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Last and First Men as Myth Last and First Men as Myth
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Future Myths and the Limits of Human Nature Future Myths and the Limits of Human Nature
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Further Reading Further Reading
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21 Myths of the Future: Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men
Get accessJohn Holmes is Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham. He was Chair of the British Society for Literature and Science from 2012 to 2015, and is currently Secretary of the Commission on Science and Literature. His books include The Pre-Raphaelites and Science (Yale University Press, 2018), which won the BSLS Prize for the best book in the field of literature and science for 2018; Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution (Edinburgh University Press, 2009); and the edited collections Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions (Liverpool University Press, 2012) and The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science (Routledge, 2017), co-edited with Sharon Ruston.
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Published:10 February 2021
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Abstract
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.
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