A review by mdpenguin
Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon

challenging hopeful informative slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

This was a grand undertaking on the part of the author and there's a lot about it that is really interesting, however I really don't think it's very good for two reasons. The first is that the writing is a lot like a philosophical essay in that it repeats things over and over in different ways to ensure that the intended meaning gets through. The second is that it's just so wrong about so much. 

Part of this, of course, is that it was published in 1930, before WWII and with the contemporary state of technology and the sciences. But some of it is just bad thinking, both on his part and that of many of his contemporaries in England. An example of weakness on his part was that technology was already moving faster than what he supposed would happen in the future of his time. Much of what he projected would take 100's of years was accomplished by the end of the 20th century and there were plenty of scientists who would have gotten this timescale pretty close to correct. The science of heredity in England at the time was pretty horrible, and English racial theory – with all of the nasty implications that served as the backbone for eugenics programs domestically, in the US, and in Nazi Germany – plays a heavy role in the development of the various human species through the book. The nastiness is tempered somewhat by Nietzsche's heavy influence on the progression of the species, but it still felt kind of grody to me, having grown up in a country that shut down its last public Eugenics program only in the mid 1970's. 

At first it was interesting to see where he got things wrong and where his propositions rhymed with what really happened, but the writing made it a slog to get from one interesting idea to the next. And after a while, the wrongness just stopped being interesting. With the social developments of the mid-20th century through the remainder of the more familiar structure of society, one could think about what the world looked like to a well-educated Englishman in 1930 and see where he might come to the conclusions that he did. But as the geopolitics stopped being couched in familiar terms and started becoming much broader, all that was really left was the fact that things just don't work the way that he thought that they did. 

I think that I might have found it quaint if this were written from the perspective of the 1830's rather than the 1930's. The 1930's was just as science was starting to figure out astrophysics and engineering was really starting to understand how to harness energy to do interesting things, so it wasn't far enough removed from modern times for me to suspend disbelief and accept that things might just work differently in the setting of this book. If there were fallacies involving the luminous ether rather than fallacies regarding fission then I could just shrug it off. But each thing that he was wrong about in regards to physics and engineering were close enough to the real thing that I couldn't help but see it as error rather than just a different world. 

The grand scope of this project, however, was impressive. And, though many of the premises were wrong, the thinking was coherent and interesting. If it had been slightly better written or had come out a decade and a half later then I think that I'd have liked it. As it stands, I'm glad to have satiated my curiosity by having read it but would honestly rather have spent my time reading something else.