I've just started reading Olaf Stapledon's
Last and First Men, originally published in 1930.
Last and First Men is a unique entry in the library of science fiction, in that for the most part it's without characters or any sort of a plot, and as such it's not really a novel at all.
Then what is it?
Last and First Men is a history of humanity, told from the perspective of the incredibly evolved denizens 2,000,000,000 years in the future. As with actual history, it is episodic, full of tragedy and accomplishment, marked by great leaders, compassionate humanitarians, and brutal villains. Unlike actual history, Stapledon's version is punctuated by alien invasions, evolutionary alterations, and the eventual entropic death of our species, altered almost beyond description by millennia of evolutionary change.
I'm currently reading the section dealing with the very near future, circa 2030, where Stapledon offers the following description of the United States a hundred years into his own future:
In the Far West, the United States of America openly claimed to be
custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and envied, universally
respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised,
the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man's existence. By
this time every human being throughout the planet made use of American
products, and there was no region where American capital did not support local
labour. Moreover the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph and
televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought.
Thus it was that America
sank further and further into Americanism. Vast wealth and industry, and also
brilliant invention, were concentrated upon puerile ends. In particular the
whole of American life was organized around the cult of the powerful
individual, that phantom ideal which Europe herself had only begun to outgrow
in her last phase.
Those Americans who wholly failed to realize this ideal, who
remained at the bottom of the social ladder, either consoled themselves with
hopes for the future, or stole symbolical satisfaction by identifying
themselves with some popular star, or gloated upon their American citizenship,
and applauded the arrogant foreign policy of their government. Those who
achieved power were satisfied so long as they could merely retain it, and
advertise it uncritically in the conventionally self-assertive manners.
Is it just me, or is the Internet the only thing missing from that description?
