Olaf Stapledon – Last and First Men
I’m halfway through this book now. I first encountered this story via the 2020 film adaptation, which I recommend very highly. (It’s the only full-length directed by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who you know as the score composer for Mandy and Arrival). The movie was adapted from a 1930 British novel, written as a 250 page future-history book spanning hundreds of millions of years. Its first pages recounting the 20th and 21st centuries are delicious for what the author can’t know will happen (WWII, computers). Thereafter it’s delightful for it’s total lack of grounding in anything other than deep time. You turn the page and he spends scarcely a full breath on the ends of cities, continents, species of mankind. I love how humanity as a whole is treated as the central character, going through rise and fall after rise and fall. This book is pure flight.