
On Stapledon's “Last and First Men” (1986) - walterbell
http://dpuadweb.depauw.edu/icronay_web/lem%20stapledon.html
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tnecniv
My freshman year in college I took a science fiction literature course (aside:
it turned out that my dad took the same course with the same professor some 40
years earlier). The professor said that Stapledon's Last and First Men was the
most ambitious and significant work in the genre's history, and I am inclined
to agree.

~~~
cfcef
Of course, Lem tried to top it with _Star Maker_, where multiple universes are
too small for his canvas :)

~~~
seanstickle
Star Maker was written by Olaf Stapledon.

[http://www.amazon.com/Star-Maker-Olaf-
Stapledon/dp/148264446...](http://www.amazon.com/Star-Maker-Olaf-
Stapledon/dp/1482644460)

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pavlov
_... we can expect to have bases on the planets in this century ..._

Lem wrote this in 1986, a year when the Cold War space race was still in full
effect. The Soviet Union had just built the Mir station and the country's
miserable economic state had not yet been fully revealed. NASA's Challenger
disaster looked more like a tragic bump in the road than a systemic failure of
the Shuttle program.

30 years later it feels like we're actually further off from having bases on
other planets than in 1986.

~~~
abecedarius
I don't know, in that year I was a space enthusiast in high school but already
iffy about human spaceflight going anywhere interesting before I got old. Even
if the disaster _was_ just a tragic bump, the shuttle was already so much
worse than promised that no evolution of it plausibly led to the really
ambitious programs like O'Neil colonies. (See
[http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/](http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/)
for the kind of thing we got excited about back then. It's a much more
compelling vision than going to Mars.)

Nowadays there's real private spaceflight in development. Still a long way
from asteroid mining and such, but it feels a little closer than it did then.

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javajosh
It is remarkable how fundamentally optimistic both Lem and Stapledon (and most
science-fiction authors) are about our long-term prospects! All of humanity
lives on the thin slime on a tiny rock hurtling around an ongoing massive
fusion event. There is no warp drive, no anti-gravity - and not even a glimmer
of physical theory that will lead to it.

We send tiny rockets into space, sometimes with robotic probes. That is the
limit of chemical rocketry, for now and for the foreseeable future. Founding a
self-sustaining colony on Mars appears to be impossible - a colony might
exist, with frequent deliveries from earth, but such a thing would hardly
qualify as a "backup" for humanity, as it would die shortly after the Earth
dies.

And of course interstellar travel is totally out-of-the question with chemical
rockets.

Meanwhile, the world (especially the First World) consume the truly unique and
precious life-support systems in the bonfire of consumerism. Not to mention
that the threat of total nuclear annihilation is still present.

So, despite all the interesting talk about Stapledon, the fact remains that it
is an optimistic fantasy that distracts us from the stark truth that the laws
of physics conspire to prevent us from living anywhere but in this one
biosphere, naked to whatever calamity befalls us.

~~~
genmon
Last and First Men doesn't feel enormously optimistic to me... [Spoilers] It's
a long history of struggle, humanity barely existing, occasionally bursting
into brief civilisation before destroying itself through accident or hubris.
And when humanity does finally attain some kind of peak existence, it finds it
can't escape the solar system and is doomed anyhow. Despite its long history,
humanity warrants only a footnote in history of the whole cosmos (sentient
nebulae onwards) given in Stapledon's Star Maker. So given your pessimistic
outlook, you might rather enjoy it :)

~~~
javajosh
But humanity a) survives long term, and b) he predicts extremely long-lived,
stable societies between calamities. It's much more realistic to assume that
no humans would survive a global extinction level event on Earth. Life itself
would probably survive all but the most extreme events, but it would have to
evolve into intelligent life for another species to attempt to spread life
beyond earth.

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peter303
A lot of science fiction is just current socity transported into a fantasy
future. For example The Jetsons is the post-WWII nuclear family 100 years
hence. We can basically identify with "us" in a new world. The problem I have
reading Stapledon is that his humans are so removed from current society that
I cant really identify with them and get bored.

~~~
walterbell
Some of his characterizations are timeless riffs on politics, religion and
science, e.g. these passages are relevant to modern entertainment and
transhumanism,
[http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601101h.html](http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601101h.html)

 _" … music had a special significance for this race. So intense was their
experience of it, that they were ready to regard it as in some manner the
underlying reality of all things. In leisure hours, snatched from a toilful
and often tragic life, groups of peasants would seek to conjure about them by
song or pipe or viol a universe more beautiful, more real, than that of daily
labour. Concentrating their sensitive hearing upon the inexhaustible diversity
of tone and rhythm, they would seem to themselves to be possessed by the
living presence of music, and to be transported thereby into a lovelier world.
No wonder they believed that every melody was a spirit, leading a life of its
own within the universe of music. No wonder they imagined that a symphony or
chorus was itself a single spirit inhering in all its members. No wonder it
seemed to them that when men and women listened to great music, the barriers
of their individuality were broken down, so that they became one soul through
communion with the music.

… It was amongst the rebel peoples that the biological interest of the race,
hitherto subordinate, came into its own. Mating, at least among the more
devout sort of women, began to be influenced by the desire to have children
who should be of outstanding musical brilliance and sensitivity. Biological
sciences were rudimentary, but the general principle of selective breeding was
known. Within a century this policy of breeding for music, or breeding "soul,"
developed from a private idiosyncrasy into a racial obsession. It was so far
successful that after a while a new type became common, and thrived upon the
approbation and devotion of ordinary persons. These new beings were indeed
extravagantly sensitive to music, so much so that the song of a sky-lark
caused them serious torture by its banality, and in response to any human
music of the kind which they approved, they invariably fell into a trance.
Under the stimulus of music which was not to their taste they were apt to run
amok and murder the performers."_

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pwang
Starmaker was my introduction to Stapledon. Superb and holds up even across
the span of several decades.

~~~
KingMob
Inded. I personally think Star Maker is better for sheer wonder and scope. I
love how Stapledon will casually dash off a whole civilization in two pages
that other authors may spend a dozen books fleshing out.

