Last and First Men

Where I heard about it

• Brendan McCord — on his Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List (March 2026), in the Literature and Societal Critique section between Ellison, Wolfe and Asimov — the section reads fiction as social criticism, and Stapledon is its longest lens, asking what any present arrangement looks like at the scale of species rather than of a career. It is marked with a ☑️ on the list, which gives no legend for the mark. The full list is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.
• On Patrick Collison’s Bookshelf — Patrick Collison’s catalog of the physical books he owns (unflagged). Saved in Kyle’s April 19th, 2020 Roam daily note.

About this edition

There are no characters to speak of; the narrator is a Last Man of the eighteenth species reaching back into the mind of a 1930 Englishman. Civilisations rise, exhaust their energy sources, engineer or devolve into new forms, migrate to Venus and then Neptune, and are finally extinguished by the sun. Stapledon, a philosopher by training, anticipated genetic engineering, terraforming, group minds and the deep-time perspective; individual triumphs and catastrophes are recorded in a sentence and then passed. Arthur C. Clarke and Doris Lessing both named it as the book that changed how they wrote.

Connections

• Science Fiction — the genre this book substantially shaped.
• Progress — the idea the chronicle repeatedly builds and then dismantles.
• Evolution — the mechanism driving the eighteen species.
• Utopia — the several the book constructs and then ends.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.