Customer Reviews

Last & First Men & Star Maker

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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

-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.

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...

Olaf Stapledon is the undisputed master of science fiction. His work predates all major authors and the scope of his vision was so vast that modern authors merely leech ideas from him. These books changed the way I looked at the entire body of science fiction and my own life.

THERE IS NO GREATER BOOK IN SCIENCE FICTION, AND THERE ARE FEW, IF ANY, MORE PROFOUND NOVELS IN WORLD LITERATURE, THAN THIS WORK OF THE BRITISH PHILOSOPHER STAPLEDON. STAPLEDON LOOKS AT THE INFINITY OF FUTURE TIME AND ITS CURIOUS PRODUCTS, INCLUDING THE DELIQUESCENT RAMIFICATIONS OF MATTER, MIND, AND SPIRIT, WITH THE SENSIBILITY OF A GREAT PAINTER.

- Patrick Gunkel

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.

"Olaf Stapledon is the undisputed master of science fiction. His work predates all major authors and the scope of his vision was so vast that modern authors merely leech ideas from him."

1) This is an absurd claim. Stapledon's "The First and Last Men" was written FORTY YEARS A-F-T-E-R H. G. Wells's austerely beautiful and, of course, monumentally influential "The Time Machine". In the hundred plus years since, only Poland's Stanislov Lem has rivaled H. G. Wells.

2) Sorry, making your "story" take place over a zillion years does not make it "deep"; it only makes it tedious. Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" (a science-fiction novel from an author who mainly wrote non-science-fiction), published within a few years of "The First and Last Men", is infinitely more telling, trenchant, and philosophically compelling.

I am not a rabid science fiction, but this novel opened doors in my brain that I had never even known were there. For a mind-bending, conceptual peek at our species future, this is the book for you. A little slow from the outset, but plod on...It is worth it