Geoffrey Miller’s foreword · Opening of the novel
Foreword
Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
Geoffrey Miller
You are about to read an extraordinary book by a singular genius. It describes the evolution of eighteen successive species of humans, living on Earth, then Venus, then Neptune, over the next two billion years. This vision of humanity’s cosmic potential has never been surpassed.
When Last and First Men was published in 1930, critics were awed by the scope of its imagination. Hugh Walpole called it “as original as the solar system.” Arnold Bennett noted its “tremendous and beautiful imagination.” Winston Churchill was deeply inspired by the book, and in 1931 published a futuristic essay, “Fifty Years Hence,” summarizing the book’s cosmic themes.
This book inspired generations of science fiction authors. H. G. Wells praised its vast imaginative scope. H. P. Lovecraft said “no one ought to miss reading [it].” Arthur C. Clarke, who first read the novel at age twelve, said, “No book before or since has ever had such an impact upon my imagination.” Science fiction author and Nobel laureate Doris Lessing wrote, “There has been no writer remotely like Stapledon, and there is no one like him now.” Physicist and science fiction author Gregory Benford praised its “sweeping beauty and moral resonance.” Hard science fiction author Stephen Baxter wrote that “this book is full of concepts mined by later generations of thinkers.” Finally, C. S. Lewis praised Stapledon as a “corking good writer,” but was so disturbed by the themes of Last and First Men that he wrote his Cosmic Trilogy as a Christian rebuttal to Stapledon’s Darwinian atheism.
Stapledon also influenced Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, Jorge Luis Borges, Stanisław Lem, Vernor Vinge, Bruce Sterling, and the Culture novels by my own favorite author, Iain M. Banks.
Last and First Men also inspired generations of scientists, such as astronomers Freeman Dyson and Patrick Moore, and biologists J. B. S. Haldane and John Maynard Smith. Dyson often said that his “Dyson spheres”—hypothetical megastructures that completely surround a star to capture its entire energy output—should properly be called “Stapledon spheres,” since they were first described in Stapledon’s book Star Maker in 1937, long before Dyson proposed them in 1960.
Indeed, my own Stapledon journey began in the early 1990s, when I was a postdoc at the University of Sussex, doing research on evolutionary psychology and artificial intelligence. One of my mentors there was the pioneer of evolutionary game theory, John Maynard Smith, who recommended Last and First Men as the book that inspired him to become a scientist. I first read it in 1993 and was blown away; I have since reread it repeatedly over the decades. I had studied evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology at Columbia and Stanford, and I’d spent years thinking about human mental evolution across millions of years in the past. But I had never before encountered such a grand vision of human evolution across billions of years in the future.
Last and First Men was full of ideas ahead of its time. Stapledon wrote about atomic weapons—first anticipated by H. G. Wells in his 1914 novel The World Set Free with the idea of uranium grenades, but before Leo Szilard realized in 1932 that neutron-induced chain reactions could work. He wrote about humanity terraforming Venus and Neptune to become more suitable to human life through planetary-scale chemical agents and colossal engineering projects, and through shifting the orbits of planets to keep them in the “habitable zone” for life. He wrote about the cognitive and moral enhancement of humanity through selective breeding and genetic manipulation—including the development of superintelligent giant brains (the “Fourth Men”), forty feet across, housed in great masonry towers with mechanical life-support systems. He anticipated the notion of “engineered panspermia,” using solar-powered space seeds to deliberately spread life throughout the galaxy—an idea proposed by Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel in 1973. Indeed, the central conceit of the whole book—telepathic communication from a benevolent distant-future human to a present-day “receiver,” to safeguard human development—anticipated the key idea in the Christopher Nolan movie Interstellar (2014). And the central hope of the book—that far-future humanity could achieve a godlike superintelligence that allows the retroactive resurrection and salvation of all previous lives, anticipated the Omega Point theory of physicist Frank Tipler in his 1994 book The Physics of Immortality.
Yet, despite his profound impact throughout the twentieth century, Stapledon today is almost forgotten.
