Last And First Men by Olaf Stapledon

The readers of this book are
not in a position to realize
the poignancy of the conflict
which now threatened to
wreck humanity. 

Consider if you will that the world was still recovering from what was to them then the Great War, the single most pointless and bloody conflict that man had ever seen. 16 million lives, both combatant and civilian, were lost, and families were indelibly marked for generations to come. So, if, at first, Stapledon's cosmological novel seems a little naïve, or rather ridiculous, particularly with his predictions for the immediate political future of Europe, you might forgive him. He was, so I'm told, a committed Marxist and could see nothing good coming from the consumerist capitalism of America and its influence on the old world. In the foreword, Gregory Benford mentions that the unforgiving might like to skip to part five, so as to miss those parts to which one might take offence with the benefit of so stark a hindsight. Part five is where humans are almost totally killed off, for the first time of many.

For this book (novel would seem an odd description given it has no central characters, almost no dialogue and, apart from the fact that it is an exercise in imagination, has no plot of which to speak), is the written testimony of the Last Men, the final incarnation of humanity in a future so far distant as to boggle the mind. This edition carries a number of timelines at the back to indicate just how far into the future the reader is asked to travel. Our progress from the cooling of galactic dust clouds into planets in our heliosphere to the future where the author of this account is transmitting his or her words to an author of the 20th century to transcribe (through an obtuse mechanism of the mind which we are too primitive to even comprehend), and where the Last Men are doomed to an untimely demise is a span of 4,000,000,000 years. By this stage, changes to the sun have meant that mankind has migrated out into the solar system, colonising first Venus and then Neptune and humanity has fallen and risen through innumerable dynasties and ages of both darkness and enlightenment. Indeed, the repetitiveness of our own near total destruction and rebirth risks becoming a despairing dirge, as cultural amnesia wipes clean the slate of lessons learned and we all start again from the beginning. However, the sheer fact that in Stapledon's far future, mankind persists in its various forms right up to the last cataclysmic demise of the sun, which catches everyone unawares, might be testament to an almost desperate hope that we can progress beyond our wretched pursuit of worldly goods and finally realise the potential of the divine mind (being of or like a god, rather than of God or devoted thereto).

In essence, I suppose, (above and beyond the one, sadly being proven accurate by the current administration and its core supporters, that America's crude cultural influence is insidious) Stapledon's message is that he believes underneath our merely reactive and comparative animal minds lies the possibility of something truly remarkable, something that, with infinite time, will be unearthed from our demon chimp detritus like miracle gems fossicked from the mullock of the mind. I truly hope he's right, and that we're not going to leave it too late. That purple radiation from the neighbouring stars sounds nasty.

(Paid link)