The predictive quality of science fiction is often oversold. Yet, when a writer speculates about the future, it’s hard not to measure their work against the real world.
Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon published in 1930 is a chronological future history of humanity. The narrator is one of the First Men, who has been contacted by one of the last. From a distant future this guide seeks to help us understand our human spirit and takes us on a journey to witness the cyclical rising, falling, and evolutionary adaptation of intelligent human civilizations on Earth and other planets. It begins with our current epoch, taking in half-centuries and centuries at a time, then follows a telescoping timeline covering increasingly longer periods; thousands, hundreds of thousands, then millions of years at a time—ultimately encompassing two billion years. It is a masterpiece of speculative fiction. Arthur C. Clarke considered Stapledon’s imaginative exploration of the possibilities of human existence in the universe a huge influence on his own science fiction writing.1
However, the early chapters of the book that describe The First Men, our current human species, its successes and failures, its conflicts and obsessions up until its demise in several thousand years time, were criticized by others. Science fiction author Stanislaw Lem in 1986 described these chapters as “laughable” and “complete nonsense.” Another science fiction writer Gregory Benford wrote a foreword for the book in 1988 that actually recommends the reader skip the first four chapters, to pick up the narrative after the fall of First Men—an odd prescription for how best to read such a revered work.
These first chapters named Balkan Europe, Europe’s Downfall, America and China, and An Americanized Planet, envisage thousands of years of human activity beginning in 1930. They describe a period of dangerous nationalism, new alliances formed between nations, devastating conflicts over resources of coal and oil or prompted by trivial events. They describe missed chances for lasting peace and the taking of a different path due to accidents and misunderstandings. Numerous squabbles between warring tribes become an “epidemic of wars”; between England and France, France and Italy, and Germany and Russia, America and Europe, and finally China and America.
But, amongst this speculation is a description of the American character and culture that will sound more familiar to today’s readers than at any other time since the book was first published.
Lem and Benford criticized these chapters because they didn’t believe Stapledon’s vision of the near future was realistic. Lem thought Stapledon scientifically inaccurate and called out the “naïve, anachronistic, and melodramatic details”2 imagined in America’s future. Benford agreed saying: “virtually everything he says about America and Germany is startlingly off base.” However, as we’ll see when comparing these details with our current world and its recent changes in global power structures, and with a modicum of hindsight, these details appear far from naïve, they are on point and accidentally prophetic.
The book was written in the interim between two world wars. While the conflicts between allied European nations—or between Europe and America—that Stapledon imagined might have seemed unrealistic as near future events at that time, they seemed even less likely in the relative political stability of the late 1980s when these chapters were critiqued. Stapledon was aware of the expectation for his story to be predictive, but shied away from it, refusing to claim his work was or should be considered prophecy—instead he called it myth. But the myth he created then appears to be edging closer to alignment with reality now, 95 years after its publication.
The irony is that it is precisely the chapters leading up to and including The Americanized Planet which Lem and Benford criticised, and that we’re encouraged to skip, where Stapledon accidentally predicted the future—our present. Now that the similarly ridiculed Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement is once again in power in the United States, and is projecting its version of American culture around the world in word and deed, we can see this clearly. So, rather than skipping these chapters they deserve renewed attention for what they anticipated and what they might yet foreshadow.
America: “A people of unique promise”
Stapledon, an Englishman, acknowledged the potential of America and, anticipating the American Century, saw it as the prime driver of human progress—it was “a people of unique promise.” But, he also envisioned its mismanagement and the stages of its decline when the powerful pursued “progress of an unintelligent type.” America is thus central to the fate of First Men in his book, and Stapledon created a story to illustrate how its actions mark “a turning-point in the long drama of Man” affecting future aeons.
In the first four chapters Stapledon described a Europe wrecked by internal conflicts, plagued by distrust and a “ridiculous epidemic of patriotism,” and contrasted it with a more unified America vying for global hegemony and dominance of coal and oil resources against a patient and industrious China.
Although his language is outdated, Stapledon described an early iteration of America as multicultural. Echoing real discussions happening around the time of it’s writing about “America for Americans”3 where, instead of being fearful of immigration it saw itself as an American “race” formed in the melting pot from assimilated immigrants, not impoverished but “enriched by foreign stock.” Stapledon recognised how America’s diversity conveys a unique strength:
“Here was a race brewed of all the races, and mentally more effervescent than any….the whole was increasingly one people, proud of its individuality, of its success, of its idealistic mission in the world, proud also of its optimistic and anthropocentric view of the universe.”
