From archive (archive) From: leeper@mtgzz.att.com (Mark R. Leeper) Organization: AT&T, Middletown NJ Subject: LAST AND FIRST MEN by Olaf Stapledon Date: 3 Jul 88 18:21:22 GMT LAST AND FIRST MEN by Olaf Stapledon Tarcher, 1988 (1930c), ISBN 0-87477-471-3, $10.95. A book review by Mark R. Leeper With the application of fractal geometry to computer graphics it is now possible to recreate on a screen the exact texture of the surface of a mountain. The same geometry can allow you to create a mountain that never existed but which has the texture and feel of a mountain that really did exist. This is not a new concept.. The "future history" is a type of science fiction in which a writer, hopefully well-versed in real history, creates a future that has the texture and feel that make it believable, the same texture of history past. The father of the future history is Olaf Stapledon. In 1930 he wrote LAST AND FIRST MEN, which is probably the most complete and detailed future history, a mammoth 325-page (in the Penguin edition) work of straight history. Unlike other authors such as Wells and Heinlein, he did not write a set of stories, each giving you one point of the future and letting you fill in the gaps; he wrote in the style of a history book. Stapledon starts in his present and covers history with exponentially increasing speed. In the end he has covered the next five trillion years of humanity's future. Unhampered by the need for character development or very much of having to create individual characters at all Stapledon--whom Arthur C. Clarke has called "the most educated man I have ever met"--is given free rein to apply the principles of history with a vigorous sprinkling of science fiction ideas. Rather than having characters, Stapledon often uses an entire civilization as if it were a single character; later it becomes entire species of future man in the same way, as each step the camera pulls back to show another exponential magnitude of time. As Stapledon picks up speed, his style changes and becomes more entertaining. Gregory Benford, in his preface to the new edition recommends that new readers and especially new American readers skip the first sic chapters. I did not, but found it might well have been good advce. The first six chapters are ponderously written. They are too much grounded in the 1930s and in Stapledon's own anti-American prejudices. Beginning with Chapter Seven his whole attitude toward the book--I hesitate to call it a novel--changed and he started using less stodgy prose and more started to enjoy himself. By the very nature of the book it is difficult to say what it is all about because it does not stay about anything for more than a few pages without going on to be about something else. What is a new and earth- shaking idea on one page is an old and outmoded idea ten pages later. A future race of man labors hard to create a perfect version of itself. Not many pages later, the perfect version is all that is left and the first race is forgotten. In Stapledon's future, everything the reader has deeply believed in is soon dismissed as what an earlier version of man thought for a while. But fear not, whatever the current version believes will soon be forgotten also in the onward rush through time. Stapledon forsees genetic engineering, but in a few pages it becomes a decadent form of entertainment in which odd, deformed creatures are created for amusement. LAST AND FIRST MEN works by giving the reader progressively more dumbfounding scales of time and human development. When Stapledon wrote it, he knew of Wells's "scientific romances" but not what science fiction was, though science fiction was developing independently of him. Yet LAST AND FIRST MEN remains a unique book in the field, influencing many current writers but rarely even imitated and never equaled. Mark R. Leeper att!mtgzz!leeper leeper%mtgzz@att.arpa Copyright 1988 Mark R. Leeper Path: news.ifm.liu.se!news.lth.se!feed2.news.luth.se!luth.se!uio.no!logbridge.uoregon.edu!newsfeed.stanford.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!dreaderd!not-for-mail Sender: wex@deepspace.media.mit.edu From: tillman@aztec.asu.edu (P.D. TILLMAN) Subject: Retrospective: Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Reply-To: tillman@aztec.asu.edu Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Organization: none Date: 13 Jan 2000 10:14:09 -0500 Message-ID: X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.5/Emacs 20.3 Lines: 225 NNTP-Posting-Host: deepspace.media.mit.edu X-Trace: dreaderd 947776453 22496 18.85.23.65 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:2560 Retrospective: Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon Review Copyright 1999-2000 Peter D. Tillman Rating: "B" -- interesting but disappointing period piece, with pioneering sfnal ideas and some *seriously* wrong science. Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) are considered (by the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction) to be Stapledodon's best work. Some consider them the best SF books ever written. Prompted by an online discussion, and laudatory comments by Freeman Dyson, I just reread L&FM for the first time in 30 years. While still interesting, it hasn't aged well. Last and First Men is written as a future history of humanity for the next two billion years, as told to a First Man (us) by an Eighteenth or Last Man, living on a terraformed Neptune 2 billion years hence. Its chief virtues, for the present-day reader, are its broad scope, pioneering ideas and magisterial tone. Drawbacks include ludicrously erroneous science, unintentionally comic dialog, and moribund political-philosophical rambling. If you decide to read Last and First Men, I recommend skipping very lightly over the first 50 pages, picking up when the "delicious daughter of Ocean" interrupts two diplomats on an Island in the Pacific. This scene makes Robert Forward look like Vladimir Nabokov: "Delectable," said the Chinese, "exquisitely proportioned, exquisitely civilised savage! Come with me for a holiday in modern China! There you can bathe without a costume, so long as you are beautiful." [note 1] I *wanted* to like Last and First Men. I try to read stories that have been overtaken by real events as a sort of alternate history, to achieve a momentary suspension of disbelief. But the science in L&FM is such a muddle-headed mess -- and wasn't, I think, a whole lot better when it was written -- that I'd make a hard landing at each absurdity. I realize he wasn't trying to write hard-SF [note 2], but, my God! Non-scientists might find it easier going, if they enjoy great lumps of 1920's philosophy and spectacularly askew projections for the 20th century. Well, it was his first novel, and he did have the Last Men engage in ritual funereal cannibalism, as well as forming 96-member(!) group-marriages -- ideas later picked up by an upstart named "Heinlein" [note 3], though not to universal acclaim. I dimly recall that Star Maker was easier going and had aged more gracefully -- see < http://www.qartman.com/brainville/holaf/olaf.html >. And there are more positive opinions of both books at < http://www.amazon.com >. But I think I'll let old Olaf rest in peace awhile longer. SPOILERS (and more Crude Critical Carping) follow: S P O I L E R S H O !! Stapledon projects our culture as continuing for the next 4,000 years as a coal-powered, airplane-mad 1950s-tech civilization. With some *very* strange turns -- for example, infants are taken up by a "priestess of flight" shortly after birth and dropped, "clinging to a parachute," to be retrieved by the father in his plane. This, as you can imagine, places a premium on that ol' simian grasping-instinct -- infants who couldn't hold tight, fell to their deaths [note 4], the ritual serving as a contraceptive-substitute. This led to a "marching monkeys" devolution of the First Men. One wonders what the mothers thought of this custom. When the coal ran out, the civilization fell, and a 100,000 year Dark Age ensued. Finally, a new First-Men civilization arose in Patagonia, discovered nuclear power, and destroyed themselves and their environment by a world-wide runaway chain-reaction. This seems ludicrous now, but there were (semi-rational) fears of such a possibility before the first atomic-bomb test. Anyway, vast and (mostly) absurd tectonic disturbances ensued: "... a new land rose to join Brazil with West Africa.... Europe sank under the Atlantic." I'm pretty sure a geologist in 1930 would have found this as silly and impossible as I did [note 5]. Stapledon, who had a doctorate in philosophy, notes in his preface that he "tried to supplement my own slight knowledge of natural science by pestering my scientific friends." Apparently he didn't pester a geologist. I don't think he pestered an evolutionary biologist either, as much of the evolution of the various races of Men has a distinct Lamarckian flavor, which I don't think would have passed muster in 1930 either. Stapledon's Martians, by contrast, are sophisticated aliens: clouds of viral-size units that can unite to form vast group-minds: in a nice touch, the bigger the group-mind grows, the more dogmatic and bellicose it becomes. They came to Earth seeking water and food, both of which were in short supply on Mars. They got here by dissociating to virus-size particles at the top of Mars' atmosphere, and then light-sailing to Earth, somehow using gravitation to tack. While you can tack with a lightsail -- see, for example, http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~diedrich/solarsails/intro/tacking.html -- you do need a steerable sail, and it's hard to envision a virus with *any* sort of sail. But let's