Very pleasant read

This book was surprisingly refreshing to read. It was good, comfy science fiction. Here's what I found most noteworthy. Spoilers ahead!

The Sacred Black Men

The story of the First Men (our species) goes from the end of WW1 to their extinction a few thousand years later. It is here that the author goes into some wild speculation that probably would not be kindly received by today's audience. Namely, he envisions a future in which the classical races have mixed to such a degree that it's a rare occurrence for a person to be born with a “pure” phenotype, looking distinctly White, Asian, Black, etc.

The author envisions a ritual in which a White woman dances with a Black man in front of an audience. The dance increases in fervor and culminates in the ritual rape of the woman. The crowd, driven into a frenzy, gives chase to the Black man. If he is caught, he is torn to pieces; if he reaches sanctuary, he becomes sacred, untouchable for the rest of his life.

This bit was quite a ride to read, as a modern reader, with modern qualms. However, I understand how it could occur to someone. If Suzanne Collins was supposedly inspired to write Hunger Games after watching the Olympics and a commercial showing starving children, it would not be a stretch that Olaf Stapledon would be inspired to turn real-life lynchings into a cultural practice of his globalised First Men. I would think that at some point, someone would do the same with school shootings.

The Martians

I don't think I've ever heard of sentient clouds before, so I was pleasantly surprised by the Martians and thought it was quite creative. The Martians are an interconnected mesh of microorganisms suspended in the air, forming a cloud. Within each cloud are sub-clouds of specialized cells that serve as the cloud's organs. They are coordinated via radiofrequency, to which the cells have become sensitized. By pooling together certain types of cells, the Martians can generate organs on the fly, like bigger and better eyes capable of telescopic observation of space (which is how they noticed Earth lighting up when the First Men fucked around with nuclear energy).

Nuclear energy

It's interesting to note that Stapledon, having published the book before the creation of the atomic bomb, takes this power away from the First Men until the very end of their run. Having been discovered amid international tensions, it is decided by a group of scientists that mankind is not ready for such technology. The weapon (for as such it was first conceived), is destroyed, and the scientist responsible for the breakthrough commits suicide.

Thousands of years later, when all the oil has long run dry, nuclear energy is rediscovered and promptly leads to a mass extinction event, from which eventually the Second men arise.

It is a common theme throughout the story for scientists to make the choices that ultimately save Man from an early extinction. Stapledon even shows the folly of going against scientific thought in the outcome of the schism between a group of survivors from the planetary disaster that wiped out most of the First Men. While the scientifically minded choose to stay in an arctic refuge to repopulate the Earth, the stubborn among them insist in venturing out to find other places to settle down. The former group eventually give rise to the Second Men; the second group devolve into savagery and inhumanity.

Evolutionary tragedy

Stapledon gives us a sense of tragedy in evolution and the struggle of life through both the Martians and the Second men.

The Second Men, though a nobler race by far than the First Men, are ultimately consumed with despair and fall into inaction when faced with their racial doom. Their very sensitivity and empathetic nature saps their vigour and will to survive against the remnants of the Martian microorganisms on Earth, which have become a deadly plague.

The Martians, though they have developed a group mind, cannot reap the benefits of such unity, cannot become more than the sum of their individual parts. Thus they ultimately failed to conquer Earth, as the experiences of individuals separated from the mother cloud on Mars only caused irreconcilable internal strife.

In both species, the capacities with which they were equipped, which should've coalesced into further action, were simply not enough. There was something tragically missing.

The Fifth Men, the Stoics

The Fifth Men were born of Science's admission that pure reason is not enough to make a species advance beyond itself. Having exterminated all life on Earth, including their creators, the purely intellectual Fourth Men, the “super brains”, now set about designing a species of human that would possess as much of their own raw intellectual capacity as possible, but also the emotional insight that they lacked.

Thus were born the Fifth Men, intellectually brilliant, but also sensitive to the sublimity of life. Endowed with telepathy, as the Fourth Men devised a way to combine the radio-sensitive Martian cells with human brain tissue, this new species achieved a level of mutual understanding and communal cohesion never before seen on the planet.

The Fifth Men achieved a dispassionate, not apathetic, outlook on life that reminds me very much of the Stoic ideal. It was this detachment that enabled them to see the beauty in everything, both bad and good. They were able to accept whatever fate befell them as part of a cohesive universal whole, appropriate in the cosmic order of things. It was also this detachment that enabled them to accept their doom and make the necessary preparations when the time came for humanity to abandon its birth planet and venture out in search of another home, thus furthering the existence of sentience in the universe.

The Eighteenth Men

The story reaches its end by explaining why the contents of the book are being transmitted all the way back through time to the First Men. The Eighteenth Men are exerting their influence on the course of history by transtemporally communicating their ideas to mankind, steering their responses to events. They are doing this because they have done it, in the sense that every turning point where an individual made an uncharacteristic choice (the First Men deciding the world wasn't ready for nukes, for example) was due to the mental influence from the future Eighteenth Men.

Just as the Fifth, the Eighteenth are facing extinction, this time on a galactic scale, and they intend to do two things: create a “dust” capable of traversing space and seeding life upon its arrival to a favorably conditioned planet in some other galaxy; and go back through time telepathically to admire and relive all of Man's past, exerting their influence when necessary.

Though the odds appear slim, the Eighteenth still hope that a suprahuman, universal consciousness will awaken before the End of Sentience, as they recognize throughout the fabric of Time an influence that cannot be attributed to themselves, something operating at a higher level, someone looking back through time in a still more distant future, beyond the present galactic extinction, perhaps beyond our space and time altogether.

I absolutely loved everything about this ending, with its subtle suggestion that humanity will meet (or become) God himself in the end. It was all just spectacularly imagined and very well developed.