Progress and History
A Review of Last and First Men and Last Men in London by Olaf Stapledon
Published in 1930, Olaf Stapledon’s little known Last and First Men is a science fiction novel which, rather than tell the story of particular human beings, tells instead the future story of the human race (or, races, as we will see) as imagined by the author, who lived in England during the early and mid-twentieth century. Covering hundreds of millions of years, Last and First Men is notable for the fact that there aren’t any major characters in its three-hundred-plus pages. There are a sprinkling of minor characters, but for the most part, there aren’t any characters at all. Instead, we follow the human race through a series of progressions, collapses, and rebirths. It’s sequel, Last Men in London, has more defined characters, but also spends much of its time at the level of the general, rather than at the level of the individual.
This is a serious drawback. Stapledon’s writing is notable for the fact that he eschews the individual focus most novels take, preferring instead the grand scope of humanity as a species. But this leads to tedious, at times tiring, prose. Writers are often advised to “show and not tell.” Both novels consist almost entirely of telling, and it is instructive that this creates a distance in the reader. The reader struggles to care about the stakes of a story which lacks any persons to which we can anchor. It turns out that, despite Stapledon’s pretentions that he was writing a progressive novel which evaded the limitations placed upon prior novels by their backwards focus on individuals (i.e., their preference for the narrow and particular over the grand and comprehensive), readers want a story with real (individual) characters. Otherwise, we lose interest.
Last and First Men tells the story of a sequence of eighteen human species. Each one is described in hyperbolic terms as incomparably more advanced and perfect than the previous species, such that with the passing millennia future humans look back and shudder at the primitive and provincial lives of previous generations who are so far inferior to their descendants as ants are to homo sapiens. But this grows tiresome, and after the tenth or so such telling, difficult to believe. Especially since readers are rarely given concrete examples of this progress, beyond being told that it encompasses art, spirituality, romance, wisdom, scientific knowledge, technological prowess, philosophical enlightenment, etc., and being treated to repeated belittling of the comparable failure of current human beings in those regards.
But the descriptions of the future humans tend to create the impression in the reader of childishness or even of semi-intelligent nonhuman species fumbling with sticks and rocks. Perhaps it is the grand scope of the narrative, or perhaps the constant foreshadowing of the ways in which each species will fall short. Whenever it seems that there is a human species which has finally achieved some perfection and can stop progressing, we find out that this species, too, is terribly limited by its own shortcomings. Which makes it hard to believe when we are told that finally, in the Eighteenth Men, human beings have reached their pinnacle. (Especially when we are told that these perfect humans are ugly and grotesque, although supposedly it is us who are ugly and grotesque and incapable of appreciating their beauty.)
It is also difficult to relate to these creatures, because they aren’t actually descended from homo sapiens. We die out, as do subsequent species, some of which develop out of primates, others of which are engineered by previous species, others of which develop out of primate cousins. Some of these creatures are described as beautiful. Others are described in ways which come off grotesque or comical. And yet we are told that it is us, homo sapiens, who lack beauty when compared to our clumsy and too-large successors.
Notably, it is difficult to take seriously these claims of progress when the most advanced human species aren’t that much further along in space exploration than homo sapiens is today in the year 2025. Perhaps the author assumed other forms of progress would come quicker, and that space was something which would always remain out of reach of human ken.
In any case, the novel could have done with a few concrete examples to anchor these claims of progress. In Hyperion and The Rise of Endymion, Dan Simmons is able to create in readers the effect of experiencing creatures so terribly advanced beyond human beings that we are as ants to them. His descriptions of the interaction between human beings and godlike artificial intelligences achieve this impression without giving away all that much about the AIs (in the scheme of things). He does this by introducing us to particular intelligences and showing us their interactions with particular human beings. We can tell that they possess abilities so far beyond what we can imagine today that they are close to omnipotent, but he doesn’t spend dozens of pages telling us that this is the case (without divulging convenient examples) as does Stapledon.
Stapledon’s vision of progress also comes off as somewhat trite. Inevitably, future human beings aren’t burdened by religion and individualism. Some future species can experience a sort of hive mind, or can sense other minds directly. Some communicate telepathically. They live far longer than we do, in some case for hundreds of thousands of years. They practice polyamory,1 while we are castigated for our sexual repression and silly taboos. But they control their populations without complex contraception.
Future species also practice forms of eugenics. It is worth dwelling on this, despite its minor role in the novels. Eugenics plays a role in the biological engineering, or breeding, of future species. It usually involves culling the old and unfit. Sometimes it is voluntary. Always, it is praised as the height of progress and compassion. As befits a good early-twentieth-century progressive, Stapledon fully believed that eugenics represented moral progress over benighted traditions which allowed respect for individual human life to stand in the way of the health of the species.