A Last and First Book
Editor's note: The Following essay was written by Charles E. Stebbins, and is the winner of this year's "My Favorite Sci-Fi Story Essay Contest." Charles is the Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Postdoctoral Fellow at the Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine. His thoughtful essay about Olaf Stapeldon's Last and First Men was selected as the winner for its contents, which are very much in keeping with the spirit of Science Fiction and Society, and for its well-crafted language. We hope that you enjoy it as much as we did.
A First and Last Book
By far my most engaging, fulfilling, and lasting experience in fiction of any kind was my first reading of Olaf Stapeldon's Last and First Men. This is despite glaring shortcomings in the narrative, such as complete lack of character development, normal plot structure (or plot of any kind in all honesty), and several lapses where weak ideas mar an otherwise brilliant construction. Rising above the failings is an unmatched imaginary experience pregnant with ideas and a sense of cosmic time that to this day still dwarfs most fiction.
For those unfamiliar with the work, Last and First Men, written in the 1930s before the transistor, the atomic bomb, space travel, and the computer, is the story of a man who is contacted by a being from the distant future. This being is also our distant cousin, evolutionarily related to us but far more advanced. The book relates this entity's description of the history of mankind from "the collapse of our own primitive civilization" through the rise and fall of 18 different species of human kinds over an extraordinary scale of time and mentality. The purpose for this distant temporal communication is not like most sci-fi stories of historical alteration, but instead serves a more enigmatic purpose related to the nature of the advanced beings and the nature of our universe that is revealed as the story unfolds.
The story is thus much more a dynamic historical narrative than
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