Book Review by George Simmers: In my twelve years as a member of the Popular Fiction Reading Group, I have never yet given up on a book, though I nearly did after the first twenty pages of Last Men in London, which were truly awful. This first section essentially summarises Olaf Stapledon’s earlier book Last and First Men, and does so very unappetisingly. On one Kindle page I found not a single concrete noun – only abstractions parading self-importantly and clunkily. Olaf Stapledon is not a reader-friendly novelist.
Despite misgivings, I did carry on with the book, mostly because the chapter-headings suggested it would be giving an account of the Great War, a subject I am always interested in.
![Last Men in London (1932) by Olaf Stapledon Last Men in London (1932) by Olaf Stapledon](https://m5.paperblog.com/i/793/7937641/last-men-in-london-1932-by-olaf-stapledon-L-aXvAel.jpeg)
The book’s narrator is twenty-thousand years old, a giant with reptile eyes born on the planet Neptune; he is a new improved type of human, created by eugenics.
My parents were chosen for me. They had long been intimate with one another, but the call to have a child arose from the knowledge that there was need of such a being as they together could produce.
He is writing from millions of years in the future, when Neptune has been colonised by humans and is, it seems, a Socialist Utopia where everyone is engaged in intellectual research such as astronomy, physics or the study of human nature. Technology has long eliminated the need for manual labour, so there are no working classes now. The mercantile middle classes are also disposed of:
As for commerce, we have no such thing, because we have no buying and no selling. Both production and distribution are regulated by the organizers, working under the Supreme College of Unity. This is in no sense a governing body, since its work is purely advisory; but owing to our constant telepathic intercourse, its recommendations are always sane, and always persuasive.
So in this perfect future, nobody has much to do except think, and everyone thinks the same (Their opinions, being enlightened, are just those that clever people like Olaf Stapledon were beginning to think in the twentieth century.)
The narrator is a historian of a sort, investigating earlier stages in the evolution of the human race. He is especially interested in the humans of the early twentieth century, which he sees as a crucial time in the development of the Race. He is able to do his investigations because the Uranians have developed a kind of telepathy which enables him to enter the minds of people in the past. He is the ultimate omniscient narrator, since he not only knows what everyone is thinking, but with his Uranian superiority is constantly explaining why they are wrong, and how limited they are in comparison with him. We primitive humans are repulsive to the Neptunian sophisticates of a later age, not only for our primitive opinions and our unruly passions but also for our odour:
In the matter of personal beauty, too, the explorer is at first repelled by the grotesque caricature of humanity which among primitive species passes for perfection, much as you yourselves may be repelled by the too-human animality of apes.
Stapledon writes of a
mode of the primitive which is distinctive of your own species, a mode characterized by repressed sexuality, excessive self-regard, and an intelligence which is both rudimentary and in bondage to unruly cravings.
The telepathy allows the superior Uranian to occasionally give the primitive human a nudge that will point him in the direction the human race ought to go (which the poor things would be too stupid to consciously work out for themselves.). I’ve never read a book where the author condescends so much to his characters.
As I said, I nearly gave up on the book, until I realised that it was largely going to be about the First World War, and a few chapters in, the theme is introduced. The main twentieth-century human whose mind the narrator infiltrates is a young man, a trainee teacher called called Paul, and we first met him at a moment of crucial indecision; it is August 1914, and he is deciding whether or not to enlist in the army. This is a key moment because, the alien narrator tells us, “the European War, the War to End War… played [a] great… part in setting your species toward decline,”
Paul is conflicted. On the one hand, he does not enjoy his job as a teacher:
And how good to be out of all this fiasco of teaching. Anything was better than that. How good to surrender one’s conscience into the keeping of the army. That way surely lay peace of mind. Like surrendering your conscience to the Church. Give it to a general to look after.”
Yet because of the insights granted him by the Uranian lodger in his mind, he cannot believe in the war:
“Must he really help in their stupid war, their filthy, mad, backward-looking war, that was wrecking the civilization it was meant to save.”
The choice is made to be one between two different kinds of weakness:
Thus, he dared not enlist, lest his motive should be merely moral cowardice; he dared not refuse to enlist, lest his motive should be merely physical cowardice or moral pride. Whatever course he chose would almost certainly spring from purely selfish motives. In fact although the decision had indeed really been made long ago, he had ever since been chafing within his illusory cage of morality and selfishness, like a captive beast that rubs itself painfully against its bars without hope of escape.
There is no sense that in August 1914 a man might enlist for moral reasons. Reports of German atrocities are dismissed as things that ’in his heart he could not believe.’ (The all-wise ancient Neptunian’s opinion of the war just happens to coincide exactly with those held by the average bien-pensant left-winger of 1932, by which time reports of German misbehaviousr in Belgium were being minimised).
Having presented Paul in his moment of crisis and choice, Stapledon goes back to tell his previous life story up to that point, including early intimations of morality and early sexual experiences. Much is made of an incident when he had the chance to fondle a girl’s breast under her dress; the experience meant a lot to him. The narrator, by the way, coming from a more rational age, is not at all repressed sexually; he often leaves his study of humans to spend long ecstatic periods with a gigantic (and translucent) Uranian girlfriend, whom he calls The Panther. We are left to assume that she is very grateful for these intermittent attentions.