However, this idealism would be short-lived as it is pushed aside by the single-minded pursuit of wealth and resources. Stapledon sees a fragile American character emerge not unlike the one we are witnessing today:
“They had ever been vainglorious and intolerant; but now these qualities in them became extravagant even to insanity. Both as individuals and collectively, they became increasingly frightened of criticism, increasingly prone to blame and hate, increasingly self-righteous, increasingly hostile to the critical intelligence, increasingly superstitious. Thus was this once noble people singled out by the gods to be cursed, and the minister of curses.”
Anti-Environmentalism and a Technological Saviour
One thing his critics fail to acknowledge is Stapledon’s dry humour. Early in his narration of First Men’s progress an incredible technology is introduced. A subatomic device wielded like a normal rifle was invented by a Chinese scientist. Presented to a group of scientists from around the world, this magic wand could alter the trajectory of human progress, and bring together a world contending for fossil fuels by offering energy of “unlimited potentiality.” If used wisely they could become “Masters of this planet.”
During a demonstration it produces a dazzling light, boils the sea, creates a massive mushroom cloud, destroying the Island of Lundy, off the Devonshire coast. An Englishman mutters “Gawd ‘elp us!”—a cockney colloquialism—which is overheard and misinterpreted by a non-English speaker. The device is deemed too dangerous and is destroyed by its creator who then, shockingly, kills himself to prevent its secrets falling to the wrong hands—and so a legend is born. For hundreds of years afterwards men speak reverentially about “Gordelpus” and the “son of god” or “incarnation of the Buddha” who will usher in the return of this wonderful technology. They perform worship rituals, frivolously expending their resources to fly aeroplanes around creating patterns in the sky as if signalling to the heavens, expecting the magical return of the incredible lost technology that will solve all Earth’s energy problems. But, of course, this is a myth; the technology, at least for this iteration of humanity, will remain lost.
God Help U.S.
The worship of the mythical Gordelpus seems predictive of contemporary MAGA positions on the exploitation of natural resources and the environment, and of recent executive orders signed by a President4 who claims an abundance of fossil fuels are ready to be “unleashed” for American consumption. Associated with this order is the belief that, in the pursuit of American energy independence, America will innovate its way out of any and all environmental problems caused by resource extraction and pollution. The “drill, baby, drill” manta of MAGA, who seek to open up protected lands to oil and gas extraction, expresses a similar blind faith that a divine intervention will shortly occur and that the depletion of Earth’s resources is in the distant unimaginable future.
The wasteful ritual flying of the First Men is also comparable to anti-environmentalism (think “coal rollers,”5 or today’s version of conspicuous consumption6) and, more generally, MAGA opposition to renewable energy sources from wind, water, and solar. Interestingly, just prior to the near total extinction of First Men, and the devastation of America, Stapledon writes of a furious backlash against renewable energy as somehow an affront to liberty: “The great stations of water-power and wind-power were wrecked by lunatic mobs who sought vengeance upon anything associated with authority” (emphasis added).
Realignment of Global Powers
Amongst his speculation about global power structures of the near future Stapledon saw new and unexpected alliances and conflicts that seem very familiar today.
Europe is forced into a fearful unification opposing an America that has abdicated its position as the cornerstone of global stability. It develops a European Confederacy that includes all the nations of Europe—except Russia. The pooling of their armaments is perceived as a threat by America which responds by withdrawing from the League of Nations.
In a prediction of Germany’s post World War II economic miracle, Stapledon correctly envisioned its ascension to become the voice of Europe after the decline of British leadership. As the only economy large enough to stand up to it, Germany tries to advise a wayward America, but America does not listen.
Stanislaw Lem took issue with this portrayal of Germany as the “most cultured, peaceful, and humanistic country” yet today we have to consider whether this idea is wholly unrealistic or remarkably accurate. Germany is the largest economy in Europe and its Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently spoke for Europe when he rejected America’s uncharacteristic call for Russia—the aggressor in its war against Ukraine—to be readmitted to the G7.7
Perhaps most relevant to today’s changing world is Stapledon’s description of a Russia deeply enmeshed with American business and finance: “Russia moves away from its communistic ideal because of American capital and industrial organisation, becoming completely dependent.” This Russia begins a “self-righteous” hatred of Germany and this “hate was encouraged by America,” now “tolerant of Russian doctrines.”