give Olaf an "E" for effort. After suffering numerous invasions and defeats, the Second Men finally destroyed the Martians by infecting them with a lethal disease, as in Wells' War of the Worlds (1898), but which also killed humans. As the Martian cloud-folk disintegrated, their viral bits gave people pneumonia. So almost everyone died, on both planets, and a new Dark Age descended. A few humans survived, and some eventually assimilated the Martian virus into a symbiosis. Here Stapledon's biology might actually work -- Mars and Earth life had to have a common origin, since they could infect each other -- and indeed some sort of panspermia looks rather likely nowadays [note 6]. Incorporation of disease-causing organisms as symbionts is also respectable in present-day biology. Plus, he evolves the Third Men by a proper Darwinian expedient of isolating a small human population on an island, then changing the environment. Olaf's on a roll! The Third Men were great music-lovers, and once united in a Holy Empire of Music, ruled by a benevolent monarch, the Supreme Melody, or, more familiarly, "God's Big Noise." The Holy Empire was succeeded by a culture that practiced "plastic vital art", breeding strange decorative creatures as a competitive art-form. Naturally, they experimented on themselves too, creating the first of the Great Brains, a creature with a brain twelve feet across! Enter the new Fourth Men -- latest models with forty-foot brains! (cover art by Frank Paul). A rather short-lived experiment, and (sigh) pretty much the end of credible science in Last and First Men. Now we come to a true show-stopper. The Fifth Men are going to have to abandon Earth, because, mysteriously, the Moon is spiralling inward and will soon crash. Why? (oh, God....) Powerful Mental Radiation! From the mighty brains of the culturally and philosophically-advanced Fifth Men! [note 7] Anyway, the 5ths fix up Venus, wiping out the natives en passant (one might think this alone would have shoved the Moon into a higher orbit) & move in. It's hot & muggy. Some of them grow wings, then some wingless ones come along and wipe out the wing-men. Now we're up to the Eighth Men, and my interest is fading fast. They move out to Neptune to avoid some sort of solar flare, and by this time they (the Sixteenth Men, I think) are Really Advanced: they have to boost Neptune all the time to compensate for those mental Retard-rays, they (the 18ths, now) can pretty much cruise ol' Nep around the solar system like a boat. BUT Ol' Sol is SICK. We're all gonna DIE. But first we're gonna send [note 8] you sorry primitives a WHOLE BUNCH of REALLY ADVANCED 1930 leftist one-world philosophy. And you'll wake up and think it was all "just a dream." You dumbshits. Signed, the Brotherhood of the Condemned [note 9] The End __________________ Note 1) p. 51 ff., Dover edition, which, remarkably, has stayed continuously in print since 1968 (with the price rising from $4 to $11). Good old Dover! 2) Heinlein's groups are a bit spicier, IMO, but you can judge for yourself from this L&FM sample (p. 222 ff., Dover ed.): "Groups differ... but in most groups all the members of the male sexes have intercourse with all the members of the female sexes... Each member of the group is fundamentally just a highly developed human [party] animal. He enjoys his food. He has a quick eye for sexual attraction, within or without the group..." Whee! 3) Apparently he was initially unaware of the very existence of genre SF, and was taken aback when he was acclaimed by SF fans in the 1940's. He was even more startled when shown the SF magazines of the time (paraphrased from Encyclopedia of Science Fiction). 4) Olaf pioneers a bit of proto-splatterpunk here, describing the unfortunate infants "smashed upon the paternal [aircraft] wings." 5) Sadly, such geologic foolishness lives on today, for example in Eric Nylund's Signal to Noise (1998), gory details available at http://www.silcom.com/~manatee/nylund_signal.html And Nylund has a good scientific education! 6) A current hypothesis is that life on Earth could be descended from Martian microbes that were accidentally carried here inside meteorites splashed up by large impacts on Mars. A number of meteorites from Mars have been found on Earth, though the one first thought to contain Martian microfossils has been downgraded to "probably not" by further studies. 