternative history. After all just because one path was followed doesn't mean that other paths didn't exist. The language can be a little dry at times and in some ways this is an interesting read rather than an entertaining one, although that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The two big flaws are that the scope and the science. The scope is so large that by the author's own admission much of the story is glossed over. I would have loved to see more detail on the different human species and cultures and in particular some of the individuals. That would have made this a huge book though, so the surface skim is a necessity, but a shame nonetheless. The issue of the science is that a lot of it doesn't stack up with modern knowledge. This is partly due to the limitations of knowledge at the time, but also in part because the author follows some interesting and quite far out threads.

Despite its flaws this book deserves its classic status. The sheer scope and imagination of it was enough to keep me enthralled throughout and I'd recommend it to fans of the genre.

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.

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 classic.

I didn't have any preconceptions about the plot or story - that's how little I know about the book. What I did know is that Arthur C. Clarke always referred to it as one his most inspirational reads and a work of great imagination.

This book is not a novel in the strict sense of the word but it is still a `story'. It's simply the story of man through the ages.

It starts in some of the ages we and the author would be familiar with before moving on into the realms of fantasy and the imagination. Of course the writing style is of the era, textbook like, authoritative but also full of detailed description and references.

Stapleton maps out the next millions of years for humankind and in a kind of future-history. Expect some amazing turns and incredible detail as you move museum-like through the ages of man. You'll witness evolution in action as `man' develops in new environments.

I think some modern readers will find this volume a tedious challenge and as mentioned, there is the definite feel of a textbook. They may also get caught by the 1930s reference to race and breeding But, I would advise staying with the book. If you have to, skip the first four chapters and plunge straight into the rise of the Patagonians. Also be warned that America gets a rough ride.

This is fiction, fantasy, sci-fi, story-telling, future-reading and hard-going. My advice is to buy a copy then dip into it. It's quite easy to read one age then pick it up again later on.

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.

One of my all time favorites, which is all plot and a little character and very modern in simply presuming appropriate technology, is Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker. A fellow's consciousness rises one night and journeys to an inhabited planet, something like Earth, sometimes un-like Earth. The disembodied consciousness finds someone similar to himself whom he can communicate with, and eventually they go rambling, coming to another planet and another, each filled with complicated aliens with all kinds of evolutionary adaptations which support intelligence, but really different body plans. As they travel, they collect more and more minds from the worlds they visit, and eventually they sense that there is something that they all share and a reason for them to travel and learn together, and some organizing principle that he calls the "Starmaker" that they must try to understand. After that encounter, not exactly and eye to eye talk and a firm handshake, it is obvious that they will have to return to their origins eventually, with what they have learned. And they do.

Stapleton covers land-dwelling, sea surface dwelling and subsurface dwelling 'persons', as well as some VERY further afield. His inventiveness is dazzling and he creates an unforgetable story from planets and inhabitants who occupy not more than a page or two. Great stuff, IMHO.

Last and First Men, bound with Starmaker in the Dover edition, follows our own species future history, through different kinds of bodies we choose for ourselves and different planets we chose to live on... He's a bit of an anti-Fascist and has one set of desperate days occur because society, world wide, has a fascination with "beast-men', all brute strength and no particular thought, and he paints a frightening picture of how this might affect genetics... breeding out intelligence... The language is old fashioned and the pace is moderate, but the ideas are terrific and I recommend them both.

Another reviewer said that these are more like narritive history and less like novels and that is certainly correct. Future, or now, alternate, history, but its the wide scope and shallow details that make history and there is plenty of both, here.

This book is something that has to be taken on its own terms to be enjoyed. It is supposed to be the history of the human race, written as it faces extinction two billions years from now, and sent back in time. Stapledon believed that evolution happened in spurts separated by long periods of stability, so he divides future humanity into the "First Men", "Second Men", etc.

Being written on such a scale, it has no characters worth mentioning and scarcely any dialog (this is deliberate on Stapledon's part; his other novels ODD JOHN and SIRIUS have wonderful characters). Since he was writing in the early 1930s, he didn't anticipate Asimov's "Foundation" device of setting short stories at crucial points of future history.

The story pioneered dozens of science-fiction ideas. An energy crisis, a nuclear holocaust (written before atom bombs were even invented!), genetic engineering, aritificial intelligence ("Great Brains"), 18 different species, imaginative descriptions of Venus, Mars, and Neptune.

The big flaw: an utterly wrongheaded attempt to guess how the twentieth century would turn out from the perspective of 1930. Unlike Orwell, he didn't confine himself to "in 1984 there will be a dictatorship and never mind how it arose". But if the reader can get through that, he will find him or herself reading one of the masterpieces of imagination.

The other day I finished re-reading a book I first read nearly 20 years ago, Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker. I am just as amazed at its imaginative scope as I was 20 years ago. Re-reading it now I recognise many of my basic ideas, probably derived from a first reading of the book: the value of community; the idea of sentience applied to other life forms; the 'livingness' of all creation; the idea of harmony as essential to an approach to 'god'.

Stapledon's book has been compared to Dante's. I find the language beautiful, the thought intricate and marvelously well-constructed: at once a deeply felt work of spiritual vision, a work of incredible imaginative scope, a detailed reasoning of the possible construction of reality, a work of fiction that carries the reader along despite its complexity, and a work of poetry.

Star Maker was written in 1937. It caused a sensation at the time (H G Wells was still alive, a potent example of philosopher-opinion shaper-novelist). After a few years it was forgotten, until in the 60s academics took up 'popular culture' and a canon was constructed for science fiction. Neither Wells nor Stapledon would have been interested in science fiction...

Stapledon uses the dream metaphor, just as ambiguously as Dante. Dante in the middle of his life finds himself in a dark wood (a metaphor which becomes 'real' to form the poem). Stapledon lies on a hill top, thinking of mortality and looking at the stars. He falls asleep and dreams/has a vision/is transported through the solar system. Travelling from star to star he finds another earth, where similar but distinct beings to humans go through many of the struggles, disasters and triumphs which have marked human history. So Swift might have written, though Stapledon is philosophically detached.

Soon he is caught up in a spiritual union with a member of this other species and finds he is part of a group mind, in itself more than its two components can contribute to it.This new 'I' voyages further and finds many other species in the galaxy with some of whom the group 'I' melds to form a greater, more perceptive 'I' which is able to see and understand much more. Soon not merely a world mind, not merely a galactic mind but a cosmical mind is possible. This new mind becomes aware of the mode of being of suns and the galactic clouds themselves. The cosmical mind has inkings of the nature of the Star Maker, and through these inklings conceives of other creations and of their possible nature. The act of creation gives it some idea of the nature of the Star Maker, seen as an evolving being for whom creation and all possible cosmos is merely a stage.

Star Maker combines two modes used in other books by Stapledon, most notably Last and First Men. One is the concept of the group mind with powers of perception and realisation much greater than any single being. The other is that of scope, whereby what is seen is gradually revealed in a larger and yet larger context. Stapledon often uses this scale, playing up and down it as it were to create points by making a rapid change of perspective. And yet...as modern astronomy and nuclear physics confirm, the further one sees the more one realises how much more is unseen. The end of all this realisation is to see that the most that is possible of a cosmically united mind is to accept one's part in the life of the Star Maker. Acceptance becomes joy. By realising to the extent of one's power the possibilities inherent in community, in living and striving for a whole greater than one's own needs, one can align oneself in the activities of 'god' as he ceaselessly (to us) creates himself.