One problem is that Stapledon’s two epic masterpieces—Last and First Men and Star Maker—are almost unfilmable. Through movie adaptations of Frankenstein, The War of the Worlds, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and Dune, people learned of science fiction classics by Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, and Frank Herbert. No such luck for Stapledon. His two epics are books of fiction, but they aren’t novels in any traditional sense. They don’t have main characters, dialogue, or personal conflicts. There is neither a “character arc” nor hero’s journey in Last and First Men, in which an individual protagonist learns, grows, and conquers—or falls through tragedy or disillusionment. The only real “character” here is the unnamed narrator from the Eighteenth Men who telepathically transmits the whole story back in time to the 1920s author figure, serving merely as a passive conduit. Instead, the main protagonist is humanity itself as a biological lineage, persisting through many cycles of progress and retreat, evolution and devolution, and peaks and troughs across many ages and epochs. The main “inner conflict” for this humanity-as-protagonist is the tension between individual-level passions for survival, status, sex, beauty, and meaning, versus the group-level passions for social connection, planetary harmony, and galactic awareness.
The one attempt to film Last and First Men—an obscure 2020 art house film by the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson—is the exception that proves the rule. It makes no attempt to cover the whole sweep of the book. Rather, it condenses the book’s last few chapters to a lugubrious, poignant monologue read by actress Tilda Swinton, focused on the Eighteenth Men facing their extinction with calm, detached melancholy. The only visuals are haunting, grainy, black-and-white images of the “Spomeniks,” abstract brutalist monuments in former Yugoslavia honoring those killed in World War II. It is, let’s just say, difficult viewing. We live in an era of viewers, not readers—and when viewers are hooked on superhero movies, streaming video, and social media, unfilmable books languish. My aim in this foreword is to entice younger readers to rediscover Stapledon’s distinctive vision through actually reading his work.
A second problem that limited the long-term impact of Last and First Men was its wildly experimental structure and style. It was not a novel, but a work of celestial philosophical fiction. Science fiction author Brian Aldiss interpreted Stapledon’s work as “ontological epic prose poems.” Stapledon himself called it “an essay in myth creation.” Critics have caricatured its style as cold, clinical, dry, pedantic, tedious, and textbook-like. Admirers would describe its style as precise, pensive, patient, dispassionate, scientific, wise, serene, and enlightened. The book’s pacing is wildly uneven, some pages covering only a few weeks, some paragraphs hundreds of millions of years. The beauty of its prose is also uneven, with long, dry paragraphs punctuated by startling flashes of dark beauty and wondrous insight. Reading it is like hiking along a dry riverbed, then looking down and realizing that the surface is rich with jasper, garnet, sapphires, and jade.
The novelty of the book’s literary form is congruent with the experiments in style, tone, plot, and structure by many early twentieth-century modernist writers. Yes, Last and First Men seems weird compared to most recent science fiction novels. But it’s not that weird compared to other avant-garde works of its era, such as Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts (1904–1908), Anatole France’s Penguin Island (1908), May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier (1919), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), or Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927)—all of which directly influenced Stapledon. The 1920s was an era of cutting-edge literary courage, but Stapledon’s macrocosmic mythmaking has rarely received as much attention as the microcosmic, psychoanalytic, stream-of-consciousness prose found in Joyce, Woolf, William Faulkner, or Gertrude Stein.
So, who was this guy?
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) was born into a wealthy English shipping family based near Liverpool. In the late 1800s, Liverpool was one of the most important maritime centers in the world, handling about 40 percent of all global shipping trade. Olaf’s grandfather, William Stapledon, a master mariner, took advantage of the new Suez Canal opening in 1869 to build a successful shipping agency in Egypt, handling the vast exports of British manufactured goods to Asia and Australia. Olaf’s father took over as manager of the firm, so Olaf spent his first six years being raised in Port Said, Egypt, before his family moved back near Liverpool.
Olaf received his BA in modern history at Oxford University in 1909, taught at Manchester Grammar School, worked as a clerk in his family’s shipping offices, and joined the Workers’ Educational Association, tutoring working-class adults in history, literature, and philosophy. The First World War (1914–1918) interrupted his idealistic educational activism. Olaf loathed the idea of killing, but felt obligated to “share in the common agony” of his generation’s defining conflict. So, as a conscientious objector, he worked as an ambulance driver on the Western Front from 1915 to 1919. For four years, he drove screaming, terrified, severely injured French soldiers from the front lines back to field hospitals, along muddy roads under heavy artillery fire. He was awarded the French Croix de Guerre for bravery in saving many young men, at great risk to himself, from the industrialized slaughter of trench warfare. His lifelong devotion to pacifism, socialism, and world government were inspired by seeing, day after day, month after month, the gruesome human costs of tribalistic bloodlust and hyper-nationalism. He was not a sentimental softie or a resentful Marxist. He just wanted humans to get along. For Olaf, there were only two futures open to humanity: militant nationalism that leads to extinction, or global coordination that leads to survival.
