Last and First Men & Star Maker

Fülszöveg

The late British philosopher W. Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) has
long been regarded as one of the major figures in modern science
fiction. His novel Odd John is the definitive fictionalization of the
mutated superman; Sirius is the type-story for an alien intelligence
forced to live in a human civilization; and his two great novels
Last and First Men and Star Maker are generally considered the
finest future histories ever written, the gauge by which all earlier
and later works are measured.
In Last and First Men the protagonist is "mankind" in an ultimate
definition—human intelligence. Through the ages mankind evolves,
rising on occasion to pinnacles of civilization, facing extinction at
the next moment through inner weaknesses, surviving onslaughts
from other planets, overcoming the waning of solar energy, devel-
oping new appearances, new senses, and new intellectual abilities.
At times in the future (as with the Seventeenth Men who live on
Neptune billions of years... Tovább

Fülszöveg

The late British philosopher W. Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) has
long been regarded as one of the major figures in modern science
fiction. His novel Odd John is the definitive fictionalization of the
mutated superman; Sirius is the type-story for an alien intelligence
forced to live in a human civilization; and his two great novels
Last and First Men and Star Maker are generally considered the
finest future histories ever written, the gauge by which all earlier
and later works are measured.
In Last and First Men the protagonist is "mankind" in an ultimate
definition—human intelligence. Through the ages mankind evolves,
rising on occasion to pinnacles of civilization, facing extinction at
the next moment through inner weaknesses, surviving onslaughts
from other planets, overcoming the waning of solar energy, devel-
oping new appearances, new senses, and new intellectual abilities.
At times in the future (as with the Seventeenth Men who live on
Neptune billions of years from now) mankind would not seem en-
tirely human to us, but the common factors of descent and intelli-
gence are there. From the present to five billion years in the future
this romance of mankind extends, filled with the material for a
hundred more conventional novels.
S{ar Maker is in a sense a sequel to Last and First Men. Concerned
with the history of intelligence in the entire cosmos, it describes
the many strange mankinds that have arisen: nautiloid water beings,
symbiotic races of hyperspiders and hyperfish, composite group in-
telligences, and plantlike beings, among others. The narrator, a
contemporary Earthman, eventually joins a community of cosmic
explorers who range among the multiple intelligences of past and
future, to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, seeking for traces of
Intelligence itself. Stars are born and die; forms of life emerge,
mature, manipulate their environments in quasar-like experiments,
and perish; and eventually the Supreme Moment is reached.
Profound in thought, incredibly imaginative, often prophetic in
matters of the near future, these two novels are not only classics
of science fiction; they are almost unique works that have had con-
siderable importance in such varied fields as modern literature,
social anthropology, and philosophy.
Unabridged republication, vi -f 438pp. 5*/s x SV2. Paperbound. Vissza