Stapledon realises that much of this can become perverted and gives space to analyses of this. He also attempts to deal with the primary conflict caused by our perception of evil. His answer is that evil is a relative value (as when good comes of evil - temporal scale, or when evil to some results in good to the whole - spacial scale). He also sees evil as part of creation, serving some unknown purpose. The Star Maker is beyond good and evil, one of the many ways he is unknowable.

The book stimulates while it satisfies. Both a completed work of art, formally unified, it is also an exploration of concepts which can never be known. Its scope is such that it powerfully urges its readers to continue that exploration.

It's not a word I use often, but it fits this remarkable book: transcendent.

Stapledon's philosophical fantasy starts small. One human mind escapes its connection to flesh and begins to explore. It roams the stars and their planets, and discover other life, intelligent life. The mind lodges for a time in one of those non-human people, experiences its alien joys, sorrows, and unfamiliar mode of existence for a time. Then it moves on, finds a new host on another star, and moves on again. In retrospect, one could call this a pilgrimage across the stars. Despite its many hosts over the years, and the friendships it experiences with them, the protagonist finds no others of its free-floating kind. Being unique in the entire universe creates a loneliness beyond words.

Then, the bodiless pilgrim does find another, one that originated in a different kind of physcial being and that has passed through a different trail of alien hosts. The two share their experiences, enlarging the perspective that each has gained individually on the many ways for intelligence to manifest. They exist for a time as the only two of their kind, with all the good and bad a couple can bring to each other, then find others, and learn from them in turn. After more time, measured in geologic eras, the little band of spritual explorers find another small group. They join forces, add their knowledge to each others, and move on. As the eons pass, the group of wayfarers grows, merging with other groups that themselves are mergers, but time continues to pass onward. Stars age, gutter, and dim, and the stars' planets and populations die with them, even as the group's size and wealth of experience grows to encompass so much of what is and what was.

The final segment of the story, when the universe lies cold and dying, caps this quest with one of the most remarkable conjectures I have seen in print. It combines the book's two trends, the growing richness of spirit and poverty of the universe's physical substance, in a magnificent way. There's no hope for the darkened universe, but it has not died in futility, either. Stapledon maintains a complex tone that defies easy characterization, but that will stay with you for a long time to come.

Stapledon's book stands with very few others - perhaps only C.S. Lewis's spce trilogy and Lessing's Canopus books - as a serious philosophical study using science fiction as its vehicle. I recommend this to any thinking reader, including those who would normally never read science fiction. This book truly earns its place among the classics of modern literature.

- wiredweird

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.

This is an epic story of the future of the human race, starting in the present day (ie about 1930) and ending millions of years from now just before the destruction of the solar system by cosmic catastrophe. I think of Stapledon's epic - yet detached tone reminds me of Stephen Baxter who is in many ways Stapledon's heir.

He describes a destructive war between England and France (a peaceful and neutral Germany standing by), followed by a succession of European conflicts which seem improbable to us. (In his foreword he hints that this is really a moral parable, a plea for the success of the League of Nations.) Still there are a couple of dead on predictions, such as the sinister political party which adopts the swastika as its symbol, or the much greater longevity of the communist one-party state in China as compared with Russia.

Then we get onto the meat: the repeated near-extinction of humanity, whether through its own folly or natural disaster, followed by its reinvention of itself; emigration from Earth to Venus and then Neptune, having repelled invasion from Mars in the meantime; huge changes in the human form and lifespan. He achieves very well the epic scale of a few decades in one chapter, centuries in the next, millennia in the next.

An amazing, amazing book. Profound and powerful.

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.

This book, as I write, is over 80 years old, having been written in 1930, a fact worth bearing in mind as you read. The tale within is an attempt to conceive of a future history of humanity that extends for millions of years and to attempt such a thing is ambitious to say the least.

Consider that it was written at a time that predates the Second World War, the Atomic Age, the Silicon Age, the Age of the Genome and the interconnected Internet Age and this throws the scope and thought provoking vision into an unusual focus.

Naturally it is bound by the limits of scientific understanding of the time such that there are some ideas and extrapolations that seem rather odd now with our modern sciences and I have to admit that a combination of the age of the book and its ambitiousness renders the earliest chapters somewhat tedious as they lay out a century of history that we know simply did not unravel that way, but that is hardly unusual where all fiction set in the immediate future is concerned.

Every now and again I found myself thinking, "That's not a particularly original idea, why bother putting it in and not explore it?" At certain little gems not fully pursued but it slowly dawned on me that the reason for thinking it lacked originality and failed to follow up on ideas was because this was probably an early, if not original, incarnation, of a concept that a more modern Sci-Fi writer has since expanded upon, a state of affairs that in itself must be some sort a testament to the achievement of the book and its themes.

Interestingly the story holds together with almost a complete lack of characters to empathise with, I think the first and last character, if you exclude the narrator, is the first of the Fourth Men, whose thoughts and motivations are only briefly touched upon. Such a literary structure is quite an achievement in itself.

Having followed another's advice to persevere through the first section of this book I would definitely offer the same advice, in fact to the impatient I might even suggest reading this book by skipping the history of the First Men and going straight to the Second Men and perhaps reading the first section of the book after reaching its conclusion, the final revelation of the nature of its narration mean that I suspect that its not entirely a problem to use that modern trope of telling a tale out of chronological order.

I have to admit that the fate of the Last Men definitely did fairly tug at my heart strings and for me added a poignant conclusion to the tale of the Last and First Men and I would recommend it to anyone with patience and a desire to read some Science Fiction somewhat different to the more modern fare we are all used to which somehow seems very narrow in its predictions compared to the soaring imaginings unfettered by a more modern and scientific knowledge.

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."

"Who are we?", "Why are we here?" and "What's it all for?" are questions most of us have probably asked at some point, whether we're going through times of doubt, uncertainty or philosophical musing. Destiny and fate are fuzzy topics that make for deep intellectual discussion, providing much stimulation and irritation for those who like to ponder such matters. "Star Maker" attempts to answer the above questions by taking the reader on an epic voyage spanning the cosmos.
The human protagonist becomes a disembodied psychic presence travelling across the immense gulf of space and time, visiting numerous worlds, some of which, like Earth, spawn conflicting cultures and religions. We see evolving star systems and witness the birth and death of countless species before meeting the creator of it all, the enigmatic Star Maker.
On our own miniscule speck of a planet (where the book begins) we go about our daily business, struggling to make sense of a senseless existence, living in a world that seems to punish the innocent and reward the wicked. As we soon discover, it's like this throughout the universe. We witness acts of barbarism and atrocity, noble races are wiped out, unwilling (even if able) to defend themselves against less civilised, but no less talented aggressors. Other worlds are simply destroyed by freak twists of fate. All this is of complete indifference to the Star Maker. (How many of us feel grief when we accidentally step on a bug?)
On meeting the Star Maker we find that our cosmos is merely one of a series of artistic experiments churned out over the aeons, as the Star Maker strives to create something that meets his satisfaction. Like any artist on an endless quest for perfection, he has to go through several failures in his "immature" phase. Our cosmos is produced in his "mature" phase. Yet it still fails to satisfy him, and even stranger, more incomprehensible creations are brought into being.
I suspect John Wyndham got his inspiration for "Chocky" from reading this book, the way the narrator becomes an observer who can inhabit the minds of various hosts. I know Wyndham had read "Odd John". In "Star Maker" there's a lot to take in, even the narrator had trouble understanding a lot of it. 100 billion years of birth and death, hope and despair, good and evil are covered in 253 pages. I read "Last and First Men" two years ago. Even though "Star Maker" is an interesting book which I finished more quickly, I still prefer the former.