After the war, Olaf married his Australian cousin Agnes Zena Miller, moved near Liverpool on England’s northwest coast, and had two kids. He got his PhD in philosophy in 1925 at the University of Liverpool, where his “modern theory of ethics” was shaped by Spinoza, Hegel, Nietzsche, Darwin, Galton, Whitehead, Freud, and Jung. His four central values were intelligence, creativity, beauty, and connection. His guiding star throughout life was the notion of “personality-in-community”—the full variety of distinctive human types, organized into peaceful, flourishing social groups that generate much more aesthetic, intellectual, and creative value than the sum of their parts.
Family wealth gave Olaf intellectual freedom. For centuries, bright young British men had been empowered by such wealth to pursue their ideas without worrying about academic tenure, research grants, book sales, or Substack subscribers. These fortunate geniuses included Francis Bacon, Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, Aldous Huxley—and Olaf Stapledon himself. In each case, they could have squandered their talents in lives of sloth and luxury, but they felt compelled by a higher calling—to become what we would today call “public intellectuals,” fully engaged in the cerebral and ethical struggles of the day.
Naturally a bit awkward, shy, and earnest, this role of public intellectual did not come easily to Olaf. Today, he might be considered on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. But, as with so many bright Aspies throughout history, his distinctive vision, his longing for social validation, and his quest for public impact, led him to doggedly cultivate his skills in writing, public speaking, and political activism.
So, when Olaf was writing Last and First Men in the late 1920s, he was in his early forties. He’d already been married for a decade, and his two kids, Mary and John, were already intelligent and curious readers.
It’s worth noting a few bits of intellectual context to appreciate how voraciously Stapledon incorporated the scientific ideas of his era. When Last and First Men was published in 1930, it incorporated many innovations—radio transmissions, radioactivity, Mendelian genetics, and airplanes—that were only about thirty years old. Such things were younger to Stapledon than the internet is to us. The book was also shaped by Max Planck’s quantum theory (1900), Alfred Wegener’s continental drift theory (1912), Ernest Rutherford’s atomic model (1911), and Einstein’s general relativity theory (1915).
Stapledon’s planetary astronomy was fairly up-to-date. The action in Last and First Men happens mostly on Earth, Venus, and Neptune, with some influence from Mars. Astronomers in the 1920s viewed Venus as a steamy, tropical swamp planet, resembling the Earth’s Carboniferous period. When describing the Fifth through Ninth Men living on Venus for five hundred million years, Stapledon partly echoed this scientific consensus, except that he described a Venus with a huge shallow global ocean, little land, colossal storms, and some intelligent life-forms, such as the aquatic, telepathic, swordfish-like “Venerians,” whose deeply spiritual culture centered around synchronized swimming and communal music. Conversely, astronomers in the 1920s viewed Mars as a cold, dying desert world, with a thin atmosphere and possible signs of primitive vegetation due to seasonal changes in color—but they had already rejected Percival Lowell’s idea of Martian “canals” that inspired the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels set on Mars. Thus, Stapledon’s idea that Mars might host intelligent, collective, cloudlike organisms composed of trillions of microscopic “vital units,” communicating through telepathic radio waves, was far ahead of its time, but reasonably plausible, given the science of the day. As for Neptune, it had been discovered in 1846, but it appeared as a tiny, featureless, blue-green disc; astronomers of the 1920s knew its size, mass, temperature, orbit, and rotational period, but had few other details. When Stapledon described the Tenth through Eighteenth Men living on Neptune for a billion years, he knew that it had about seventeen times the mass of Earth, so he emphasized the evolutionary challenges of its crushing gravity.
Radio-based telepathy used to create group “hive minds” was a major theme in Last and First Men. Stapledon’s notion of telepathy was built upon the late-Victorian enthusiasm for “psychical research,” and upon the inventions of the telegraph (1837) and radio (1896). On Neptune, the Last Men form polyamorous, sexually intertwined groups connected by radio-telepathy, yielding emergent collective intelligences far beyond their individual minds. These “telepathic polycules” in turn combine together to form a kind of species-level meta-polycule—a “racial mind”—involving a trillion humans linked into a transcendent global Mind. Such ideas may appear quaint and bizarre to modern readers. But consider this: Out of Earth’s eight-plus billion people, roughly six billion now use smartphones. We can communicate with anyone else on the planet, through text, voice, and video, carried by radio waves (5G cellular networks, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth). Billions of humans participate in global hive minds such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, WeChat, and X. Hundreds of millions coordinate their sexual connections through dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Badoo, Happn, Momo, Baihe, and Tantan. Perhaps our radio-telepathy species-level meta-polycule is not so far away, after all.
