Frankly, there’s always something more immediately interesting to read. I haven’t given up, because I’m (a) hopeful of eventual payoff (b) on a promise to a friend. But it’ll probably take a long plane journey …

Well, the First Men have finally fallen, and the book has become more interesting as it has moved out of (what is now) alternate history and into more speculative areas. You have to admire Stapledon for attempting to tackle the social implications of technological change – more Wells than Gernsback.

As with the earlier geopolitical “predictions”, Stapledon’s sociology gets eeriely close to the truth in places – albeit that the timescale is vastly overstretched. Among the more obvious parallels, I picked up beats on such “modern” phenomena as time-poverty and racial tokenism; but elsewhere there is a distinctly Thirties feel: an almost mystical emphasis on atomic power and aviation, plus some slightly unnerving between-wars thoughts on racial “weakness”.

Still, it’s getting better. Next we move on to the Second Men, and outright speculation. Interesting.

I thought this might be too much like hard work to read while I was on holiday, so I hadn’t picked it up for nearly a month until this week. I’m not particularly glad I did. More faux future history, this time of the conflict between America and China, that’s as tediously pedagogical as the preceding chapters on Europe. Again, it’s not so much that Stapledon’s not dealing with occasionally interesting ideas; it’s just that it reads like his research notes, rather than a novel.

But I should have been careful what I wished for: this guff abruptly gives way to an excruciating section in which representatives of the two nations meet on a desert island, only for their negotiations to be interrupted by a mysterious naked woman who stiffens their, er, resolve to, um, hold firm rather than truly co-operate. (If you think these innuendoes embarrassingly juvenile, you should try reading the book).

Exactly what Stapledon is playing at here is a mystery to me. The leap from an encyclopedia entry to poor man’s magical realism is jarring to say the least. The Daughter of Man is a clearly mythical (or allegorical) element that sits uneasily with the detailed pseudohistory which both precedes and follows her introduction. Perhaps it will make more sense later …

Gregory Benford, who wrote the introduction to my edition of LaFM, recommends skipping the first few chapters. I’ve ignored this advice, since it seems like cheating. I’m not sure if he was right, yet, but there have been some interesting resonances, though: the rise of fascism in Italy (but not Germany); China versus America; entire cities devastated by weapons of mass destruction. I wonder:

— Was Stapledon a genuinely skilled extrapolator?
— Am I projecting significance into his “hits”, which are inevitably outnumbered by “misses”?
— Or were some of the features of contemporary geopolitics more apparent back in 1930 than I realise?

In any case, I have to say this chapter has proved remarkably effective at getting me off to sleep at night. It’s like reading the backstory for an alternate-history novel, rather than the novel itself. And Stapledon’s casting of historical development in terms of (supposed) national characteristics has the potential to become more than mildly irritating if he keeps it up.

LaFM confirmed my memory/preconception of an obsession with scale almost immediately, as the narrator (the conceit being that the book is written through Stapledon by one of the Last Men) sets out a stern exposition on just how incomprehensible the size of his story will be. Which immediately put me in mind of Douglas Adams’ parodic version:

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

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.

Some interesting ideas, and a strong style, but flawed.

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