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.

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.

This one's a bit of an oddity. It's a dense, first person account of an extraordinary out-of-body odyssey that spans the entire life of the cosmos and beyond. We meet myriad worlds, alien life-forms ranging from crustaceans to conscious galaxies, and even the Star Maker himself, the great Creator. I don't know what Mr Stapledon was smogged on when he wrote this but I've never seen this many SF ideas packed into one novel. He penned it in 1937, which is kind of staggering because it means he probably coined more SF concepts in Star Maker than anyone else has in a full career.

It's tough going in places due to the relentless bombardment of ideas without a proper narrative. The author also drifts outside SF throughout; he's spiritually/philosophically inclined. But he's also a poet, and I really lapped up the eloquence of his prose. My imagination reeled for days after finishing it. As trailblazing SF, it's a one of a kind.

I'll admit, I'm no science fiction connoisseur, I simply enjoy a well-written book every now and then. So when I first started reading "Last and First Men," I was a little bit disappointed in how slow it seemed to move. Then the book took off, after the first 50 pages or so. It's quite surreal reading about this story of one man's view of our future, and really makes you think and question what you find important.

Religions grow and die, mentalities and work ethics differ between generations and civilizations... This book really puts this in perspective. Chances are, as the book theorizes, that in 100 generations, very little will be the same, from culture to mentality. Petty differences that seem to mean the world to people are so ridiculously meaningless when put in perspectives this large.

I think the most interesting aspect of how it is written is the rise and fall of technologies, multiple times over. A civilization seems to get to a point much more technologically-advanced than we currently are, at which point, something seems to inevitably go wrong, sending what are loosely referred to as humans back to a type of dark ages. This is generally followed by a tale of rising up again. The writing flows well, and even uses what I (as a young person) might call archaic language.

All in all, this book will make you think. You really can't avoid it. And for that reason, it's good. It's great. It's fascinating. Read it.

Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker is a sequel of sorts to his earlier book Last & First Men. Whereas L&FM dealt with the fate and evolution of humankind, Star Maker concerns the fate and evolution of the universe. The unnamed narrator passes through time and space in an out of body experience, discovering the history of the universe both past and future, with the ultimate goal of understanding the nature of the Prime Creator- The Star Maker.
Like L&FM Star Maker is a book that is easily admired yet difficult to enjoy. The scope of Stapledon's imagination is astonishing. Yet because of its broad scope (literally billions of years of time and billions of light-years in space) it is by its very nature general, with little detail and much philosophy. This makes for tedious reading. And the philosophy espoused by Stapledon is Socialism. The theme running through the book is that only when the workers overcome their capitalist masters and control the means of production will a society be able to evolve a world mind -the next stage in galactic evolution. Those societies which do not will be consigned to the dustbin of history.
This attitude is not surprising given when the book was written. WWI demonstrated the failure of monarchy, the Depression the failure of liberal democracy and capitalism. The choice seemed to many in the 1930's, a choice between fascism and communism. And Stapledon chose Lenin; to quote 'we were amazed to find that in a truly awakened world even a dictatorship could be in essence democratic' (Chp 9.1)That would be the Dictatorship of the Proletariat comrade.
Politics aside, it is a seminal work in the history of the genre. It is an amazing work of imagination, even if it does take a great deal of effort to wade through.

First published nearly 70 years ago, this masterpiece is regarded as one of the most influential science fiction novels of the 20th century. Olaf Stapledon creates a history of the evolution of humankind over the next two billion years, and has lots of it right!

It's so vast; it brings the concept of `time' closer to the human experience. It left me thinking and pondering life from a very different point of view. I think it's they way astronomers must think, looking at things today, knowing what they are looking at was millions of years ago. It must make you think differently, as did Stapledon's book.

Well, well recommended!

This one's a bit of an oddity. It's a dense, first person account of an extraordinary out-of-body odyssey that spans the entire life of the cosmos and beyond. We meet myriad worlds, alien life-forms ranging from crustaceans to conscious galaxies, and even the Star Maker himself, the great Creator. I don't know what Mr Stapledon was smogged on when he wrote this but I've never seen this many SF ideas packed into one novel. He penned it in 1937, which is kind of staggering because it means he probably coined more SF concepts in Star Maker than anyone else has in a full career.

It's tough going in places due to the relentless bombardment of ideas without a proper narrative. The author also drifts outside SF throughout; he's spiritually/philosophically inclined. But he's also a poet, and I really lapped up the eloquence of his prose. My imagination reeled for days after finishing it. As trailblazing SF, it's a one of a kind.

I'll admit, I'm no science fiction connoisseur, I simply enjoy a well-written book every now and then. So when I first started reading "Last and First Men," I was a little bit disappointed in how slow it seemed to move. Then the book took off, after the first 50 pages or so. It's quite surreal reading about this story of one man's view of our future, and really makes you think and question what you find important.

Religions grow and die, mentalities and work ethics differ between generations and civilizations... This book really puts this in perspective. Chances are, as the book theorizes, that in 100 generations, very little will be the same, from culture to mentality. Petty differences that seem to mean the world to people are so ridiculously meaningless when put in perspectives this large.

I think the most interesting aspect of how it is written is the rise and fall of technologies, multiple times over. A civilization seems to get to a point much more technologically-advanced than we currently are, at which point, something seems to inevitably go wrong, sending what are loosely referred to as humans back to a type of dark ages. This is generally followed by a tale of rising up again. The writing flows well, and even uses what I (as a young person) might call archaic language.

All in all, this book will make you think. You really can't avoid it. And for that reason, it's good. It's great. It's fascinating. Read it.

Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker is a sequel of sorts to his earlier book Last & First Men. Whereas L&FM dealt with the fate and evolution of humankind, Star Maker concerns the fate and evolution of the universe. The unnamed narrator passes through time and space in an out of body experience, discovering the history of the universe both past and future, with the ultimate goal of understanding the nature of the Prime Creator- The Star Maker.
Like L&FM Star Maker is a book that is easily admired yet difficult to enjoy. The scope of Stapledon's imagination is astonishing. Yet because of its broad scope (literally billions of years of time and billions of light-years in space) it is by its very nature general, with little detail and much philosophy. This makes for tedious reading. And the philosophy espoused by Stapledon is Socialism. The theme running through the book is that only when the workers overcome their capitalist masters and control the means of production will a society be able to evolve a world mind -the next stage in galactic evolution. Those societies which do not will be consigned to the dustbin of history.
This attitude is not surprising given when the book was written. WWI demonstrated the failure of monarchy, the Depression the failure of liberal democracy and capitalism. The choice seemed to many in the 1930's, a choice between fascism and communism. And Stapledon chose Lenin; to quote 'we were amazed to find that in a truly awakened world even a dictatorship could be in essence democratic' (Chp 9.1)That would be the Dictatorship of the Proletariat comrade.
Politics aside, it is a seminal work in the history of the genre. It is an amazing work of imagination, even if it does take a great deal of effort to wade through.

First published nearly 70 years ago, this masterpiece is regarded as one of the most influential science fiction novels of the 20th century. Olaf Stapledon creates a history of the evolution of humankind over the next two billion years, and has lots of it right!

