2014 read #88: Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon.

Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
Foreword by Gregory Benford; afterword by Doris Lessing
324 pages
Published 1930
Read from September 16 to September 20
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Within the last year or so, I read words from some recently famous sci-fi writer or editor, to the effect that Olaf Stapledon had been an enormous influence on the Grand Masters of science fiction, and his modern-day obscurity is a shame. Such words nudged me toward checking him out, together with the prospect of learning something -- anything at all -- about the evolution of genre fiction between the heyday of Wells and the first stirrings of the New Wave. Some say Star Maker is his masterwork, and I'll be reading that soon enough. Others say Last and First Men was his crowning achievement. If this is true... well, there were times during the last few days when I thought it might be better that Stapledon be forgotten.

Last and First Men is a bizarre book, fragments of brilliance and Siddhartha-esque spirituality scattered through a dry-as-dust narrative recounting the next 2,000,000,000 or so years of human evolution. On one hand it's fascinating to observe early appearances of themes and imagery that would be staples over the next two generations of speculative fiction: sentient virus clouds predating Star Trek, metapsychic unity long before Julian May, grisly and outré scenes of far-future ecology that would do Dougal Dixon proud. On the other hand, the book makes heavy use of then-current "race theory" and eugenics, as well as repugnant notions of "racial senescence" and the supposed vitiating effect of tropical ecosystems (dreamed up as a posthoc "theory" for why the "Nordic races" conquered the world, I imagine). And just think -- this Stapledon guy was progressive for his time. There's a description early on in Last and First Men, depicting the crude and appalling "Americanized" near-future, which features a ritualized Sacred Lynching -- all portrayed with anthropological detachment. In 1930, this would have been a scathing criticism of American culture and de facto politics. Reading it now, the effect is merely horrifying.

Gregory Benford, writing perhaps in the flush of the "Tear down this wall!" speech, advises in his foreword to skip the early chapters, eliminating the "antique quality" of Stapledon's interwar prognostications. Skipping the Americanized Planet, however, glosses over some sharp commentary and unexpectedly perceptive extrapolations of America's inevitable failure. I won't type out extensive quotations, so I'll share one of my favorite pages as two pictures, here and here. Stapledon's thoughts on the world's immediate future are certainly quaint, but what he gets right is startling from seventy years' distance.

Boring, horribly racist, full of stuffy pseudo-Buddhist philosophy -- why did I rate it so highly? I don't know. I guess the ending passages got to me despite my cynicism. And it's hard to entirely hate a book that incorporates both a Lindberghian cult of the airplane and a race of monkeys using posthuman "submen" as beasts of burden and of warfare. Plus -- one last thought, I swear -- it's fascinating to see how many eons Stapledon assumed would pass before any human descendant fashioned workable interplanetary travel (almost half a billion years before the first attempt to travel to the moon, and only then when instigated by planetary catastrophe). Not that that deserves a higher rating on its own, but I love the historical interest of it all.