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A review by brucemri
Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
5.0
One of the classics of science fiction on the grandest scale, this history of humanity from the aftermath of World War I till the destruction of the solar system still resonates deeply with me, long after I first read it. Changes in scientific understanding since 1930 make it so that most of it can't actually happen, but it has what some critics of science fiction call "plausible impossibilities" - things that resonate with our hopes, fears, dreams, wishes, and passions.
What really interests me much more than the technical bits are the philosophical ones. Stapledon reaches for a sense not just of the universe being beautiful, which many modern scientists and philosophers would agree with, but it being beautiful and therefore in some sense ultimately just and good, despite all the awful incidents on the way from any starting point to the whole. I think that that yearning has pretty well dropped out of Western intellectual life. We've seen additional human-scale awfulness, and learned more about how large a force sheer random contigency plays in existence at all scales, and between those, it's...maybe less necessary as well less feasible to anchor a moral vision in acceptance of the cosmos just as it is. But there's something in the mind of (at least) this reader that would still very much like to be able to feel that sense, and it was well worth riding along with Stapledon for the trip.
I had this in audiobook form. Stephen Greif did an outstanding job making the darnedest things seem plausible and inviting, mixing a studied intellectual calm with great passion where appropriate.
What really interests me much more than the technical bits are the philosophical ones. Stapledon reaches for a sense not just of the universe being beautiful, which many modern scientists and philosophers would agree with, but it being beautiful and therefore in some sense ultimately just and good, despite all the awful incidents on the way from any starting point to the whole. I think that that yearning has pretty well dropped out of Western intellectual life. We've seen additional human-scale awfulness, and learned more about how large a force sheer random contigency plays in existence at all scales, and between those, it's...maybe less necessary as well less feasible to anchor a moral vision in acceptance of the cosmos just as it is. But there's something in the mind of (at least) this reader that would still very much like to be able to feel that sense, and it was well worth riding along with Stapledon for the trip.
I had this in audiobook form. Stephen Greif did an outstanding job making the darnedest things seem plausible and inviting, mixing a studied intellectual calm with great passion where appropriate.