The description of an America encouraging hatred of one nation for another might have seemed ridiculous even less than a year ago, yet today such language is heard daily in American political discourse.
Today’s global politics, the sudden alignment of this new American administration with Russian interests,8 while European nations gather in support of Ukraine defending itself against an aggressive invasion from Russia, seem like pages torn straight out of Stapledon’s fiction. Then there is the obvious parallel of America taking umbrage at European cohesion and its threats to leave the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Again, Stapledon’s words have an eerie ring of truth: “To attack Russia, it was thought, would be to wound America in her only vulnerable spot,” especially as America now sees Russia as a vast underexploited economic market and seems set to use its unique position of leverage to lift sanctions against it and seek stronger economic ties regardless of its aggressive actions.
In Stapledon’s fiction the friction between opposing worldviews from old Europe and new America eventually leads to an unthinkable conflict between them that will lead directly to the end of the First Men.
Mediatization of Hate
Despite America’s initially promising situation, Stapledon put his finger on an emerging problem: the media and its uneven amplification of American culture. Writing even before the television age, but likely thinking about the trend toward newspaper syndication, he saw how sensationalism allowed the worst traits of a culture to drown out its best. He described how distorted imagery in the media is a mechanism that allows “the floods of poison issuing from this people’s baser members” and if unchecked would become “a rising tide of vulgarity and superstition.”
It is impossible to read this language without comparing these details with our current communication tools, in the internet age, the waning of legacy media and journalism, and the monopolisation of our attention by social media platforms. The shrillest voices are able to amplify disinformation provoking visceral and hateful reactions globally and instantly. He described an image of a young woman mutilated by a bomb, her image flashed across a population’s awareness which changes the mood of an entire city, from being open to peace talks to a “paroxysm of primitive hate,” within an hour. Stapledon also implied that fear and hate would be amongst America’s principal exports and appears to have sensed the looming power of conspiracy theories and the susceptibility of a population to dangerous superstitions. Nowhere is this atomization of society captured more succinctly than when he describes the media producing “a huge wilderness of opinionated self-deceivers,” and when he implies that media augments the “the incompetence of the First Men to control their own nature.”
Foreshadowing a Post Truth World
Coupled with these concerns about communication, Stapledon imagined America and China as rivals vying for fossil fuels who both lose interest in critical reasoning. Essentially their rivalry sets aside all intellectual pursuits or interest in truth as they compete to mine Antarctica for its resources:
“Neither of them [America and China] was disturbed and enlightened by that insatiable lust for the truth, that passion for the free exercise of critical intelligence, the gruelling hunt for reality, which had been the glory of Europe and even of the earlier America, but now was no longer anywhere among the First Men.”
Again, this sounds familiar as we enter into an era of global politics where oversimplification and inartful negotiating strategies are considered “The Art of the Deal,” and soft power and cultural exchange seem suddenly obsolete.
In what might be Stapledon’s most uncanny preemption of the MAGA-style isolationism and today’s emerging tech oligarchy appears in a section where he contrasts the European values with those of America. He evisions America drifting far away from historical European ideals, instead its society is bifurcated into idolizing minions who worship celebrity business leaders:
“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…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.”
The image of “gloating” upon American citizenship seems particularly on point in this moment where America’s popular star having just passed an enormous new spending bill9 will use new powers to seek to make good on the promise of “mass deportations” regardless of any errors it makes. Gloating, if not actual vengeance, is a behaviour that Stapledon saw lurking in the American character and today all MAGA actions and utterances seem motivated by it.
In another theme that is familiar today Stapledon tied the derailment of American progress to the pursuit of wealth for wealth’s sake:
“Wealth was the power to set things and people in motion; and in America, therefore, wealth came to be frankly regarded as the breath of God, the divine spirit immanent in man.”
In his history of our near future hundreds of years of this simplified ethos leads to evolutionary effects of unnatural selection on the American population: “Intelligence declined because instinct was revered. Unwholesome members survived and reproduced.”
In a move that will resonate with followers of contemporary conspiracy theorists who rail against the Globalists and imminent one-world government, Stapledon envisages a world hundreds of years ahead of ours which is exactly that; one controlled by central governing bodies; a World Industrial Council and World Financial Directorate.