It's so vast; it brings the concept of `time' closer to the human experience. It left me thinking and pondering life from a very different point of view. I think it's they way astronomers must think, looking at things today, knowing what they are looking at was millions of years ago. It must make you think differently, as did Stapledon's book.

Well, well recommended!

Quite an amazing and thought-provoking book, for those of us who find enjoyment in even dated science fiction. At some points the author is a brilliant visionary of the future, and at other times curioiusly myopic. I have little else to say about the content that hasn't already been mentioned before. But I will confess that I found the first part of the book dealing with the "first men" (namely, us) to be a little dull, perhaps because Stapledon gets off on such an inaccurate start predicting the near-term history of Europe. The rest of the book is filled with the repetition of civilizations rising and falling, with enough varying details to hold one's interest. I found the bit about the cloud-like Martians venerating diamonds because of their hardness to be particularly charming and clever.

However, the editing and proofing by the small-time publisher who put out this latest paperback edition is atrocious. The second half of the book is marred by typos -- a few here and there at first, and increasing steadily in number as the text goes on. I found my reading disrupted time and time again by the most ridiculous of errors. For example, "This would have beets a more difficult task..." and "Everything but the hare essentials of humanity had to be omitted," to name but a few. There was even an indecipherable typo in the very last sentence of the book, so I'm not entirely sure I got the right interpretation there. A terrible way to end the thing.

A quick check online revealed that there's a free Project Gutenberg ebook edition, with exactly the same errors. And I'm assuming the errors in that online version stem from the text being captured faultily by OCR from an original printing.

I don't mind an entrepreneur grabbing some public domain title off the Internet and selling it in print form. I prefer hard-copy books, and I'm willing to pay for that format. But in return for my hard-earned money I expect them to at least READ the text and correct the ridiculous errors. Just running it through a spell-checker would have done wonders here.

The publisher of this 2009 edition is listed as NewWayBaby on the copyright page, and the cover shows a spaceship before a greenish planet and a red and purple nebula background of stars. I point this out because editions can change, and the the store reviews get placed on the new edition's page. the store is currently showing CreateSpace as the publisher, but the NewWayBaby edition with a print date of 12 December 2009 is the version shown in the thumbnail and the one I received.

**** for the content, * for the publisher.

What is remarkable about Stapledon's The Star Maker is the year in which it was written: 1937, only eight years after Edwin Hubble had announced his discoveries concerning redshift, when other scientists were still confirming Hubble's results. Keep in mind that this is a period thirty years before Big Bang theory, when most astronomers were largely unaware of an entire universe beyond our own galaxy.

Modern science fiction itself was still being invented and the term science fiction had only been in use for less than a decade prior to this novel's publication. Writers of scientific romances were still alive and working.

In this light Stapledon's ideas are astounding, and they still hold up today. Even within the genre that would become hard SF, this particular realm of storytelling remained mostly unaddressed until Asimov wrote The Last Question, first published in 1959.

Say what you will about Stapledon's outdated writing style, this novel is properly referred to as "an early classic of science fiction". An entire generation of authors now considered giants in the field site Stapledon as a strong influence. This book belongs in every serious SF reader's collection.

Last and First Men: Another reviewer mentions that Stapledon's treatment of America is unfair, referencing Stapledon's later apology for his anti-Americanization views. However, in light of current modernization and McDonaldization of the world, I'm not entirely sure Stapledon is all that far off, and as it's a piece of fiction, I certainly don't think he has anything to apologize about. The story itself serves as an excellent treatise on both the fragility of human life as well as our constant push toward exploration and change. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in speculative thought on what it is to be human and involved in the experiment of life.

Star Maker: This book is dizzying in scope. Rushing the reader through ever expanding finite perspectives on the purpose of the Universe, Stapledon seems to follow a Spinozan line of ultimate ends (highly theistic), while abiding by a very relativistic view of life. I was left awed by the breadth of this story as well as the finitude it firmly ensconces the reader within.

I would not recommend this compilation to anyone looking for a quick read, good dialogue or anything resembling a traditional novel. I would definitely recommend this compilation to anyone without an aversion to Science-Fiction and interested in following one person's perspective on questions involving cognizant existence, the universe and everything.

This was author's first novel, and it has earned such praise:

"one of the most remarkable imaginative works in the field of futuristic fiction: an account of human development during the next hundreds of millions of years."
Arthur C. Clarke

"On his own terms, Stapledon is unequaled, and he certainly has been one of the major influences on contemporary science fiction."
Survey of Science Fiction Literature III, pp. 1140-43.

"soars far beyond the accepted limits of science fiction... Stapledon is the great classical example, the cold pitch of perfection as he turns scientific concepts into vast ontological epic prose poems, the ultimate SF writer."
Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction,

Stapledon's "influence, both direct and indirect, on the development of many concepts which now permeate genre SF is probably second only to that of H. G. Wells."
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

What can I say after that? Only that I loved the book, and it is indeed an epic masterpiece!

"No book before or since has ever had such an impact upon my imagination," declared 2001 author Arthur C. Clarke of this masterpiece of science fiction. An imaginative, ambitious history of humanity's future that spans billions of years, this 1930 epic abounds in prescient speculations. Not only a must-read for scholars of the genre but even for those who want to look beyond their own immortality, as well as our civilizations immortality. Think of something god-like in being able to watch the ebb and flow of man.

well.. for me this is probably the most amazing piece of fiction ever written. i ended up reading it as the next step on from the cosmic visions of both h.p. lovecraft and william hope hodgson, plus the recommendation of c.s. lewis, arthur c. clarke, jorge luis borges and winston churchill (among others). i'm sure it won't appeal to a lot of people (one reviewer said it was completely boring and nothing at all happens in it), but it is more of a philosophical exploration of the nature of the universe and existence than a novel per se. i've recently been reading some of the process metaphysics of a.n. whitehead & charles hartshorne, because its pretty obvious the titular 'star maker' itself was inspired by said philosophy - it is the 'di-polar' god who grows with each successive 'cosmic epoch' by learning from the experiences of the creatures it creates in any of the given universes (my favourite of which in the book was the pythagorean-esque musical cosmos). needless to say i don't agree with this view of deity ('pan-en-theism' - c.s. lewis was also appalled by it and wrote his cosmic trilogy partly as a response), to which i would recommend jay richards' recent book 'the untamed God' as a top draw defense of 'classical theism' which dialogues with process thought. i'd also highly recommend stapledon's 'last & first men' - a somewhat depressing account of the entire history of the human race from the 20th century on (which is relegated to a paragraph in star maker!) and some of arthur c. clarke's early stapledon-esque science fiction, especially 'the city and the stars' and 'childhood's end'. to me stapledon remains one of three authors (the others being lovecraft and tolkien - especially in 'the silmarillion') where, upon reading them, you will be baffled as to how any one human mind could create such awe inspiring vistas of the imagination. there has been nothing like it before or since.

BECAUSE I consider Star Maker to be the most important work of autobiography, literary art, and metaphysical knowledge ever to be created by a member of our species, I suggest that you read it immediately.

Very regrettably camouflaged as science fiction, Star Maker is nothing less than an essentially accurate, albeit drastically abbreviated, blueprint of this Cosmos, the spectrum of life within it, and the ineffable Spirit that has created all of it. W. Olaf Stapledon presents all of this, in beautifully composed prose, as capably as can be expressed and comprehended by Homo sapiens at this stage of our intellectual evolution.

