“Last and First Men” eschews the dramatic conventions of the novel form: There are few significant characters or particularities of place. Instead, the plot is a causal chain of civilizations rising and falling. There is a voice, infused with a distant sense of beauty and tragedy as it considers humanity in the abstract. Stapledon described the novel as “an essay in myth creation.”
In his autobiography, Stapledon relates the “Anglesey vision” that inspired the novel. He was scrambling on an island off the rugged coast of Wales when he came across a colony of seals surrounded by crashing waves. Perhaps the faces of the seals suggested blurred abstractions of human faces. He had “a sudden fantasy of man’s whole future, aeon upon aeon of strange vicissitudes and gallant endeavours in world after world.”
Stapledon’s imagination is profuse. He can be read as a compendium of science fiction ideas: his “Odd John” (1935) with its homo superior and titular telepathic character seeds the ground for Marvel’s X-Men; in “Star Maker” (1937) he describes the stellar structure that Freeman Dyson conceptualized as the Dyson sphere; in “Last and First Men” and its sequel, 1932’s “Last Men in London,” human evolution is driven across millennia to produce telepathy, as in Frank Herbert’s “Dune”; in the age of the Fifth Men, the Moon is destroyed and falls to Earth, raining down destruction and driving further evolution of the species — Neal Stephenson’s masterful pan-generational novel “Seveneves” is powered by the same conceit.
A further astonishing influence, traced by the scholar Dominic Moran, is upon Jorge Luis Borges and his short story “El jardÃn de los senderos que se bifurcan” (1941), or “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Borges reviewed Stapledon and went on to cite a section of “Star Maker” that anticipates the idea of the multiverse. The “many worlds” theory of quantum mechanics would not be proposed until 1957, nearly 20 years after Stapledon’s speculation of a creature capable of taking many possible courses of action at once, with each choice creating a new dimension in time.
The long future of “Last and First Men” is influenced by the interwar concern with deep time. Doris Lessing observed that surely what was going on in archaeology in the period inspired Stapledon: The early 20th century was marked by the rediscovery of civilizations such as the Olmec mother culture in the Americas, the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb, and the excavation of the Hittite capital that proved they were a genuine civilization and not solely a Biblical one. Lessing’s own science fiction sequence, “Canopus in Argos: Archives,” first published in 1979, is a similarly eon-spanning future history.
The different generations of Stapledon’s humankind evolve under pressure from cultural and environmental effects. Their advances leave a mark on the Earth, and the Earth violently reacts. This anticipates a key theme of the 21st century, the Anthropocene, the theory that humanity has left evidence of itself in the geological record, thus making our mark in deep time. [...]
Universal significance is certainly a concern of Stapledon’s: His letters and articles in the early years of the First World War seek it in his war experience. Stapledon served in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, a third choice outside of the binary of being a soldier or a conscientious objector. To volunteer, he adapted his car — a roomy grey Lanchester that he learned to drive along the narrow lanes of the Wirral — into an ambulance and drove to the front, signing up in Dunkirk. He was joined by Lewis Fry Richardson, the mathematician who would later find fame for his work on meteorological prediction but at the time was working on an equation to predict the end of the conflict. Their unit was attached to a French infantry division moving from the ruined port town of Nieuport, where the barbed wire straggled down to the North Sea, to a convoy camp in Flanders.
On a warm September night in 1915, Stapledon took a stretcher, a sleeping bag, and a leather rug from the car to sleep under the stars. He lay down and marveled at the Milky Way, at the Pleiades and Jupiter. The distant guns fell silent. He tried to see the stars as they truly are, to comprehend the spatial, temporal, and moral depths of the starfield.
What followed was a reverie of cosmic consciousness that underpins “Last and First Men” and his later masterpiece, “Star Maker.” In the vision, his beloved cousin Agnes sang his name and appeared to him; they soared to the heavens together; planets fell away; the sun diminished to a mere star. He saw all the suns, all the planets, all the living beings. The earth was far away; from space, he could see the trenches and battle lines and the souls of the soldiers. In an instant of cosmic consciousness, he saw the “strange noble beings of other worlds” and “of each one we felt ‘It is I.’” [...]
“Last and First Men” is not progressive. Civilizations rise and fall, the tide of progress advances and retreats, variants upon the theme of humanity strike up and diminish — what endures of humanity is not spirit in the Christian sense so much as, in the philosophy of the Fifth Men, “a work of tragic art.” The Fifth Men regarded the cosmos as an aesthetic unity in four dimensions. Art focuses aspects of the cosmos, making it apprehensible even if its complexity means that it can never be entirely known.
by Matthew De Abaitua, MIT Press | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. I've had Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker on my coffee table for like, forever it seems. When there's nothing to do or I need to take a book somewhere for temporary diversion, like a doctor's appointment, I'll pick it up and read a few chapters. It's not light reading, and the time scale it covers - billions of years - is pretty daunting. But it's well written and thought provoking throughout.]