Even here we see the disconnect between ideal and cynical reality where power is concentrated in the hands of a few, Stapledon wrote: “Each industry was in theory democratically governed by all its members, but in practice was controlled by its dominant individuals.”
Stapledon described the top of the pyramid in terms that could have been written yesterday with the simple exchange of “millionaires” for “billionaires”: “The real seat of power was a dozen millionaires, with the American President and the Chinese Vice-President.“
Stapledon even described a scandal and its response that would not look out of place in today’s tabloids. In his fiction there is an attempt to shame the American President by revealing his involvement with Daughter of Man (a black woman) – instead he admits the affair and “glories in it” while insisting he’s still a monogamist “with a wife in New York,” telling the world that he only sinned as a private individual. His actions only enhanced his prestige and people began to emulate his behaviour.
If Stapledon’s work could be seen as myth creation that might be looked back on from new epochs millions of years in the future then it’s not all bad news for MAGA—at least in the short term it tracks with the much-vaunted “Golden Age” it believes we just entered into. His story sees thousands of years of apparent prosperity as progress toward material wealth is pursued with extreme vigor. People are rich. The entire Earth is urbanized with three mile high skyscrapers. Real estate is built on every square mile and every person has a flying machine.
But the whole thing comes crashing down when fossil fuels, including those mined from Antarctica, are suddenly depleted. Having made no contingency plans and with Gordlepus having failed to return, society panics. The elites tell the masses that the sudden energy scarcity was a “supreme test of man’s faith” and that they must double-down on their ritual flying, even sacrificing vital resources to keep the practice going.
After selective breeding favoring those with “instinct,” above all else, and with education elevating finance over the exercise of any intellectual curiosity, the generations that emerge are in no position to think their way out of this crisis, being scientifically illiterate, and so grow hungry and sick. It finally dawns on them that the energy generated by wind and water powered stations should be used to keep themselves alive instead of powering a ritual that they now realise is a lie.
Riots break out which lead to wars, and America, trying to wrestle back control, releases a poisonous microbe that it created centuries earlier. However, since they now lack science and understanding to limit its spread they’re unable to create a cure (or vaccine) and the entire continent of America is devastated by disease. Those not killed by the disease are cannibalised by others. The microbe spreads and virtually the entire global population is decimated, while nature makes itself great again.
If there is one phrase Stapledon used that perfectly captures the ineffectual opposition to the massive changes occurring in America today it’s this:
“the best of America was too weak to withstand the worst”
Contrary to Stanislaw Lem and Gregory Benford’s critique, to ignore the early chapters of Stapledon’s Last and First Men would be to ignore a remarkable imagining of what an irrevocable turning point in human history looks like.
Taken as allegory it can be read, not as the end of First Men, but as a warning about what the beginning of its end might look like. The Second Men to emerge millions of years later has no choice but to learn from the mistakes of their ancestors and develop their civilization without fossil fuels.
In his Preface to the book Stapledon apologises for giving America an “unattractive part” saying “I have imagined the triumph of the cruder sort of Americanism over all that is best and most promising in American culture.” He continues “May this not occur in the real world!” We can only hope that these chapters are the full extent of his accidental prophecy.
Copyright © 2025 Gideon Reid
Bibliography
Epler, Howard. 1916. ‘America for Americans’. Monmal Student Magazine.
Lem, Stanislaw, and Jr. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay. 1986. ‘On Stapledon’s “Last and First Men” (“Les Derniers et Les Premiers” de Stapledon)’. Science Fiction Studies 13 (3): 272–91.
Stapledon, Olaf. 1930. Last and First Men. Methuen & Co. Ltd. https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20200531.
Footnotes
- https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p017yqh4 ↩︎
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/4239766 ↩︎
- America for Americans, Howard Epler, Monmal Student Magazine, 1916 ↩︎
- https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/unleashing-american-energy/ ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption ↩︎
- https://www.politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily/2025/06/17/the-world-waits-for-trump-and-tehran-00410669#:~:text=In%20this%20format%2C%20we%20are%20not%20sitting%20at%20the%20table%20with%20warlords%20and%20not%20with%20war%20criminals ↩︎
- Notably the State Department web link to the “United with Ukraine” web page is no longer functioning. https://www.state.gov/division-for-counter-threat-finance-and-sanctions/ukraine-and-russia-sanctions ↩︎
- https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1/text ↩︎
As always pacey and well structured. Interesting to see ideas from almost a century ago linked to current affairs. Well done.