While best understood as essentially a "mythological autobiography", which is a new literary classification that I just made up, the fact that it has always been commercially marketed as a work of science fiction needs to be explained. First, in its Preface, Stapledon specifically states that the work is not a novel. He wrote, " ... Judged by the standards of the Novel, it is remarkably bad. In fact, it is no novel at all." What is meant is that because Star Maker is lacking in the typical character development and abundant dialogue that characterizes a novel, using those standards would not reflect favorably, but only if it were in fact a novel. Evaluated by the standards of 24th Century mythology, it is superlative.

Furthermore, Stapledon's contract with his publishers called for him to produce fiction, not a literally fantastic autobiography. Therefore, even though he felt compelled to produce Star Maker, the account of this most spiritual of private accomplishments, he acquiesced in its placement on the bookshelf as science fiction. Indeed, it was the best choice available to him, especially at the time, which was 1937, for God's sake.

As an Oxford-educated member of the British upper class who had been thoroughly indoctrinated to respect and retain as much of the status quo as possible, and as a person who retained an ambivalent attitude about his peak experiences throughout his life, Stapledon was determined to keep a low profile regarding established religion. If the message contained in Star Maker was ever going to have the revolutionary effect that it should produce, Stapledon was content to be its absent parent. Stapledon most clearly expressed his spiritual and social values by being a prominent activist for peace and disarmament both before, and after, the Second World War. Not overtly religious, and professing a very spiritual and nuanced agnosticism, he recoiled from the label of prophet, even though some people wanted to thrust it upon him.

Incidentally, the entire underlying plot arc of the Star Wars© series of movies, tracking the maneuvers of an Evil Empire on a galactic scale, representing a darkly twisted and authoritarian perversion of spirituality, can be seen to have been anticipated by part of a single chapter from Star Maker, although this has yet to be widely acknowledged.

Bottom line: This is the Creation Myth version 2.0 that Humanity needs to adopt.

Last and First Men is not so much a story as a history of mankind from 1914 to about a billion years in the future, a board overview of about 17 species of Humans over that time period. It doesn't have indiviual characters as mankind itself as the protagonist.
This is not a book for people who want a traditional story. This is a book for people who like to read books about history, who like accounts over long timeframes, who like Truley Epic stories. The kind of people who buy computer games with thick plots, or who want to know more about the background history and politics of a fantasy world. Stapleton traces the rise and fall of a number of civilizations, the reasons, the dark ages between them, with the evolution of the various men. He puts a lot of thought into how each civilization works and what leads to it's fall, usually some fatal flaw that is never compensated for, all withen some kind of philsophical/spiritual context. As Stapleton himself says, he is constructing a "Myth".
Admittly, it has it's flaws. The first 50 pages or so seem rather strange in the context of the history of the 20th century since 1930, when Stapleton published this book. There are no Atomic/Nuclear Weapons(though there is something that may be called a fusion weapon ), coal-powered airplanes are described at one point, the Nazis don't exist and mentions of the "League of Nations" in 2300 AD just seems bizarre. A number of Human species are completely glossed over, so out of the 17, we really only learn about half that many. Stapleton is a Philospher and it shows, going on diatribes at times that occasionally gets a little thick for the normal reader.
I liked this book and found it facinating, though I also am interested in the whole of human history, including the hypotheicals of the future. Not everyone will, due to the lack of characters, but hopefully people will give it a chance.

No work of science fiction, perhaps, has such a sweeping vista of time. From the 1930s (when it was written) to the two thousand million years in the future, this novel has it all except for characters ! Unfortunately it has dated to such an extreme that the first few chapters are,perhaps, unnecessary. Stapledon's prose is fine, his vision of humanity as a mutable and ephermal tune in a cosmic symphony is a joy to read within its limitations. For the modern reader Stapledon's humans are passive creatures, accepting the woes of their times. In fact, Stapledon's supermen of the future seem more like effete "Bloomsbury" types pontificating on the evils of the world than the species we know. Obviously the years of the Great Depression and the rise of totalitarianism wearied Stapledon, and the result is that his novel shows humanity as essentially a beast stumbling from disaster to disaster whilst episodically understanding something of its true nature. Brian Aldiss suggested that the novel would be more believable if some old fashioned science fiction concepts were thrown in (ie time travel,etc). Aldiss may have been right, since even Stapledon's supermen technically only progress maybe a couple of centuries beyond we dumb homo sapiens. The emphasis on moral/spiritual/ethical development in the work is symptomatic of the "churchy" Stapledon. Overlong and towards the end geologic ages pass faster than the pages. A historic curiousity, but with touches of inspiration.

Stapledon's Star Maker says,eternally, if we could only hear Him: (IT)?

"If I am God, I am certainly not 'Fatherly' and certainly not 'In Heaven.' There is nothing merciful and forgiving about Me. I have not the 'Fatherliness' of an earwig. And I care about you only to the degree of your willingness to be swept away by the wind, engulfed by the waters, and overwhelmed by the mountains. The world is So, and all your tears cannot wipe out a molecule of It."

-Last and First Men
How to describe such a profound novel? Long? Pedantic? Kickass? You see, as many have already pointed out, the first few chapters, with what we know today, seem somewhat ridiculous. But once you get past that, and you get to the men of Patagonia and beyond, it pretty much kicks ass. We see the destruction of the First Men (normal humans, like us) and then the evolution of the superior Second Men. Unfortunately, despite their greater sensory powers, strength, height and brain power, the Second Men still get whipped by the Martians; which Stapledon deftly represents as cloud-like composite beings rather than the stock humanoids. Anyhow, from there we go to the lemur-like Third Men, then the Great Brains, and finally, the vastly improved Fifth Men. Due to black and unexpected disaster, however, these poor boys have to pack up and leave Earth. From there, with a time scale represented in billions of years, we see Man chillin' on Venus, and in the end moving on to Neptune. Neptune was pretty cool. There the Last Men contemplate space, time, alien life, the meaning of life, and how to get the entire human race high. Not a bad way to live. All in all, despite certain slow and boring areas, this aeon spanning account should appeal to the science-fiction fan with an urge and the curiosity to experience the Great Adventure of the entire human race itself, all 2 billion years of it, to the bitter end.
-Star Maker This book was good, but in my opinion, not as good as Last and First Men. This book recounts the tale of Intelligence throughout the Galaxy and the Universe through all time. Told from the perspective of a disembodied human intelligence, this mind eventually links up and combines with other disembodied alien intelligences. They wing it through the Galaxy, exploring the many modes of intelligent life; fish-spider symbionts, plant-creatures, composite beings, humanoids, fish beings, intelligent stars, intelligent galaxies. We trace the history of Mind, through its ups and downs, and we finally reach the creator of the Universe, the Star-Maker. The book is good, but it wasn't as well done as Last and First Men. It doesn't have as many alien creatures as I would have hoped, and quite frankly Stapledon just imports modes and styles of thought common and natural to humans onto completely alien creatures. This is ridiculous, as being of utterly different organization and having a different evolution, these creatures would be incomprehensible to us. It worked to give human thoughts and feelings to future human species, but it doesn't cut it with aliens. This science-fiction book goes too far into social commentary (it was written just prior to World War II), and this spoils it. And at the end, it just degenerates into some kind of a bizarre religious awakening, as the Star-Maker is just a thinly veiled quasi-scientific description of God. Its kinda boring.

