Access Instantly Last And First Men Brought To You By Olaf Stapledon Shared As Paperbound

distinct species of human being, thats what youre in for with Last and First Men, Not all at once of course, I mean it takes two billion years andextraordinary pages from Olaf Stapledon to create this seminal landmark in literary science fiction.
In fact this wholly remarkable work is so brave and so audacious in its scope that it leaves you dizzy at the sheer scale of the writers triumph of imagination.


The early part of the book begins with usual geopolitical speculative fiction of the kind that H.
G. Wells so thoroughly bores his readers with, only here it is done with much greater success, The great empires of the day are as familiar to us as their petty squabblings and within a few pages they are at each others throats.
They ally and scheme, and dream and fight and then very quickly, and quite simply, they are gone.
All that is familiar to us, the empires of mind and mammon, nations and names, the languages of Shakespeare and Tolstoy, are simply swept away by the passing of the years slipping first into obscurity, then passing into mythology, before finally succumbing to oblivion.
This is both clever and shocking as it simultaneously allows Stapledon to free his narrative of the shackles of contemporary perception, and ruthlessly demonstrates the utterly unsympathetic nature of the passage of time.
Everything dies and everything will be forgotten,

From this point on the reader is adrift upon the churning sea of Stapledons seemingly boundless imagination.
The years roll by and humanity persists, sometimes soaring to great and noble heights, sometimes sinking into the abyss of savagery and barbarism.
Hundreds, then thousands and finally millions of years drift by years in which mankind is repeatedly subject to near extinction level events, events that are sometimes natural and sometimes selfinflicted.
The race spreads its wings and other sentient forces are encountered and different species of man evolve and deevolve, many of them simultaneously.
All the while both evolution and revolution promote different branches of the human family and in time antennae, fingers and fins will all stretch out towards the light of the sun before succumbing once again to the evolutionary night.


When I read this book I developed the distinct feeling that Stapledon may have pushed the human mind as far as it can go, in terms of what it can conceive of in relation to its place in time.
Ive personally not read anything since to dissuade me of that and rarely have I seen the treatment of ideas and concepts given such free rein as they are in Last and First Men.
In the novel Stapledon subverts the usual trite literary conventions, Traditional characters are replaced by the various species of man and the idea of plot, along with the endlessly proselytized story arc, is made redundant, ridiculous even, by the sheer relentless march of time.


Stapledon himself gave up a career in academia to write this book, in the hopes that he could reach and influence a wider audience.
Afteryears Last and First Men' is still in print and widely credited as being a powerful influence on successive generations of writers.
Job done Olaf, bravo.
Theres this moment in Douglas Adams sitelinkThe Restaurant at the End of the Universe where, to torture a certain character, he is put into the Total Perspective Vortex, a device that gives him a perfectly accurate glimpse of the entire mindcracking enormousness of the universe and every single thing contained therein, including a microscopic pinprick that reads You are here.


Reading Last and First Men was like being put into the Total Perspective Vortex.
My brain is currently quite broken, Or, at the very least, my sense of proportion, If next time Im expected at a party I show up,years late, itll be entirely Olaf Stapledons fault for making me think,years is but a trifling moment, gone in an eyeblink, and no reason to put away the punch and slam the door in my face.


In this book, Stapledon pour yourself a strong one for this tells the future history ofconsecutive species of hominids over the course ofbillion years.
Just for reference:billion years ago, the planets in our solar system had only finished clumping together into more of less cohesive balls of rock.
Things get trippy.

So you start reading and initially you follow along sure,years in the future, I get that.
Then it's,years, still with you, But then suddenly humanity blows itself up in a worldwide nuclear disaster and we slump into the first of many Dark Ages for, wait, whats thatmillion years!!

This guy gets space.
It's huge and slow and mostly uninteresting, For most of the books timespan, humanity's not up to anything too exciting we're portrayed as just another part of nature, blindly evolving, ever adapting, who every once in a while gets lucky and makes some dazzlingly fast technological leap.
You know, like the actual history of humanity so far,

In a way, hes sketching his vision of what an ideal future moral history of humanity would look like with plenty of wars and aliens to keep things interesting along the way.
Stapledon seems to have very little faith in our current species hell, we dont even make it to the Moon until approx,,years in the future because our intellectual progress, impressive as it is, isnt free from the fetters of our biological hinderings, i.
e. , sexual jealousy, selfinterest, competitiveness. There's no realpolitik in Stapledons vision of the present nations keep going to war because they hate each other.
This book is about humanity's quest to overcome its base passions and become pure mind,

Having said all that, this novel can be dull, Seriously dull. It would be a whopping fivestarrer if it wasn't so egregiously boring at times, Writing is not this mans forte he gets carried away with flowery metaphysical lyricism that smothers and overwhelms the course of events.


Still, Stapledons vision and imagination more than make up for it, One can open this book at random and always find an idea that has been subsequently used in any number of scifi stories, all the way from sitelinkDune to biopunk.
Its all in there. This is a mustread for all serious science fiction fans,

INDIGNANT POST SCRIPTUM: The first American edition of this book, by SF Masterworks, opens with a regrettable foreword by Gregory Benford, in which he nonchalantly remarks: I would advise the reader to simply skip the first four parts of this book and begin with The Fall of the First Men.
I found myself shouting EXCUSE ME at the dumbstruck print, What sort of foreword recommends readers skip half the book theyre about to read Ill readily admit the first half is rather boring, but its a part of Stapledon's envisioned whole.
Furthermore, its essential to fully appreciate the time scale as the book advances, allowing one to reminisce about those first few chapters and marvel at how far humanity has come over the course of billions of years.
It makes you realise how mightily insignificant our present is in the greater scheme of things, Oh, and he also scoffs at Stapledon for being shockingly wrong about the events that would take place in the decades following the Last and First Men's publication.
Im sorry, but what exactly is shocking about not being able to predict the future Are we holding him up to the standards

of a prophet Seriously, this foreword is nothing but a puddle of runny arse gravy.
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