Last Men Universe

Two billion years of human history, narrated at the speed of a geologist. Olaf Stapledon's future opens a few decades after the First World War and does not stop until the Eighteenth Men are dying on Neptune with the sun going wrong above them. Civilisations rise, discover something ruinous and fall; the species is remade — by war, by flight to Venus and then Neptune, by deliberate design — eighteen times over, and each new version would not recognise the last as itself. This is Last and First Men, its companion Last Men in London, and Star Maker, which plays the same trick on the whole cosmos: a mind travelling outward through inhabited worlds, symbiotic species and living stars until it stands before the maker of all of it and is not comforted. The excerpts and extracts gathered around them are how these books were read for decades — in pieces, in anthologies, because whole they are almost too much. There are barely any characters and next to no dialogue. What Stapledon offers instead is scale, and the strange devotional calm of a man describing the death of everything. Read Last and First Men first for the human span, then Star Maker, the book that made Arthur C. Clarke and Stanislaw Lem sit up. Last Men in London is the personal one, and reads far better once you know who is narrating it.