Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men has always struck me as being to science fiction what Lord of the Rings is to fantasy – the genre-defining ur-text that sets the ground rules for a generation of future writers. That impression is given some weight by Stapledon’s description of LaFM as an exercise in myth creation, rather than fiction – a description that obviously mirrors Tolkein’s approach. And just as LoTR takes equal credit and blame for the subsequent development of the fantasy genre, so LaFM should for science fiction.

In that respect, I think of LaFM as the progenitor of a kind of scifi that I haven’t really been interested in for a decade or more – the kind of grandiose, didactic work that aims to browbeat the reader into submission through scale, rather than subtlety. After a point, all those cosmological extrapolations seem pointless: once you’ve accepted the concept of unimaginable reaches of space and time, there’s comparatively little point reading randomly speculative variations on the theme. (The emergence of the Dangerous Visions and cyberpunk sets suggests that I’m not alone in that).

Still, it’s anotherbook that represents unfinished business from my childhood. I read it as a preteen, and don’t remember being particularly impressed by it. But one of my friends swears by it: so perhaps I was just too young to appreciate its virtues at the time. Perhaps it’ll be interesting to see where all that cosmic fiction started out; maybe it’ll be a good book in it’s own right. Anyway, I’m going to divert from my usual format for this, and post rolling notes as I go along. Mainly in case I never make it to the end.