Plot
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A being of the distant future, a descendent of human beings, travels back in time to communicate with our current age (well, Olaf Stapledon's age - 1930). He wishes to tell the story of humanity from our age until his own. In the tale we learn of man's physical, spiritual, and philosophical alterations over literally billions of years to the age of the future communicator, who is one of the species that will constitute the final development and existence of mankind - the "Last Men."
Pros
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One of the most imaginative tales in all of science fiction - or any fiction. Full of deep questions and fantastic events over a time scale that gives great meaning to the story of evolution and consciousness, touching questions of religion, science, and philosophy. It challenges the reader to view our species in a cosmic perspective, understanding both its insignificance and great significance.
Cons
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Not a really novel. More like a history book. Because of the tremendous time scales covered, there are not lasting characters, and thus no character development. Instead, entire species become "characters" which are indeed developed, but through the format of discussion, not action or speech. This may be too much for some readers. The beginning is too focused on the final chapters of our own civilization, and here the author's close ties to it in fact bind him too much to his own prejudices and culture, making it the least believable and weakest portion, and most clearly the product of his own time (don't worry, it picks up after that).
Review
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This history-scifi-philosophy-religious creation stands beside other science fiction novels of this century, last century, and more than likely the coming century, as the last men might stand beside ourselves - above and beyond them on many levels, and containing whole areas of thought rarely touched upon in other works, or only crudely intimated and imitated. It is a foundational classic in the genre (along with StarMaker), and should extend an influence on any reader toward thinking about our species and its place in the universe beyond the trite and comfortable images with which we tend to rock ourselves to sleep.
Last and First Men is a story, told mainly as a history and partly as a myth (it is of course hard to distinguish the difference between these two even for 'real' history), about the progression of "humanity" through many different cultures, and more interestingly, many different species over a vast range of time (billions of years). It is a story not so much concerned with the material advances of humans as much science fiction is, but instead with the development of the mind and spirit of humanity as it seeks to understand and relate to the universe which contains it and has given it birth.
It is with the ideas of mental/spiritual development, both of the individual and of culture, that the book derives its essence, as the themes of man's quest for fulfillment in these areas leads him to frustration, enlightenment, progress, and often disaster. As science fiction it is of the sort rarely seen today - deeply imaginative, on the whole rigorous in thought and logic, and almost wholly free of the strange tendency to focus on technology as a theme instead of as a component of much broader picture. The scope entertained and success of its attempt is almost unrivaled in any fiction. The great sense of time and man's smallness in relation to it and the universe is given great attention and comes out clearly to the reader.
Olaf Stapledon's visions of the future are on the whole very believable, and he foresees, in a general manner, many things which did not exist in his time (the book was written in 1930), including: genetic engineering of animals and humans, deriving the power of self-destruction from harnessing the power in subatomic particles, the mad drive of industrial society toward constant material gain, and the strange flaws in human nature which undermine our attempts to act rationally toward our world and one another.
The details of his visions, especially the political future of the First Men (us) is on a superficial level utterly wrong. However, the themes which he gives flesh to in order to make a story are in fact essentially correct. Since this is a book about theme, the reader should not worry so much about the accuracy of the details - what nation did what and why - but read on the level of the forces driving human nature and what sort of world this might ultimately give rise too.
This is such a profound book that it deserves a category all its own with other profound books that, because of the effect they may have on the reader, transcend any genre. If you are the type to think critically on a grand scale, enjoy imagining the possibilities of our future, and are not afraid to entertain the idea that the best of what we are is perhaps only the crude beginning of what might be called a more noble life form, give this little book a read.

Last and First Men :-

One of the most succinct and accurate renderings of mankind's present state of mind and future progression. It documents the future of man from the start of WW2 and continues until the Sun engulfs the earth, and beyond. Considering this book was first published in 1931, it is remarkable, both in its honesty as regards human nature, and in its phenomenal span. By the time we reach chapter 3 of the 16 in this book, it is already 2300 AD and you feel like you have had the viewpoint of a God. So intense is the writing, that a few pages can take you hours to read and weeks to think about. What a writer, what a visionary. Of particular interest to me was the laconic way he can sum up an entire country's culture and people, and the accuracy of prediction in the first part of the book. Quotes from around what would be the back-end of the 20th century on his timescale (what he terms "Balkan Europe") :-

"... For love of France was the undoing of the French. They prized the truly admirable spirit of France so extravagantly, that they regarded all other nations as barbarians."

"... the practice of communism was gradually undermined. For the Russian state came increasingly under the influence of Western, and especially American, finance. The materialism of the official creed also became a farce, for it was foreign to the Russian mind. Thus between practice and theory there was, in both respects, a profound inconsistency. What was once a vital and promising culture became insincere."

Points to note :-

All budding politicians should be forced to read this book. It should be part of any politics curriculum.

Strikingly accurate and plausible portent of homo sapiens future. Read in the context of 2002, it is easy to see mankind's current folly and the extrapolation of current scientific endeavours. For example, we may achieve global peace ("An Americanised Planet"") for a few millennia, but at the cost of spiritual and intellectual freedom and development. When the "Fall of the First Men" happened, recovery took a very long time :-

"Later, when the epidemic was spent, even though civilisation was already in ruins, a concerted effort of devotion might yet have rebuilt it on a more modest plan. But among the First Men, only a minority had ever been capable of wholehearted devotion. The great majority were by nature too much obsessed by private impulses."

Sounds like the malaise of current homo sapiens.

The theme of continual physical exertion and constant movement of attention as an underpinning for the lifestyles of all successful social inhabitants was beautifully described. This is so true of today's and future societies. No pause for reflection or contemplation. The abandonment of philosophy as a science in the future. The pig-headed clinging to pagan artefact or idol worship, rather than logic.

The brilliant description of the "Second Men", with his finer array of senses, and his natural propensity for altruism.

The plausible evolution of intelligent life on Mars in 10 million years time, with the subsequent misunderstanding of what is intelligent between Earth and Mars.

Man's creation of more evolved forms of man meshes brilliantly with current genetic research.

"Time travel" achieved by mental regression into past minds. The future remains unknown.

Conclusions :-

Apply common sense to the situation as it is now, to work out the best course of action. Never invoke traditions or old beliefs as these threaten your survival in an ever-changing environment.

Within the same species, organisms are equally complex biochemically. Therefore, any social structure that imposes arbitrary division within the species, is intrinsically flawed. This is true of current homo sapiens organisation, where certain people are far more highly regarded than others for stupid reasons, and divisions between cliques of people usually erupt in violence, rather than heated debate.

Just because someone cannot be convinced of your way of seeing things, doesn't mean that physical coercion becomes necessary.

"Live and let live" doesn't mean live it up and let the rest live in squalor.

Nothing should be regarded as taboo, save that which is unnatural.

There are absolutely no restrictions on what anyone can think.

If you can have it, then anyone can have it.

