Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon

First published: 1930

Type of work: Science fiction

Time of work: c. 1900 to c. two billion years c.e.

Locale: Earth, Mars, Venus, and Neptune

Principal Characters:

• Human Nature, the character of humanity as revealed over billions of years
• The Narrator, a member of the eighteenth species of mankind, who speaks through the medium of the twentieth century writer of this narrative

The Novel

Last and First Men is an imitation history of mankind written from the point of view of a new species of humanity two billion years in the future. Though Olaf Stapledon presents some episodes in detail, most of the novel is very general, showing the broad sweep of a possible human history without attention to particular characters. The narrator’s subject is human nature. The accounts of eighteen different human species add up to an exploration of potentials inherent in human nature and assertions about which of those potentials ought most to be valued. The eighteenth species exemplifies the fullest development that humanity achieves.

Contemporary humanity, the first species, is characterized by a childish individualism that repeatedly leads to self-destruction. During the centuries of this species’ domination, humanity repeatedly rises toward common ideals of civilization only to decay into savagery. The first men deplete their resources and health through religious warfare. This pattern continues to characterize the early developments of subsequent species.

The second men are nearly destroyed by Martian invaders, who are incapable of understanding human consciousness. Because the nonanimal Martians cohere and reason by means of forms of radiation, they are unable to recognize humans as sentient beings. They assume that radio stations are intelligences and humans their servants. The second men destroy the Martians with a biological weapon that also destroys human civilization. When the third men achieve high culture, they use genetic engineering to produce the fourth men.

The fourth men are giant brains with immobile, partly mechanical, vestigial bodies. After the fourth men virtually destroy the apparently useless third species, they come to see that the life of the intellect is not satisfactory. Without consciousness of physical existence, they are without passion or affection. They can neither know all that may be known nor sustain the desire to know when they encounter intellectually incomprehensible realities such as love and values. To escape despair, they create a fifth species that balances a maximum of intellect with the best of human passions.

As the fifth men approach a pinnacle of human culture, they are forced by cosmic disaster to move the race to Venus. The adjustments to a new planet involve creating the sixth men, who fare badly there until they develop the seventh men, a winged species which delights in the physical sensations of flight at the expense of intellectual pursuits. Without intellectual rigor, the flying race is happy and free but lacking in the tragic vision which derives from objectivity and a sweeping view of human history. When the more serious species that replaces the seventh men has achieved a high level of civilization, humanity is again forced by cosmic calamity to move, this time to Neptune.

Over millennia, the cycle of development, destruction, and decay is repeated until humanity again adjusts itself to an alien and hostile environment, balances conflicting potentials, and produces the eighteenth species, the highest level of human development presented in this “history.”

Eighteenth men, of whom the narrator is one, learn that mankind will be destroyed by yet another cosmic disaster before the completion of the human destiny they imagine: to achieve a full racial consciousness, making the human race in all time and space conscious of itself as a whole. This goal was to be achieved by two means. The human past would be unified with the present by mental time travel of the kind exemplified in the narrator’s use of a first-species writer. Eighteenth men plan to become acquainted with the minds of all people of the past and to commune with them. Full consciousness in the present would result from increasing telepathic union of the entire existing human race on Neptune. Having learned of the impending destruction of the solar system, the last men endeavor to continue the exploration of and union with the past while preparing a molecular dust which might carry the seeds of human potentiality into the cosmos. They hope that, before the end of the cosmos, humanity might again achieve high self-consciousness and reach the apparently ultimate human destiny of realizing a unified spiritual being, of making the universe conscious.

The Characters

The main character of Last and First Men is human nature. The narrator speaks as one of a species which has realized human nature to the fullest in his time. He speaks to the first men, who can hardly imagine what such humanity may be. Though many thematic issues are explored, the main subject is always the possibilities inherent in human consciousness, how they might be meaningfully and beautifully organized.

Stapledon sees human nature as divided between the individual passions that arise from the need for personal survival and group passions that arise from the need for species survival, between physical and emotional being on one hand and self-consciousness and the need to understand on the other, and between subjectivity and objectivity. The various species he presents illustrate the permutations of imbalances and balances among these main potentials. The eighteenth men represent an ideal manifestation of humanity because they have found a proper balance of these possibilities.

A proper balance includes a complete subordination of the individual to the race without the surrender of the individual. This seemingly impossible balance becomes possible only when telepathic communication allows a perfect understanding between individuals. It approaches the ideal on Neptune, where “families” of ninety-six members frequently experience complete mental union and where occasionally the whole race experiences such union. All these types of union depend upon the physical bonds of emotion and affection that these people cultivate. The regular experiences of “higher consciousness,” or group mind, lead to a blending of objectivity and subjectivity that the narrator often characterizes as aesthetic and tragic.

Last men are able to look upon the entire history of humanity as a work of art, the expression of a cosmos that may be alive and purposefully attempting to achieve consciousness. The last men are able to accept humanity’s failures and its ultimate defeat in time, for even if the cosmos achieves consciousness, it must end. To see and accept the beauty of this effort in the face of ultimate defeat the narrator characterizes as tragic nobility. This is the sort of “character” the narrator gives humanity. His narrative becomes the record of humanity’s often blind and blundering reaching out in the direction of spiritual fulfillment.

Critical Context

Though Stapledon is widely acknowledged as one of the founders of modern science fiction, his first novel, Last and First Men, has never been popular. Lacking characters and adventure, it does not recommend itself to casual readers. Nevertheless, it is widely admired by students and writers of science fiction. Eric S. Rabkin argues that Stapledon was one of the first to see the genre as useful for philosophic inquiry and fostering moral growth. Such well-known writers as C. S. Lewis, Arthur C. Clarke, Stanislaw Lem, Doris Lessing, and H. G. Wells, who also influenced Stapledon, have acknowledged debts to him. For example, Lessing’s “Canopus in Argos Archives” series (1979-1983) uses ideas of the group mind similar to those of Stapledon. While it is difficult to be sure of direct influence in every case, there are suggestive connections between Stapledon and several more recent writers. For example, the views of human nature and its relations to the future in Frank Herbert’s “Dune” series (1965-1985) may owe a debt to Stapledon. When reading Last and First Men, one repeatedly recognizes devices and ideas that are encountered in other science fiction from Ray Bradbury to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Even though the book was not very popular, it was successful enough to encourage Stapledon to continue writing science fiction as a part of his life’s work of studying and teaching philosophy. His more important novels include Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest (1935), Star Maker (1937), and Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord (1944). In those books, he continued to explore and elaborate his ideas about human nature and the destiny of humanity.

Bibliography

Goodheart, Eugene. “Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men,” in No Place Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction. Edited by Eric S. Rabkin et al., 1983.

Huntington, John. “Olaf Stapledon and the Novel About the Future,” in Contemporary Literature. XXII (1981), pp. 349-365.

Huntington, John. “Remembrance of Things to Come: Narrative Technique in Last and First Men,” in Science-Fiction Studies. IX (1982), pp. 257-264.

Kinnaird, Jack. Olaf Stapledon: A Reader’s Guide, 1982, 1986.

Rabkin, Eric S. “The Composite Fiction of Olaf Stapledon,” in Science-Fiction Studies. IX (1982), pp. 238-248.