Promotional image for the 2020 film adaptation of Olaf Stapledon's novel
directed by Jóhann Jóhannsson and narrated by Tilda Swinton
Click here to view the trailer
Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) [1] sets out the future history of mankind divided into eighteen distinct species of human being across a period of some 2000,000,000 years. The narrator of the work is supposed to be channelling a text dictated to him by one of the last men.
If Stapledon's cyclical (whilst progressive) theory of history, complete with rising and falling civilisations, owes something to Spengler and the Hegelian dialectic, his theory of a universal supermind (i.e., a consciousness composed of many telepathically linked individuals) arguably has its origins in religious mysticism.
That's bad enough. But, in a sense, my main problem with this essay in myth creation, is that, ironically, it remains very much of its own time. Stapledon is clearly not all that interested in a posthuman future; his real concern is with the politics of the post-War world and the "earnest movement for peace and international unity" [xv] that he hopes will triumph.
At its core, then, this work is less one of speculative fiction and more a piece of propaganda on behalf of universal moral rationalism. A form of communism, which helps explain its aggressive anti-Americanism. As more than one critic has pointed out, this is what makes the book - particularly in its opening chapters - seem "awkward and naive" [2].
But, actually, the end of the work is just as ridiculous: the Last Men, we are told, have finally achieved "spiritual maturity and the philosophic mind" [xviii] - a sort of mix of Socrates and Jesus, whom the Last Men think highly of, as the very first page of chapter one makes clear:
"Socrates
delighting in the truth for its own sake and not merely for practical
ends, glorified unbiased thinking, honesty of mind and speech. Jesus,
delighting in the actual human persons around him, and in the flavour of
divinity which, for him, pervaded the world, stood for unselfish love
of eighbours and of God. Socrates woke to the ideal of dispassionte
intelligence, Jesus to the ideal of passionate yet self-oblivious
worship. Socrates urged intellectual integrity, Jesus integrity of will.
Each, of course, though starting with a different emphasis, involved
the other.
Unfortunately both these ideals demanded of the human brain a degree of
vitality and coherence of which the nervous system of the First Men was
never really capable. For many centuries these twin stars enticed the
more precociously human of human animals, in vain. And the failure to
put these ideals in practice helped to engender in the race a cynical
lassitude which was one cause of its decay." It's passages like this that, unfortunately, make it impossible for me to read this novel from start to finish - even though I've tried to do so numerous times - and which kind of make me happy to discover at the end of the work that the sun is about to explode!
Notes
[1] Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, (Gollancz, 2004). All page references to this edition will be given directly in the text.
[2] Gregory Benford, Foreword to Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, ibid., p. ix.
As Benford reminds us, Stapledon was a Marxist with a strong dislike of capitalism - particularly American capitalism. Unfortunately, this causes him to give a reading of his own times and the near future that has proved to be completely mistaken. Thus Benford advises readers to skip the first four chapters.
