Review of Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon

How it must have been for a writer in the early 20th century. The world was your oyster—as long as you knew the right people, natch. There were no genre expectations, no market expectations, no massive reading culture to conform to, or rebel against. You could write what you want, and as long as you passed a basic eye test and knew the right people in publishing, then your story could see print. How else could an essentially plot-less, dialogue-less, character-less “novel” about the extreme, long-term evolution of humankind find book form? Enter Olaf Stapledon's debut novel Last and First Men (1930).

A plot summary of Last and First Men is therefore short and sweet. The book starts in modern history, at least as of Stapledon's time of writing, and moves forward, conveying the critical moments in human social and biological evolution over the next two billion years. Almost Lamarckian, it casually skips and jumps, taking advanced monkeys to the end of Earth, beyond bipedal, and into the wide universe afar. If anything, the book is a spot of intriguing imagination.

If there is anything Last and First Men does well—and something Stapledon did just as well if not better in Starmaker—is to convey to the reader's deepest impressions the passage of time. Eon too short a word, we're talking billions of years—the history of human life on Earth³⁷. Inherent to this is the (obvious) fact that Stapledon is not in the game of prediction. It isn't a shot at the world's least likely lottery to cash in. Instead, his vast, vast canvas seems aimed at modern humans. It's possible, for example, Stapledon was trying to bring into perspective contemporary life. Existence is not static, regardless the window of history you examine. A hundred million years from now the computer I'm typing on will not exist. The house I'm in, the street outside my window—none of these will exist. We, as biological entities, will not be in the same form. It will literally be another world. And with this fleetingness comes a different perspective to the too oft mode of existence we have here and now, thinking about nothing beyond.

One area of speculation Stapledon does indulge in and accidentally hits the nail on the head, however, is WWII. The novel was written in the 1920s, but even then it was apparent to Stapledon that Germany's imperial interests were not sated post WWI, and that Russia would be their opponent. Indeed, those two powers would have the largest battles of the war that would come. And there are several other prescient moments which make the early parts of the novel engaging from the perspective of history.

In the end, Last and First Men is a coconut novel. You will either like it or dislike it. If you need the standard conventions of fiction—characters, dialogue, plot, etc., then it's likely you will spit this out. If, however, A) those things are not critical to your reading experience, B) the thought of three hundred pages of exposition does not put you off, and C) one intelligent man's thought experiment as to what humanity will look like over the next two billion years sounds interesting, then have a go. Stapledon's prose is academic, but it stands the test of time.