Myths of the Future: Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men

Olaf Stapledon has been described as ‘the great classical example’ for science fiction. In Last and First Men (1930), he projected a future for human evolution across two billion years, three planets, and eighteen species. Stapledon denied that his book was either prophecy or future history, however, identifying it rather as ‘an essay in myth creation’. This chapter proposes that, through its genre and scope, Last and First Men makes a distinctive contribution to how we might seek to conceive of the future. Myth offers Stapledon a uniquely apt and versatile way to think through possible futures, free from the demands of verifiability, open to falsehood even, yet with its own authority and claim to truth. These mythic futures are a means to interrogate the present while drawing out latent possibilities within human biology and society which are as yet unrealized.