A couple of months ago I chose Odd John, Olaf Stapledon’s tale of a superhuman genius, for the fourth in this series of rereadings of classic science fiction novels. Taking a new look at Odd John got me interested in investigating Last and First Men, the British philosopher’s most famous book, which such people as Arthur C. Clarke and Stanislaw Lem regard as the greatest of all visions of the far future. More than fifty years had gone by since my last reading of it. I had found it overwhelming then. Would it have the same power for me now?
What is immediately apparent is that Stapledon (who lived from 1886 to 1950) may have been a great visionary, but he wasn’t much of a prophet. Writing in 1930, he completely failed to foresee the rise of Adolf Hitler just three years later, and spoke of the Germany of his day as “the most pacific [of nations], a stronghold of enlightenment.” Instead he singled out Mussolini, who was already in power, as the strongest figure in Europe (“a man whose genius in action combined with his rhetoric and crudity of thought to make him a very successful dictator”). Most—not all—of Stapledon’s portrait of the world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is equally wrongheaded—“awkward and naïve,” as Gregory Benford said in his introduction to a 1988 edition of the book, and even “ludicrous,” as Brian Aldiss once observed. Stapledon’s account of the near future was so far off the mark that in a 1953 American edition of Last and First Men the publisher simply deleted most of the first three chapters of the sixteen-chapter book.
But Stapledon himself knew he was no prophet. In the preface to the first British edition in 1930, he said that he did not intend “actually to prophesy what will as a matter of fact occur; for in our present state such prophecy is certainly futile, save in the simplest matters. We are not to set up as historians attempting to look ahead instead of backwards. We can only select a certain thread out of the tangle of many equally valid possibilities. But we must select with a purpose. The activity we are undertaking is not science, but art; and the effect that it should have on the reader is the effect that art should have.”
So Last and First Men, by its author’s own admission, is art—fiction—and not an attempt to predict the future. But it is fiction of a very strange kind, because it is almost totally lacking in such standard fictional appurtenances as character, dialog, and plot. In form it is a work of history, of sorts, a sober and solemn account of the passing eons to come, written in much the same tone as might be used for a chronicle of human life in the Pleistocene or of the development of constitutional theory in Great Britain. It’s a sign of Stapledon’s great artistry that he manages to make his history of the future such compelling reading.
To quote him again: “Our aim is not merely to create aesthetically admirable fiction. We must achieve neither mere history, nor mere fiction, but myth. . . . This book can no more claim to be true myth than true prophecy. But it is an essay in myth creation.”
Neither mere history, nor mere fiction, but myth. Yes, indeed. And it is, I think, triumphantly successful at that.
The early chapters are hard going because of their manifest failures of prophecy. When we find him predicting an Anglo-French war around 1950 that ends with France ruling all of Europe and England virtually destroyed, we shake our heads. He misses the development of atomic energy, too, giving us only the invention of an explosive weapon so terrible that everyone agrees to destroy the formula for it, and does. But he does hit the target now and then. His analysis of the geopolitical importance of oil is especially shrewd: “The expenditure of oil had of course been wholly uncontrolled and wasteful [and] a shortage was already being felt. Thus the national ownership of the remaining oil fields had become a main factor in politics and a fertile source of wars.”
And who can fail to feel a shock of recognition at his description of Americans: “Universally feared and envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man’s existence. By this time every human being throughout the planet made use of American products, and there was no region where American capital did not support local labor. Moreover the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph, and televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought.” This a decade before World War II, when the United States still lived in isolation from the world, safe behind the barriers of the two great oceans that formed its boundaries!
Even so, most of what Stapledon has to say about the near future is, as Aldiss said, “ludicrous.” A particularly egregious example is the episode three or four hundred years from now in which negotiators from China and the United States—the two great world powers of the era—meet to hash out a treaty. The American is dressed in a sort of Puritan costume (“a decent gray coat and breeches”) and the Chinese delegate wears traditional Chinese garb, “a sky-blue silk pajama suit, embroidered with golden dragons.” It is all very silly, and it is hard for one not to wince.
Finally, in the fifth chapter, comes the total collapse of our civilization and a series of catastrophes, some manmade and some natural, that make most of our planet uninhabitable and come close to wiping out all of humanity, and Stapledon begins to hit his stride as a science fiction writer. The wonders begin: a mutation that creates the glorious Second Men, a species of big-brained geniuses who live for hundreds of years, then an invasion from Mars that owes a good deal to H.G. Wells and leaves the Earth devastated again, and then the emergence of another dominant kind of humanity, the Third Men, “slightly more than half the stature of their predecessors,” with immense silken ears that are “expressive both of temperament and passing mood,” and “great lean hands, on which were six versatile fingers, six antennae of living steel.”
At this point the book is just past the halfway mark, and he starts to hurry his tale along. When he tells us in Chapter Five that we will now skip over the next ten million years, because it was a time of barbarism and stasis, we understand that we are entering a visionary dream. (Ten million years: what an enormously long span! If we go back ten million years from our own day, nothing remotely like a human being has yet evolved.) In the remaining pages Stapledon unfurls one successor species after another—there will be eighteen types of human being in all, over a span of two billion years—and, by so doing, set a mark of inventiveness that the rest of us have been striving to match for nearly eighty years. As he piles one wonder atop another he swings the reader’s mind as though in a centrifuge, and then sends it swirling agreeably off to undreamed-of distant places.
But the book isn’t just a zoo of fantastical entities. What is really unrolling before us is a pattern of cyclical history—evolutionary leaps, the development of stunningly enlightened civilizations, inevitable collapses into barbarism or even worse, and, eventually, some new resurgence. In the guise of fantasy he is actually creating an allegory of our own species’ uncertain climb from its early days of savagery to what we smugly think of as our grand modern era, and reminding us that human progress is an uncertain thing and that the direction of the march is not always upward.
* * *
There are problems of scale, as that ten-million-year leap indicates. Some events, like the political struggles of our own near future and the onset of the Martian invasion, are told in very fine detail. Others are grandly skipped over (the Tenth through Thirteenth Men get only a single page for all four species). Stapledon is aware of this, and explains it by saying that he’s trying to make his book comprehensible to readers of our own day.
He greatly underestimates the pace of scientific advance. “It did not take the Fifth Men many centuries to devise a tolerable means of voyaging in interplanetary space,” he tells us, though the Fifth Men are a wondrous race of near-immortal superbeings, and we pitiful primitive First Men managed the trick only a decade after Stapledon’s death. As for gene-splicing, which we have already developed, Stapledon finally allots it to the Third Men, forty million years in our future, who begin with “simple breeding experiments, but later . . . by crude physiological manipulation of the young animal, the fetus, and (later still) the germ plasm.” On the other hand, the Martians get to Earth by traveling on the solar winds, possibly the first mention of this concept in science fiction.
Again and again Stapledon shows himself to be an amateur novelist by a curious lack of specificity: the chain reaction that destroys the world of the Second Men is caused by a “critical element,” but he doesn’t tell us which one, and the historical records of that era are stored on metal plates “constructed of an immensely durable artificial element,” a Gernsbackian construction that no modern SF writer would have used. He speaks of “ingenious methods” for solving a problem, and “a certain marine salt” as a cause of infant mortality, but doesn’t specify. Such vagueness recurs many times. But these flaws don’t matter. The book is a breathtaking vision, one of the greatest works of science fiction ever written. And—after a dark epilog that seems to foreshadow the terrible war only nine years in Stapledon’s future—comes a marvelous epilog to the epilog, with the dazzlingly endowed Eighteenth Men at the brink of extinction, summing up humanity’s two billion years of cyclical striving: “Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.”
