Last and First Men [9798901160572]

Overview

“It is very good to have been man.” 

Is it? A chronicle of the next two million years as narrated by the final human being, Olaf Stapledon's masterpiece follows the rise and fall of humanity and its ancestors from the primordial abysses to cultural and technological heights—and far, far beyond. 

Over eons of future history, the human form itself undergoes dramatic changes, elongating, shrinking, and, finally, totally escaping the bounds of the body. As rebirth succeeds cataclysm succeeds rebirth, there is always a new race of men to take up the torch from the last, down to “the last syllable of recorded time.” And while the hard laws of the cosmos may not have bent to Man’s existence, yet for a span of ages, Man knew who and what he was—and still dared to act. 

Stapledon’s infinite and icy vision of the future may seem bleak to some. For others, it is a triumph that a thing like Man existed at all. And endured through eons of changes. Presenting the definitive edition of Olaf Stapledon’s classic science fiction novel, with an introduction by famed evolutionary psychologist Geoffery Miller, author of The Mating Mind, and associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, followed by a counterpoint interpretative essay from historian and C.S. Lewis scholar Brad Birzer, Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies and professor of history at Hillsdale College. Also contains an all-new biographical essay, and more. 

This speculative masterpiece and science fiction foundational classic has often inspired, at times horrified, and always jolted the imagination of thinkers and dreamers for decades. Now in a new and definitive edition for our time, Stapledon’s two-million-year ode to Man with its vast scale of space and time provides a bleak and bracing vision of humanity’s place in the cosmos—and what we may yet become.