Conocida como "la Biblia de la ciencia ficción", ésta es una extraordinaria recreación de los próximos 2.000 millones de años y los dieciocho futuros estados de la humanidad. De ese modo, leeremos cómo la Primera Humanidad arrasa la Tierra por una reacción nuclear incontrolada, la Segunda Humanidad es invadida por unos marcianos en forma de nube y la Tercera construye la Cuarta Humanidad, que son enormes cerebros inmóviles..., y así sucesivamente, hasta llegar a la Decimoctava, la Última Humanidad, que habita el planeta Neptuno, desde donde se nos narra esta historia utópica de nuestro devenir.

I was giving this 3-stars partially because well.. its just a history book and while it has some quite nice philosophical and human elements towards the end, as a history book its still a bit dry.

However the other reason is that it seems like the first half has taken large elements of various H.G.Wells novels, including the Time Machine, War of the Worlds, maybe a bit of First Men in the Moon, but most prominently the first 20% is very much a rewrite of the Shape of Things to Come.. which i just found out was published 3 years after this...
hmmm... i'm going to deduct a star from Shape and give it to this one then, seems fair :) . ( )

Apparently this is a fairly rare book which my husband happened to find a copy of at some point. Despite the fact that I failed to listen to the very good advice of skipping the first few chapters (advice given, no less, in the introduction of the book), I greatly enjoyed it. The book is a history of 18 different species of man, starting with us, the first men, and ending with the last men who see the end of human kind. Given that this book explored 18 different species of man, it was interesting to observe Stapledon's ideas of what, other than ancestry, made all of these species human. Overall, a good read, but if you do get a hold of it, take the advice of the introduction, and skip over all the parts that are supposed to take place in the present.

I endured Stapledon for two hours before giving up. Last and First Men reads like a history textbook: country A attacked country B, which retaliated, then they became allies and attacked country C, etc, all in a boring prose that miserably fails to engage the reader. Stapledon manages to be boring even when narrating the complete destruction of Europe by America in a big war. There is no real plot, no character development, no attempt to convince the reader that the story matters. To make things worse, the book is riddled with juvenile national stereotypes: "the Germans are harsh but romantic", "the Russians are not attached to material possessions", "the Americans are materialistic", and the like. Hard pass. If you're looking for an ambitious "future history" of mankind you're much better off with Asimov's Robot, Empire, and Foundation series (15 books in total, spanning 20 thousand years). ( )

Written in 1930, Last and First Men is a worthy read for an avid science fiction reader interested in the origins of the genre.
As a book simply to be enjoyed this book did not stand the test of time. ( )