Customer Reviews

Last and First Men and Star Maker : Two Science Fiction Novels

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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.

I have never read a writer who was able to convey the vastness of the universe and the infinitely complex possibilities of sentient life forms over evolutionary stretches of time. The first of the two novels in this publication, Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon describes the spiritual, intellectual and biological evolution of the human species from our modern era to its last residence on Neptune. The slowly changing forces of our planets and the sun force humans to adapt and change, and Olaf Stapledon documents these adaptations and the adaptations humans impose on their environments. Illustrating the unimaginably long time required for this evolution is Stapledon's unique talent. The theme of the story is human's destiny - to achieve a collective conciousness. It is a fitting introduction for the next novel in this collection - Star Maker. In his novel Star Maker Olaf Stapledon builds a pyramid based on intricate descriptions of the galaxy's sentient beings and illustrates the spiritual journey of all sentient beings toward a unification into a galactic consciousness, with the ultimate goal of meeting the creator of the universe. He applies his clear knowledge of modern biological and cultural evolution and their interactions with their environments to illustrate this journey of countless species, societies and individuals toward this galactic destiny. Along the way are a few twists, which are too exciting in their intricacy to give away here! The end finds our universal being finally able to glimpse its creator. At the time of this writing I know little of Olaf Stapledon, except that he was a philospher as well as a science fiction writer. These two novels are the best science fiction I have ever read. They deal with current issues and ideas in sociology, anthropology, biological evolution, and philosophy in a vivid storytelling style. Although I know little of philosophy, his point of view is strongly deterministic. Although Olaf Stapledon is a product of his time, he was one of his time who was looking toward the future with an imaginatino more focused than any other I have read.

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.

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.

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.

Stapledon's books are two-sided. On one hand there is his thick, turgid prose coupled with lack of characters - a boggy philosopher's novel if there ever was one. These books are not easy reads - if you're looking for that check out his later novels "Odd John" and "Sirius" which read more like regular novels.

On the other hand, this writer's vision is beyond amazing. True, in the short term, he missed the rise of Nazism. However, look at the long term predictions in the first book: England is replaced by America as the world power. China rises later as the next new superpower as Europe slowly fades. America conquers not by military force but by the force of its entertainment media and business skills. Europe represents "old" values against the "new" American and China. America and China form the ultimate superpower based on business trade. The ultimate survival of the new world civilization is tied to fossil fuels, and civilization collapses when they are exhausted.

Hmmm, today we see America the superpower (as England was in the 19th century) with China rising fast. America has an huge military arm, but the real story is cultural imperalism via US media - which has created a one-sided world culture trumpeting the crasser American values (which might map to the "worship of motion" Stapledon describes). Ties between America and China are being forged ever deeper via "globalization" trade. Despite the EU, Europe has a rapidly aging population combined with ultra-low birthrates - which will give west Europe an "old" perspective by 2020. The stength of the US empire is tied to fossil fuels, which are beginning to run out according to "peak oil" researchers. Not bad shooting across an ocean and 3/4 of a century.

In short, if you want novel styling and pace, this isn't for you. If you want to explore the deepest ideas ever discussed in SF (Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke all cite Stapledon for ideas) check out these books.

Last and First Men has been my favorite book for almost 30 years. W.O.S. is my favorite author of all time. I find myself re-reading it every few years to marvel at the accuracy of his predictions. The chapter on the Americanization of the planet and the conflict with China is eerie in it's accuracy. This from a book written before WWII. I've loaned out several copies and they always wind up on extended journeys. I bought this paperback edition to give to my 17y.o. This book is a must for any serious SF fan!

If you can get past Stapledon's somewhat stilted prose (he was, after all, an Oxford educated philosophy student, so I cut him some slack here), there was probably no other sci-fi author who could convey such a sense of the vastness of the universe and of man's tiny little speck-like piece of it. For in Star-Maker, the cosmos is brimming with literally thousands of sentient civilizations, and humankind is only one insignificant cultural outpost in the midst of an infinitely bigger universe. I sort of liked this idea, because I would hate to think that humans, with all their shortcomings, are the only sentient species out there, not that the other species described in this book don't have their problems either. But I would like to think that there are other possiblities such as those that Stapledon describes in this novel, since it seems unlikely to me that the human race will evolve physically and and socially much further than its current state.

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~]

These books are ideational gems. The imagination and spiritual vision of the writer are truly great. I know of no other work of speculative fiction that even approaches the cosmic grandeur of the writers vision of the Universe and mans place in it. An absolute must read.