The notion of “deep time”—the earth being millions of years old—had dated back to Charles Lyell in 1830 and Lord Kelvin in 1862. Yet it was only in 1913 that Arthur Holmes used uranium decay to show that the earth was at least 1.6 billion years old, an estimate he updated in 1927 to three billion years old. Edwin Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe in 1929, and estimated its age to be two billion years old. Thus, Stapledon’s book envisions about as much time into the future as scientists of the 1920s thought the Earth had existed in the past. (Later, the estimated age of the universe got longer: six billion years in the 1950s, 13.8 billion years by the 2020s.)
Similarly, the notion of biological evolution over many generations had been around since the 1700s, but it wasn’t until about several decades before Stapledon that Charles Darwin published on evolution by natural selection (1859) and sexual selection (1871), or Francis Galton published on hereditary genius and eugenics (1869), or Gregor Mendel’s work on genetics was rediscovered (in 1900). Some of the key fossil evidence for human evolution was only discovered in the 1920s: “Rhodesian Man” (1921), the “Taung Child” (1924), and “Peking Man” (1927). Such discoveries led Sir Arthur Keith in 1925 to propose that modern humans go back at least 200,000 years. The “Modern Synthesis” of Darwinian selection and Mendelian genetics was just coming to fruition around 1930, inspired by mathematical work by R. A. Fisher, Sewall Wright, and Stapledon’s close friend J. B. S. Haldane. Last and First Men was written before the notion of “genetic engineering” was proposed in 1934, and long before Watson and Crick discovered the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953. Yet the idea of humanity consciously and deliberately shaping its own genetic evolution pervades this whole book.
Modern readers in our Age of AI might find it odd that Stapledon kept his focus firmly on human biological evolution and didn’t write about superintelligent machines. Granted, Charles Babbage developed his Analytical Engine in the 1830s, Samuel Butler wrote about Darwinian evolution applied to intelligent machines in his novel Erewhon (1872), and Karel Čapek invented the term “robot” in 1920. But Alan Turing didn’t publish his key work “On Computable Numbers” until 1936, and didn’t propose the Imitation Game (a.k.a. the Turing Test) until 1950. The concept of artificial intelligence was promoted only in 1956. Stapledon’s vision of the future was a deeply human vision—even when our descendants were transforming themselves into giant sessile brains on Earth, or flying men on Venus, or telepathic hive minds on Neptune. Our future intelligence remains based in organic brains, not in GPUs. In this regard, Stapledon’s future-of-humanity is fiercely human, much like Frank Herbert’s in Dune—although in the former, AI wasn’t yet envisioned, and in the latter, it was religiously prohibited after the “Butlerian Jihad” that proclaimed, “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
Whether the future will be centered around humanity, or dominated by AI, is the central existential issue of our age. The Bay Area “transhumanists” and “effective accelerationists” welcome a “post-Singularity” future run by Artificial Superintelligences. In their future, our biological descendants either become extinct within a few decades, or are kept around as amusing curiosities, indulged in a “Fully Automated Luxury Communist Utopia” based on “Universal Generous Income.” By contrast, many humanists, pronatalists, bio-conservatives, and AI safety experts view AI as the main extinction risk that humans face, and would like our kids not to be killed off by AI slaughterbots, or kept as pacified and powerless as zoo animals.
Back when I read Last and First Men in the early 1990s, this tension between a human future and an AI future wasn’t just an abstract thought experiment. It was a personal and professional quandary. I had been researching human psychology for a decade, and had written my dissertation on the evolutionary origins and adaptive functions of the human mind. But for my postdoc, I was funded to apply machine learning techniques—genetic algorithms and neural networks—to develop autonomous robots. I faced a stark career choice: become an AI researcher trying to develop machines that could replace us, or an evolutionary psychologist trying to understand the human mind and promote a future in which humans can thrive. Reading Stapledon nudged me back onto the human path.
Darwinians like me come to understand that our current generation is a very small link in a very long chain of ancestry, and that we owe everything to the blood, sweat, and tears of billions of ancestors who succeeded in surviving, mating, and parenting over thousands of generations. But we often fail to project that Darwinian perspective into the deep future. Stapledon gave me that perspective. He foresaw a future in which humanity endures, and often thrives for millions of years in near-utopian bliss, beauty, camaraderie, and wisdom. He envisioned humanity leaving the most wonderful legacy that any mere mortals could create—a species-level triumph that is “eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things.” He taught me “loyalty to the forces of life, embattled against death.”
