Olaf Stapledon published his first epic cosmic novel, “Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future,” in 1930. It is a speculative history of humanity’s evolution told from the vantage point of one of the Last Men, the people of the 18th era of humanity, 2 billion years in the future.
“Last and First Men” eschews the dramatic conventions of the novel form: There are few significant characters or particularities of place. Instead, the plot is a causal chain of civilizations rising and falling. There is a voice, infused with a distant sense of beauty and tragedy as it considers humanity in the abstract. Stapledon described the novel as “an essay in myth creation.”
In his autobiography, Stapledon relates the “Anglesey vision” that inspired the novel. He was scrambling on an island off the rugged coast of Wales when he came across a colony of seals surrounded by crashing waves. Perhaps the faces of the seals suggested blurred abstractions of human faces. He had “a sudden fantasy of man’s whole future, aeon upon aeon of strange vicissitudes and gallant endeavours in world after world.”
