Myths of the Future

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.

The Apocalyptic Cosmos

This chapter examines how Mary Shelley refashions Hesiod's search for a continuous ground of humanness that persists through catastrophic transformations of the foundations of social life. It looks at Hesiod's Works and Days, which consists of survival instructions and ontological reflections on what it means for human beings to have to repeatedly rediscover themselves in the occupations of survival. It also mentions Shelley's critics who saw willful cruelty toward humankind in The Last Man. The chapter explains how Shelley brackets the question of motive in the destruction of humankind and makes herself a proxy of Nature in bringing the era of human occupation of the earth to an end. It mentions Olaf Stapledon, an English writer of speculative fiction that focuses on how human beings relate to cosmic forces that produce drastic transformations in their physical being and form of life.

Post-apocalyptic humanism in Hesiod, Mary Shelley, and Olaf Stapledon

This paper considers the role of anachronism in large scale narratives of speculative fiction. Mary Shelley's The Last Man and Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men signal in their titles an ambition to deal with humankind totally and all inclusively. Both authors look to Hesiod as a model for their projects: the Greek poet's account of successive creations and destructions of humankind at the hands of the gods offers a way of narrating human being as both a local cosmic occurrence that has been and one day will be no longer, and as a life form that has persisted with distinctive orientations and commitments through its various local incarnations. The question of anachronism is thus given maximum scope. Rather than a question about accuracy in the representation of local historical details, anachronism emerges as an interrogation of what we recognize and acknowledge as ourselves in the horizon of deep time.

Temporal Scale, The Far Future and Inhuman Times: Foresight in Wells and Woolf, Time Travel in Olaf Stapledon and Terrence Malick

This chapter links the period’s visions of the far future with modernism’s engagement with deep time in order to show how the big historicising that begins in the nineteenth century is not solely about the expansion of historicity but the multiplicity and alternative futurity that follows from it. While the heterochrony of modernist temporal zoom includes the dissolution characteristic of immense expansions of perspective, it is not centred solely on the absorption of a small frame into some more certain, fundamental backdrop. The incongruity between the aesthetic’s imperative to scale itself to what we care about and the immensity of things that can only be registered from far away – temporal hyperobjects, speculative outsides, far-futural risks – is valuable not only for the critique of modernity’s compressed timescapes that it enables, but also for the way it reveals the plurality of times that cannot be nested within one another. This chapter constructs a relationship between genre fiction’s scope and modernism’s long-range aesthetics – the connection between SF’s literal movement away from earthly temporal units (days,years, events, lives, the career of the human as such) and modernist attempts to picture human life from an estranging distance.