Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Last and First Men (SF Masterworks) by Olaf Stapledon, William Olaf Stapledon ISBN: 1-85798-806-X Publisher: Orion Publishing Group Pub. Date: 2000 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.57 (7 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: vanity writing
Comment: >If your idea of a novel is a book about people's relationships, it may not be for you.
My idea of a novel is a book for and about individual human beings. This idea of mine is not unique to me, but is inherent in the four-hundred year-old conception of the novel, from Cervante's "Don Quixote" to Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". A book that is not a for and about individual human beings needs to be called something other than a "novel".
>The history of mankind from 1930 to a few billion years hence is pre-written by a philosopher ...
Mr. Stapledon's biography: He did earn a DEGREE in philosophy, but he lived off an inheritance and, aside from a short stint as a public grade school teacher among a variety of odd jobs before he came into his inheritance, he did not teach. Except for a few obscure early journal articles, he did not publish philosophy. He gave occasional ad hoc public lectures about socialism under the auspices of a socialist society and otherwise occupied himself writing science-fiction novels which sold very modestly. It is rather a stretch to call him a philosopher.
>...and fantasist possessed of a great and unquiet mind, inhuman but not inhumane as someone has well put it.
As someone else has pointed out, not only novelists but also historians concern themselves with individual human beings. An author who really WAS "inhuman", that is, not human, might not, I suppose, in the way that an entomologist does not customarily concern himself with individual ants, but such a non-human meta-entomologist would neither likely be as obsessed with nations as Mr. Stapledon is here. Especially he would not ANTHROPOMORPHIZE nations.
Rating: 5
Summary: A First Man Writes...
Comment: After 20 years of reading about Last and First Men I have found it at last. If your idea of a novel is a book about people's relationships, it may not be for you. That particular element of novels bores me to death and this is more my idea of a compelling read. The history of mankind from 1930 to a few billion years hence is pre-written by a philosopher and fantasist possessed of a great and unquiet mind, inhuman but not inhumane as someone has well put it. On no account skip the opening chapters, whatever anyone tells you. The fact that S got the world's history 1930-2002 completely wrong is not the point -- the rest of it will almost certainly prove to be all wrong too, if we think like that. What these first chapters do is to get us into the author's weird exalted and passionless mindset. He is not so much on another planet as in an alternative universe. It is entirely to the book's advantage that he has no grasp of Realpolitik and even that he has no detectable sense of humour -- when I was beginning to feel the latter as a lack I came to the only bit where he ascribes humour to any of his characters, a race of monkeys depicted in general unsympathetically and not least for their possession of this deplorable characteristic. That put me in my place I can tell you. From start to finish I got no sense of either pity or cruelty as he chronicles the the periodic near-annihilations that overtake the various successive human races, and while his account of the systematic extermination of the intelligent life on Venus filled me with a wrenching sense of tragedy that I did not feel for any of the mankinds the author himself seemed as unmoved as ever. If Wuthering Heights was written by an eagle, who or what wrote Last and First Men? Of other human proclivities I can report that sex is methodically accorded its place in a thorough and businesslike manner reminiscent of Peter Simple's great sexologist Professor Heinz Kiosk (assisted by Dr Melisande Fischbein). Of anything I would recognise as love or affection or friendship I can find not a trace.
Non hic mortalem uexantia sidera sortem
Aeternosue tulit sollicitare deos.
-- 'here he has not gone so far as to trouble the eternal gods or the stars that blight our human lot.' That comes in Star Maker. Here the 18th and last men are trapped in our solar system when final doom reaches out from the stars. Next -- Star Maker, which makes this book seem parochial.
Rating: 1
Summary: Ouch.
Comment: "The First and Last Men" has been praised for "containing enough material for hundreds of conventional science-fiction stories". I only wish there were at least one--conventional or other--science-fiction story in it. For this is a novel with no plot and no characters. We might call it a fictional history, but a history of England, for example, has largely to do with kings and queens and Cromwells--characters--, as a history of physics has largely to do with Newton, Einstein, and Bohr--characters. To a certain extent, the early part of the book tries to make up for this lack by
anthropomorphizing nations--nations behave as if they were persons. (Of course, you can get away with saying anything you like about nations this way, zzzzzzzzzzz.)
Wherefore no characters? It appears that this novel espouses an extreme form of anti-individualism, such that it seems to me a sort of reductio ad absurdum inadvertent argument in FAVOR of individualism. (By the bye, the novel itself calls capitalist exploitation of the masses "individualism", whereas I call
capitalist exploitation of the masses "corporate collectivism", rather the opposite.)
"The First and Last Men" was originally published in 1930 (or 1931; I can't remember), but its fictional history starts immediately after World War I, which is to say, the first part of its fictional history ought NOT to be fictional. The extent to which it misreads its own time is surprising and mystifying. Compare it to Hermann Hesse's "Steppenwolf", which accurately predicts the rise of Nazi-ism and a second world war, and was originally published in the mid-1920's. For that matter, compare it to Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", which was originally published in 1932 and remains very much on target.
In short, it seems to me, judged by any reasonable standard, this novel is simply awful. I'm guessing it has avoided excoriation only because it is fairly obscure. Read Stanislaw Lem instead.
 |
Title: Star Maker (SF Masterworks) by Olaf Stapledon, William Olaf Stapledon ISBN: 1857988078 Publisher: Orion Publishing Group Pub. Date: 1999 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