Star Maker :-

After reading "Last and First Men", I approached Olaf's next masterpiece, "Star Maker" ( first published in 1937), with some disbelief as to how on earth he could possibly better the span, pathos and magnanimity he had already laid out. A quick scan of the appendices yielded the impression that this book would embrace not just the tiny fragment of history that was mankind's stay in the universe, but that all history of the universe would be described, and that of other universes too. All of this in less pages than "Last and First Men"! My immediate reaction was simply, "No way, Jose" and I wondered how he was going to set about such an immense task. The vehicle used was, of course, the best man has going for him - his imagination. A contemplative man is whisked off on an imaginary journey through space and time by an ever-gathering mass consciousness. He describes how galaxies of stars formed from nebulae that were born flying apart from each other, how these cooling nebulae condensed into galaxies of stars, and how the rare occurrences of young stars that passed each other, formed planets, and how, on a few rare planets, intelligent life evolved. He shows how certain conditions inhibit the appearance of life, or intelligent life, and how certain evolutionary pathways cause life to stagnate or wipe itself out. He puts mankind's existence into perspective in both universal time and space.

There are touching moments and there are exciting battles. There is both tragedy and comedy. There are uplifting victories and crushing defeats. Far from being stuffy, this book is really a very good read indeed, considering the scope of its subject. The final few short chapters really have you reading a couple of paragraphs, and then putting the book down to have a long ponder over what has just been addressed. And the book's climax leaves you with lifelong matters to mull over - one of these being, "Boy, and I thought I was pretty intelligent..." ;-)

Here are a couple of lengthy quotes for your enjoyment :-

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... The sequence of events in the successfully waking world was generally more or less as follows. The starting point, it will be remembered, was a plight like that in which our own Earth now stands. The dialectic of the world's history had confronted the race with a problem with which the traditional mentality could never cope. The world-situation had grown too complex for lowly intelligences, and it demanded a degree of individual integrity in leaders and in led, such as was as yet possible only to a few minds. Consciousness had already been violently awakened out of the primitive trance into a state of excruciating individualism, of poignant but pitifully restricted self-awareness. And individualism, together with the traditional tribal spirit, now threatened to wreck the world. Only after a long-drawn agony of economic distress and maniac warfare, haunted by an increasingly clear vision of a happier world, could the second stage of waking be achieved. In most cases it was not achieved. "Human nature", or its equivalent in the many worlds, could not change itself; and the environment could not remake it.

But in a few worlds the spirit reacted to its desperate plight with a miracle. Or, if the reader prefers, the environment miraculously refashioned the spirit. There occurred a widespread and almost sudden waking into a new lucidity of consciousness and a new integrity of will. To call this change miraculous is only to recognize that it could not have been scientifically predicted even from the fullest possible knowledge of "human nature" as manifested in the earlier age. To later generations, however, it appeared as no miracle but as a belated wakening from an almost miraculous stupor into plain sanity.

and from later in the book :-

... The result of this extraordinary custom, of artificial fatherhood by "brute-men", which was carried on without remission in all countries for a generation, and in a less thorough manner for a very much longer period, was to alter the composition of the whole quasi-human race. In order to maintain continued adaptability to an ever-changing environment a race must at all costs preserve in itself its slight but potent salting of sensibility and originality. In this world the precious factor now became so diluted as to be ineffective. Henceforth the desperately complex problems of the world were consistently bungled. Civilization decayed. The race entered on a phase of what might be called pseudo-civilized barbarism, which was in essence sub-human and incapable of change. This state of affairs continued for some millions of years, but at last the race was destroyed by the ravages of a small rat-like animal against which it could devise no protection.

I must not stay to notice the strange fortunes of all the many other quasi-human worlds. I will mention only that in some, though civilization was destroyed in a succession of savage wars, the germ of recovery precariously survived. In one, the agonizing balance of the old and the new seemed to prolong itself indefinitely. In another, where science had advanced too far for the safety of an immature species, man accidentally blew up his planet and his race. In several, the dialectical process of history was broken short by invasion and conquest on the part of inhabitants of another planet. These and other disasters, to be described in due course, decimated the galactic population of worlds.

In conclusion I will mention that in one or two of these quasi-human worlds a new and superior biological race emerged naturally during the typical world crisis, gained power by sheer intelligence and sympathy, took charge of the planet, persuaded the aborigines to cease breeding, peopled the whole planet with its own superior type, and created a human race which attained communal mentality, and rapidly advanced beyond the limits of our exploring and over- strained understanding. Before our contact failed, we were surprised to observe that, as the new species superseded the old and took over the vast political and economic activity of that world, it came to realize with laughter the futility of all this feverish and aimless living. Under our eyes the old order began to give place to a new and simpler order, in which the world was to be peopled by a small "aristocratic" population served by machines, freed alike from drudgery and luxury and intent on exploration of the cosmos and the mind.

This change-over to a simpler life happened in several other worlds not by the intervention of a new species, but simply by the victory of the new mentality in its battle against the old.

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To summarise, "Star Maker" is the best book in the whole world ever, and everybody should be forced to read it and understand it, at gunpoint.

Within these two works, Stapleton dares to speculate on some of the most fundamental and unanswerable questions to ever occur to the mind of man, whilst at the same time presenting two original, innovative and captivating tales which draw the reader on and upward, litterally taking ones breath away with their majesty. Last and First Men is the story of us, and how we could develop and evolve, a tale of our future, which, despite being over sixty years old, has dated very little, largely due to the sheer scale upon which it is set. Whilst initialy hard going, once the reader becomes use to the style, the content more than makes up for this and one is soon lost in man's struggle for survival, and for his own mind and what it could be come, a prevailing theme through out this and the sequel, Star Maker. Star Maker takes the ideas from Last and First Men one step further, following the development of the mind beyond mankind, though alien evolutions, up to the end of the uni! verse itself, a daunting concept. Both these tales are challenging ones, questioning what is known and what could be, and are possibly some of the most thought provoking works of Science Fiction, Cosmology and Philosophy you are likely to come across.

This book is more of an essay and a series of ideas than a novel. It has almost nothing in the way of character and plot. It's very interesting as from a historical standpoint, as it both invented a few wholly new categories of science-fiction ideas, and inspired many of the great Golden- and Silver-Age scifi writers, many of whom (Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov) list Stapledon as one of their favorites. But, while I love classic scifi, this felt more like a too-long monograph than a good book.

Wow, it is really interesting somebody thought like this so long ago. Very well developed although hard to conceive a history that's million of years old and man still survived! The Russians will make sure the world won't survive in the next 100 years!

A humankind's evolution of eighteen distinct human species takes 2 billion (2x10e9) years. World wide war destroys nations and dark ages fall; to once again strive back to civilization. Genetic engineering is used to manipulating the germ to create new human creatures, better than previous. Not all experiments succeed. Earth must be abandoned due to instability of Moon and inhabitants must move to harsh Venus and adapt to bat-winged creatures. As the Sun, white dwarf, gets hot, they must again move, to Neptune where giant rotational forces and gravitation in gas clouds await. They master how to move planets in the solar system to compensate the changes of radiation of the sun. But nothing can be done to external event that will eradicate everything: a distant star explodes into unprobable nova that will wipe out the solar system. They no longer have the time to escape. The narrator is the last man, the 18th variation.

Stapledon, Ph.D, discusses a gamut of ideas about what events might occur in our future, and how they affect us socially and philosophically. It is hilarious in some places: gas cloud from Mars invades Earth, Patagonian Civilization returns to Aztec heritage, a world-wide religious "Gordelpus" (= in London: "God help us") movement from China is based on energy. The treatment of the early Earth and the raise and fall of civilizations in 1/4th of the book can be skipped over. The excitement starts at 1/2th of the book when man develops organic giant brains as sentient super-computers; who also start developing the next man.

