A Man Who Saw Humanity from Two Billion Years Away
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu73 points by samizdis 13 hours ago
73 points by samizdis 13 hours ago
The last I checked, it was weirdly difficult to buy a copy of Last and First Men and be certain you were getting the complete book as it was intended to be read by the author.
Oddly, this article is "adapted from Matthew De Abaitua’s introduction to Olaf Stapledon’s "Last and First Men," which says "abridged" on the cover. I wonder what that's all about.
It’s freely available from Project Gutenberg.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79003
The edition referenced in the article removes the last 4 chapters (13–16)
The book entered the public domain since I looked into it. Fun!
Yep! It became public domain in the United States this year. But it's been public domain in Canada since 2020 (70y after death) and has been available from Canada's Project Gutenberg equivalent: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20200531
Off topic, but what kind of ego does it take to write an introduction that gets your name on the cover of an abridged edition? Certainly, a writer might conceive of a work as having 10 chapters and being complete, only for a publisher to demand 3 more to satisfy the expectations of the market or some literary superstition. But having been written, the text exists. It seems extremely presumptuous to me for a literary critic to take on the curatorial role and say 'you don't need to read the last quarter of the book, it's boring/repetitive.'
A book of that stature being published cutailed in any way should be carefully avoided by all readers.
The 'Canadian Gutenburg' PD version [0] mentioned in another comment here contains all 16 chapters. ('Star Maker' is also there, as is 'Last Men in London', 'Odd John', and more.
This is definitely not the first printed edition to omit those chapters. There’s a story there and I don’t know what it is.
There is also a brilliant and ponderous film adaptation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqDBlBKlbDA. It is one of my favorites in the "sublime" genre.
The book that he wrote next, Star Maker, is a wonderful read and is quite early for the genre of scifi. Incredible scope and I still think about it often.
Love these kinds of stories. Reminds me of the novel series "Foundation" by Isaac Asimov.
Because Stapledon influenced Foundation directly, acknowledged by Asimov in his own autobiography.
I loved the book. It was great.
> “Last and First Men” is not progressive
strange thing to claim if you have read the book when there's a clear trending line in a specific dimension. what its not is monotonic.
Progress (as in The Pilgrim's Progress) used to mean just moving along in some travel, no positive or negative connotation to it.
It was only after the XVI century (when they still debated if the ancients or moderns were greater) that it acquired its present quasi-religious meaning, because on a short-term scale "historical progress" meant improvements in living conditions.
I'm not impressed with the article - boring and treats the book as an archeological study instead of attending to the immensity of the book's contents and predictions.
"Huxley" this, "Wells" that. Ugh! It is hard to make this book look boring but this article's author has done it.
Apologies in advance for the curmudgeonly tone.
I find this comment valuable because it sheds light on how impressive the book is to read in contrast to the subdued treatment in the article.
Olaf Stapledon explores IQ power levels through world building and I find it interesting how different cognitive levels interact in a world.
- Sirius shows how a dog feels as it wades through the boundary between human intelligence and animal intelligence
- Odd John shows how a group of extraordinary people engaging in a world with normal people
- Last and First men show the IQ power levels of an entire system of "humans" progressing through stages of mankind
- Star Maker is the grand culmination where the entire spirit of the cosmos reaches the highest cognitive state and meets its maker thereby