7) To be fair, he "explains" the coming Moon-crash by a teaser plus a later flashback, but it still sucks. Nor does he account for why them powerful Retard-rays weren't slowing the Earth (or Venus), or, for that matter, dragging down Triton and Neptune's lesser moons onto the 18th's. Gah. Curiously, Triton actually *is* slowing down and will eventually crash into Neptune. Coincidence? < http://www.star.le.ac.uk/edu/planets/neptune.html > The recently-discovered extrasolar planets -- gas giants orbiting close to their suns -- are thought to have migrated inward, obviously braked by the powerful mental retard-rays from the advanced, heat-loving civilizations inhabiting them. 8) The explanation for the 18ths' mental time-travel is priceless: "The past event would never have been as it actually was (and is, eternally), if there had not been going to be a certain future event, which, though not contemporaneous with the past event, influences it directly in the sphere of eternal being. The passage of events is real, and time is the successiveness of passing events, but though events have passage, they have also eternal being." (p. 238, Dover edition) Got that straight, now? I'm pretty sure powerful mental radiation is also involved. Perhaps Olaf was prefiguring present-day net.kooks? 9) "Tritonview," Poseidonshire NEPTUNE 018 EOW Telechronomentagrams to: BROCDM-18 %D 1930, 1968 reprint %I Dover %O US$11 %P 246 %G ISBN 0486219623 %S Reprinted in the UK in 1999 as part ofOrion's Millenium Masterworks series. Read more of my reviews (which usually aren't this snarky): http://www.silcom.com/~manatee/reviewer.html#tillman Path: news.ifm.liu.se!news.lth.se!feed2.news.luth.se!luth.se!skynet.be!howland.erols.net!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!dreaderd!not-for-mail Sender: wex@deepspace.media.mit.edu From: "Paul S. Jenkins" Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: Review: Stapledon's _Star Maker_ Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Organization: Customer of Energis Squared Date: 17 Feb 2001 14:30:18 -0500 Message-ID: X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.7/Emacs 20.4 Lines: 68 NNTP-Posting-Host: deepspace.media.mit.edu X-Trace: 982438224 senator-bedfellow.mit.edu 8798 18.85.23.65 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:2828 Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon Review Copyright (c) 2001 Paul S. Jenkins _Star Maker_ is a novel that defines 'sense of wonder.' From a hill near his safe suburban semi, a man travels the length and breadth of all eternity, exploring an infinity of new worlds and new civilisations. This edition is in the Millennium 'SF Masterworks' series, and _Star Maker_ could be the Masterwork of masterworks. It is a classic, hugely influential, but I didn't find it an easy read. With no more than half a dozen lines of dialogue, _Star Maker_ is mostly exposition -- a personal journal of the protagonist's enlightening exploration of the universe. The prose is dense, but so immensely imaginative (the more so considering it was first published in 1937) and so beautifully written, that one is drawn in by the sheer wonder of it all. There's a strong moral, not to say religious, theme running through the book culminating in our hero's confrontation with the Star Maker himself. As the narrator relates his epic journey through time and space, he constantly compares everything to his -- and our -- experience on Earth, using the language of wonder to put what he sees in perspective: 'We should not for a moment consider even our best-established knowledge of existence as true. It is awareness only of the colours that our own vision paints on the film of one bubble in one strand of foam on the ocean of being.' (p 172) This realisation that we can know only an infinitesimal part of the universe, such knowledge being a product of our own mechanisms of perception, is a significant philosophical stand. Stapledon seems to be teasing the reader. He spins this magnificent yarn, the story of existence itself, without telling us whether it's based on a true account or a dream. The narrator travels from the beginning to the end of time. He doesn't know how this is possible. He doesn't know if he will get back to his own time, and his own home, safely. Meanwhile he tells us about the alien societies he encounters on his travels. His reports, anthropological in style, detail how societies emerge, evolve, go to war, make peace, set out on epic stellar journeys, make mistakes, stagnate, degenerate to an earlier state, emerge once more, and so on. Throughout his reports, Stapledon seems to be pointing up the aliens' misfortunes as salutary lessons for mankind. He was writing shortly before the outbreak of war, and perhaps had certain fears uppermost in his mind. There's much to be mined from a novel of such all-encompassing scope. Stapledon touches on free will, faith, evolution, consciousness, group mentality, happiness -- almost the whole of philosophy. There are many lessons within _Star Maker_, not the least being how to write beautiful prose. %A Stapledon, Olaf %T Star Maker %I Millennium SF Masterworks (Gollancz) %C London %D 1999 (copyright 1937) %G ISBN 1 85798 807 8 %P 272 pp. %O paperback GBP 6.99 Paul S. Jenkins | More reviews at: Portsmouth UK | http://www.rev-up-review.co.uk