We also follow Paul’s interest in religion, inspired by a charismatic high Church priest. Paul’s biography coincides largely with that of Stapledon himself. But in the book, the outer-space narrator is there inside Paul’s head, nudging him towards correct perceptions. Stapledon himself, one assumes, had to manage on his own.
Finally Paul does engage in the war, not as a soldier, but, like Stapledon, as a member of the Friends’ Ambulance Unit. At last the book, despite Stapledon’s consistently clunky and and judgmental prose, becomes moderately interesting, because we are given an interesting view of the Corps as occupying an awkward place between the military on one hand and on the other the extreme pacifists who refused any kind of military service at all. Stapledon writes of
‘the heart-searching bewilderment of minds which could not find harmony either with the great mass of their warring fellows or with the more relentless pacifists.’Stapledon as a member of the Friends Ambulance Unit.
The horrors of war and the reactions of Paul are depicted closely, and the book gets near to being absorbing, except that the Uranian keeps up a moralising running commentary that is much less interesting than the events narrated. The War is seen as both a highly highly significant moment in human history, and as a disaster. With all the assurance of a non-combatant, Stapledon dismisses the puny efforts of the soldiers as unintelligent: ‘ “The strategy of your generals, for instance, has for us only the kind of interest which your own psychologists have found in watching apes baffled by the simplest problems of intelligence.”
After the war years, the book becomes really annoying, with huge generalisations about the post-war mentality of the Race, by which I think he means the human race, but it seems only to be a generalisation about Western Europe (I doubt if the feelings of disillusionment he describes were as common in Togoland or in Nepal.) Stapledon despairs of the stupidity of Europe’s post-was leaders, but he has a soft spot for Lenin ‘that man of stainless steel’,:
Little by little a new hope, a new pride, a new energy, spread among the Russian people. Little by little they fashioned for themselves a new community, such as had never before occurred on the planet. And because they allowed no one to hold power through riches, they became the horror of the Western World.
Mostly the war is recollected with a superior shudder that seems as aesthetic as anything: In London, the Neptunian says severely, Nurse Cavell’s monument proclaims: ‘her courage and her countrymen’s vulgarity’.
After the distraction of war, Paul is again plagued by sexual anxiety. He is still a virgin, despite the sexual laxness of the war years. He is now in a quandary; he does not want to commit his life to honourable marriage with a woman who would certainly be less intelligent than himself, but on the other hand he is disgusted by other options available to the promiscuous. Luckliy, the woman whose breast he had groped before the war, though now married to another, takes pity on his state of existential distress, and goes on a camping holiday with Paul for three weeks, with her husband’s permission. This satisfies Paul, and after it he seems to have no more sexual yearnings. Is this episode too based on Stapledon’s own life story? I’d like to know.
The Neptunian decides to make Paul aware that he has been the object of study by an alien intelligence, and that his mind has been interfered with. At one point the alien comes close to apologising for his methods: “the mental vivisection which I had to practice upon Paul may seem merely brutal.”
He gives Paul books to read – Dunne’s An Experiment with Time (A study of precognitive dreams, very fashionable in the twenties and thirties) and the Neptunian’s own manuscript Last and First Men. Paul works his way towards enlightenment, and occasionally writes very bad poems that the narrator takes very seriously:
Is man a disease
that the blood of a senile star
cannot resist?
And when the constellations regard us,
is it fear, disgust, horror,
(at a plague-stricken brother
derelict from beauty),
that stares yonder
so sharply?
Gas the stars are…..
Paul becomes a teacher again, and takes an interest in a student who may be the precursor of a future humanity. A chapter describes who the fore-runners are of the next stage of human progress: They are large-headed, unsocial, uncompetitive, unorthodox and hating conventional ideas; they sound very like a stereotype of the science fiction enthusiast. Stapledon’s 1932 readers might have felt flattered.
There is a brief rundown of the rest of Paul’s life, and then a sad coda about the end of the human race itself, when even Neptune is consumed by the sun. But there is a hint of hope in the project to send humanity out to other solar systems.
I can see the appeal this book might have had in 1932, with its wild speculations about humanity’s future; devotees of HG Wells might well have thought Stapledon was the next big thing. But I was deeply put off by the thinness of Stapledon’s depiction of humanity.
Stapledon’s future is a Utopian Socialist world of the worst kind. Children are planned by eugenics, and then brought up communally. There is no industry, because everything is automated. There is no commerce or competition. All those things that fulfill us as human beings – loving and bringing up children, finding satisfaction in the challenges of work, competing and collaborating with fellow-citizens to improve communities – all these have gone. All that is left for humans to do is to think abstractly and to have opinions. And they all converge on the same opinions. I have never read such a totalitarian book.
Stapledon gives us a set-piece where everyone in the world comes together and their Racial Mind unites in a common realisation of what they want:
If you had watched us for long enough, you would have noticed, after some hours of stillness, a shimmering change in the gray plain, a universal stirring, which occurred at the moment of the awakening of the Racial Mind throughout the whole population of the planet. The telescope would have revealed that all the faces, formerly placid, were suddenly illuminated with an expression of tense concentration and triumph. For now at last each one of us was in the act of emerging into the higher self-hood, to find himself the single and all-embracing mind of a world.
The book was published in 1932, but this paragraph seems prophetic, a foreshadowing of a Nuremberg rally, with the individual losing his own self in the great collective union.
This isn’t the worst novel I’ve ever read, but it’s the one I’ve disliked most heartily.