Last and First Men

Olaf Stapledon’s future history sweeps across two billion years, tracing the rise and fall of eighteen successive human species from our own troubled century to the last men living under a dying sun. There are no ordinary heroes here and little conventional plot. Instead Stapledon narrates the fate of whole civilisations, their philosophies, their triumphs and extinctions, in the calm voice of a chronicler looking back from the far future. Written in 1930, the book expanded the scale on which science fiction could think, imagining evolution, catastrophe, and cosmic loneliness on a scale few had attempted. Its influence runs through Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, and much of the genre that followed. Strange, austere, and unexpectedly moving, it reads like a scripture for the deep future. This free PDF and EPUB edition presents the complete novel.