The best word I can think of to describe Last and First Men is "intriguing". It is a "future history", a book -- written in 1930 -- that imagines the upcoming two billion years of man's development. It contains many fascinating ideas, along with a fair amount of silly fantasy. In broad strokes, Stapledon foresees humanity as forever moving through eras of rising from savagery, building civilizations of various stripe, only to eventually descend yet again, either through folly or mishap. It is essentially a manifestation of Stapledon's personal cosmology. As such, it's hard to call it an artistic work, it is more a work arm-chair philosophy, although a very accomplished one.
We start out roughly in 1930, just after WW1 and naturally we are treated to all the socio-political credences of the time -- that value of the League of Nations, for example -- including a fairly poor image of the United States, which eventually destroys Europe via chemical warfare, leaving the US and China to effectively divide the world. So maybe right for the wrong reasons. In time the First Men -- that's us, Homo Sapiens -- achieves a single world government, heavily religious, and in time destroys the world through something along the lines of an uncontrolled nuclear reaction, leaving mere remnants which descend into barbarism. What follows is the evolution of the species through various forms, seventeen more incarnations in all, the 18th being the Last Men. After 10 million years the Second Men emerge -- a new species. They build a great civilization which perishes in a seemingly endless mutually destructive war with Martians. The Third Men are experts at biological manipulation and end up creating Fourth Men, the species that eventually replaces them. Earth becomes uninhabitable for the Fifth Men so they must terraform Venus and wipe out an pre-existing sentient species there for their own survival. The Eighth Men face destruction as the Sun expands and thus create the Ninth Men, specifically designed to inhabit the planet Neptune, which will be in the habitable zone of the expanded Sun. Starting over from scratch, the Neptunians evolve through a number of species, gaining a hive mind capability and eventually the ability to send their consciousness back through time to earlier men. By the time they hit the 18th species, they are as close to perfect as can be imagined, containing the best of all that came before them. And still they are to be destroyed in an astronomical cataclysm. They manage to send viral seed out into the galaxy before they are destroyed and the End of Man finally comes after two billion years.
Whew. As I read that, it sounds awfully trite, but it's not. It's really a springboard for observations about the nature of humanity. When species come into conflict it is often for reasons of class or narcissism. Aesthetic sensibilities and art persist in almost every species in some form or other, as does spirituality and prophetry, often intermingling. We find species suffering from collective guilt, which is not surprising for an author for whom WW1 is a recent affair. Sexuality remains and gets weird, and if you know anything about sexuality in the 1930s, that won't surprise you either. The Fifth Men are so thoroughly automated that their lives consist mostly of leisure (sound familiar?) bring a whole new raft of issues. Collective consciousness is explored as is atomic energy. Stapledon's take on human nature persists to the very end.
Still it is limited in ways. There are virtually no individuals and so no character arcs; I suppose you could say it is a biography of man so there is the arc of humanity. And like all science fiction, it cannot separate itself entirely from the concerns of the day in the time of the author's life. Still Stapledon does better than most at that. Even without individuals the book is humanistic.
A greater shortcoming is that Stapledon does go on. I often say most books could be trimmed by 30% with no loss to the reader. In Last and First Men it's probably over 50%. Descriptions get overly involved and repetitive. He writes with good style, but often it feels like he's spewing content to no end. This may be part and parcel without having character arcs to provide constraints.
Should you read Last and First Men. Probably not. It is really only for folks who might like to dwell on the nature of humanity and hyman motivation. Compared to traditional fiction, it is a setting without a plot. It is too ambling to be philosophy, to broad to be hard sci-fi, and too fantastic to be predictive. Still, like I said, it is intriguing. Though I spent more time thinking about what to think of it, than of the content itself.