Shortly after reading Last and First Men, I wrote the proposal for what would become my own first book, The Mating Mind. I distanced myself from the seductive hubris of AI, and applied for jobs in human psychology. Soon after, I had my first child . . . which is the most authentic vote for a human future that anyone can make.
I trust that reading this extraordinary book will help you rediscover some optimism that our future can remain ours.
Dr. Geoffrey Miller is an evolutionary psychologist and the author of The Mating Mind, Mating Intelligence, Spent, Mate, and Virtue Signaling. He is an associate professor at the University of New Mexico, and his research has been featured in Nature, Science, and The Economist, as well as in documentaries on Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel, and the BBC.
Foreword © 2026 Geoffrey Miller.
Chapter I — Balkan Europe
1. The European War and After
Observe now your own epoch of history as it appears to the Last Men.
Long before the human spirit awoke to clear cognizance of the world and itself, it sometimes stirred in its sleep, opened bewildered eyes, and slept again. One of these moments of precocious experience embraces the whole struggle of the First Men from savagery toward civilization. Within that moment, you stand almost in the very instant when the species attains its zenith. Scarcely at all beyond your own day is this early culture to be seen progressing, and already in your time the mentality of the race shows signs of decline.
The first, and some would say the greatest, achievement of your own “Western” culture was the conceiving of two ideals of conduct, both essential to the spirit’s wellbeing. Socrates, delighting in the truth for its own sake and not merely for practical ends, glorified unbiased thinking, honesty of mind and speech. Jesus, delighting in the actual human persons around him, and in that flavour of divinity which, for him, pervaded the world, stood for unselfish love of neighbours and of God. Socrates woke to the ideal of dispassionate intelligence, Jesus to the ideal of passionate yet self-oblivious worship. Socrates urged intellectual integrity, Jesus integrity of will. Each, of course, though starting with a different emphasis, involved the other.
Unfortunately both these ideals demanded of the human brain a degree of vitality and coherence of which the nervous system of the First Men was never really capable. For many centuries these twin stars enticed the more precociously human of human animals, in vain. And the failure to put these ideals in practice helped to engender in the race a cynical lassitude which was one cause of its decay.
There were other causes. The peoples from whom sprang Socrates and Jesus were also among the first to conceive admiration for Fate. In Greek tragic art and Hebrew worship of divine law, as also in the Indian resignation, man experienced, at first very obscurely, that vision of an alien and supernal beauty, which was to exalt and perplex him again and again throughout his whole career. The conflict between this worship and the intransigent loyalty to Life, embattled against Death, proved insoluble. And though few individuals were ever clearly conscious of the issue, the first human species was again and again unwittingly hampered in its spiritual development by this supreme perplexity.
While man was being whipped and enticed by these precocious experiences, the actual social constitution of his world kept changing so rapidly through increased mastery over physical energy, that his primitive nature could no longer cope with the complexity of his environment. Animals that were fashioned for hunting and fighting in the wild were suddenly called upon to be citizens, and moreover citizens of a world-community. At the same time they found themselves possessed of certain very dangerous powers which their petty minds were not fit to use. Man struggled; but, as you shall hear, he broke under the strain.
The European War, called at the time the War to End War, was the first and least destructive of those world conflicts which display so tragically the incompetence of the First Men to control their own nature. At the outset a tangle of motives, some honourable and some disreputable, ignited a conflict for which both antagonists were all too well prepared, though neither seriously intended it. A real difference of temperament between Latin France and Nordic Germany combined with a superficial rivalry between Germany and England, and a number of stupidly brutal gestures on the part of the German Government and military command, to divide the world into two camps; yet in such a manner that it is impossible to find any difference of principle between them. During the struggle each party was convinced that it alone stood for civilization. But in fact both succumbed now and again to impulses of sheer brutality, and both achieved acts not merely of heroism, but of generosity unusual among the First Men. For conduct which to clearer minds seems merely sane, was in those days to be performed only by rare vision and self-mastery.
As the months of agony advanced, there was bred in the warring peoples a genuine and even passionate will for peace and a united world. Out of the conflict of the tribes arose, at least for a while, a spirit loftier than tribalism. But this fervour lacked as yet clear guidance, lacked even the courage of conviction. The peace which followed the European War is one of the most significant moments of ancient history; for it epitomizes both the dawning vision and the incurable blindness, both the impulse toward a higher loyalty and the compulsive tribalism of a race which was, after all, but superficially human.