Two (2) stars. Written in 1930 the book shows its age. The tone is clinical, impersonal and dense; the reader is surrounded by a didactic series of history lectures. The premise is a naive idea that the novel works by the brilliance of its ideas and the enormous reach of its imaginative scope. The time scale is impressive but the philosophical themes, that take mythic proportions, are recycled one too many times. The book's convincibility is weakened by question: why didn't the humans develop the technology needed to explore stars and beyond? In this time scale, they would have had all the time. A monumental entidad but laborious read.

As I read this book, I was so challenged by the scope of the author's incredible imagination and intelligence that there were times when I had to just stop and wait for my brain to cool down, for fear my hair might start on fire.

I don't agree with some of his conclusions, but I doubt there are many who could write with more depth of field and creativity than this guy. The things he envisions are are almost incomprehensibly deep.

I read "Star Maker" many years ago when I was very young (16?) and remember being awed by Stapledon's content and message. Granted I was probably not of an age to truly appreciate (or not) and judge the book, I have fond memories of the book.

Now, not to send the continuing dialog on Stapledon's title of philosopher, off into the ozone, I feel I must add my two cents worth. I have a Ph.D. in the sciences. I consider myself a professional scientist, not because of my degree, but rather on my publication in the professional journals. I know many people who are highly educated in various fields, but do not consider "professional" what-evers, simply because they have not developed a peer reviewed basis of work. If Stapledon has in fact "published a few articles in professional philosophical journals" this is good enough for me. You may not consider him a great "philosophical writer", but to deny him the title of philosopher given his publication record is incorrect.

Forgive my rating of 5 stars. I had to base my opinion on something and that something is my past recollection of the book. I will order a new one today and possibly reconsider.

Take out your brain and place it in a small jar, add a few onions and bring to the boil over a few zillion years. Then, make a time machine and go back to when you took out your brain and give it to yourself already cooked. This book is a bigger trip than that...
This book is the entire future of the Universe brought back from the end of time. It's historical in it's diction and dramatic in it's scales. If this was the first sci-fi book you ever read then you would consider that the sci-fi genre had got worse since that point on.
Stapledon is sci-fi's first visionary on a grand scale. If it wasn't religiously 'incorrect' to say so, I'd guess that God is using this book as the manual for His/Her's (!) next creation.
Yes I Liked it... And so will you...

My first encounter with science fiction was 44 years ago, when my father gave me a tattered novel to read. I'd not long graduated from the Beano and Dandy comics, and I initially found the tiny print and hundreds of pages of that Penguin edition of Last and First Men rather daunting. It proved, however, to be not only a rewarding task, but truly nothing short of a spiritual experience. There are many other reviews available, so I won't bore you with yet another synopsis. I am simply eager to tell you that this book is almost a one-off - almost, but not quite, if you count Mr. Stapledon's other related great work, Star Maker. Whilst these two novels are best described as sci-fi, they are, in my experience, unique in the history of the genre. Their depth and beauty causes them stand gracefully aloof as special works of art.

If you're still seeking the answers to infinity and the source of existence, this one's for you. A heady delivery--meant to be pondered and absorbed rather than hurried through. It allows even the most cynical and intelligent reader to suspend disbelief for a while, indeed, even to dare to hope to believe that the described experience may be a factual accounting of an astonishing adventure. We hope for that because the author actually holds out the promise that, this time, we may actually get a glimpse of a real and ultimate answer. In the end, we are alone again in the midst of all this, none the wiser, but definitely enriched.

Stapledon's epic ages of man tour-de-force. This is by no means a detailed character study, but a study of a theme - the evolution of humanity, and its spread. You are not quite sure how one man could get his head around this at the time, but he managed, in a masterful way. Very influential and exciting, this book.

Before you read this, or if you've read other sci-fi, read it and be prepared for a shocker.

As a sci-fi/fantasy fan, I'd been irritated by classic movie buffs raving about "Dr. Caligari", but when I finally went about watching it, I knew why. The work was so pivotal, so perfect and fundamental, later works gave tribute to it so as to not be seen as derivitive.

Now, Star maker, what a sci-fi writer does in a 6 novel series, you'll find in several paragraphs in this book. The Borg, done, but in this book its a good thing. Transhumanism, terraforming, galactic war, bizzare composite intelligence. Done.

And on top of it all, there's the quest to find God.

It must be about 10 years since I read this transcendental novel (after reading a recommendation in that amazing history of science fiction co-written by Brian Aldiss) and the flavour still lingers. It is nothing short of a speculative history of the universe! Recently, listening to the Brian Eno song Spinning Away (on the Wrong Way Up album, recorded with John Cale), I thought I detected a connection or two... has Brian read Olaf? I'll be rereading Star Maker very shortly.

I started this book in a Science Fiction class at Florida International University. I finished this book because I wanted to pass.
First of all, there are no characters in this book. Character is what most readers look for when reading a novel, but you won't find a character to identify with here. Plot is another reason people read; it's hazy here at best. Finally, the most importan reason poeple read is for story. You definitely won't find one of those here.
If this was slotted under the "Imaginative Philosophy" section, I might have held the book in higher regard. That's pretty much what "Star Maker" is, a philosophical mind trip through entire universes. I was reminded many times of Plato's _Republic_ while reading this, and indeed it seems like Stapleton was extending his philosophical exercise to cover an entire universe.
So, if you want to tackle philosophical issues, this book is okay. If you're looking for a novel (like I was), with a story and characters--and entertainment, damnit!--then run as fast as you cn from this one.

I rather doubt Douglas Adams "was thinking of Stapledon when he invented, in the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy [actually, in "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe"]...the Total Perspective Vortex", just as I doubt former Late Show host Johnny Carson was thinking of Stapledon when he parodied Carl Sagan with his "billions and billions" speech. Douglas Adams and Johnny Carson were quite capable of finding out for themselves, without help from Stapledon, that the universe is big and that time is vast.
For that matter, it is a different thing for comics to harp on this simple-minded theme and for a science fiction writer who seems to take himself very seriously to do so. Rather than read "Star Maker" or "The First and Last Man", I suggest you read instead H. G. Wells's short story "Under the Knife", written several decades earlier. "Under the Knife" deftly and SUCCINCTLY puts the "Total Perspective Vortex" itself into perspective.

It seems like a few of the reviews are very negative, but I would say that it is unfair. Arthur C Clarke described Last and First Men as fantastic.

As another reviewer pointed out, the first chapter describing the near future is not the best part of the book.

>This is a book for people who like to read books about history, who like accounts over long timeframes, who like Truley [sic] Epic stories. The kind of people who buy computer games with thick plots, or who want to know more about the background history and politics of a fantasy world.
It's probably not fortuitous that Stapledon is starting to achieve a bit of popularity well after science-fiction has largely been superceded in the mass market by fantasy (although fantasy still hides behind the moniker "science-fiction and fantasy"). There is no possible literary justification for Stapledon's sprawl, but if you're the sort of person who spends his free time learning to speak "elvish" or Klingon, then you may enjoy immersing yourself in his self-indulgence. I didn't.
P. S.: the store's biographical blurb above is not quite accurate:

>After spending eighteen months working in a shipping office in Liverpool and Port Said, he lectured extramurally for Liverpool University in English Literature and industrial history.
Actually, after (and before) leaving the Blue Funnel Line and while teaching at Manchester Grammar School, Stapledon lectured evenings in the Liverpool area for the Workers Educational Association, NOT for Liverpool University.