History Literature / LastAndFirstMen

* HeavyWorlder - Invoked by the Eighth Men when engineering the Ninth Men to live on Neptune, when that still seemed possible.
** Apart from the (today) obvious uninhabitability of Neptune, the Ninth Men are a relatively realistic example - they're scaled-down Eighth Men that take advantage of the SquareCubeLaw.

* HomeworldEvacuation: The Fifth Men migrate to Venus when the Moon (destabilized millions of years earlier in the Martian/Second Men war) starts to crash into the Earth. And the eighth men design the ninth to colonize Neptune when the sun expands to cover the Inner System. But eventually the sun goes nova too quickly for the Eighteenth Men to devise a means of escaping to another system, though they do manage to send out "seeds" of life that might eventually evolve into new humans.
* HostileTerraforming: The Fifth Men escape a dying earth by terraforming Venus. Halfway through the process they discover that Venus is inhabited and oxygen is lethal to the natives; they keep at it anyway, reasoning that the Venusians are ultimately doomed (for other reasons) regardless.
* HumanSubspecies: The TropeMaker, which details the history of over a dozen of humanity's descendants!

* ImAHumanitarian: It's revealed that the Last Men honor their dead by consuming their bodies with great ceremony--just to emphasize how different their culture is from ours.

* OneWorldOrder - The Americanized World State. It lasts for millennia; yet its downfall [[spoiler: ''rapidly'' leads to a new dark age.]]

* VenusIsWet: Venus is an ocean world with fierce storms.

* EveryoneCallsHimBarkeep - None of the characters mentioned or focused on are given any actual names, with the exception of a brilliant Chinese physicist [[spoiler:later deified as Gordelpus]].

** For the First Men, traditional religion is superceded during the OneWorldOrder period by a dogmatic rationalism that over time becomes a scientific cult dedicated to Gordelphus, ironically cribbing Christian elements in the process.

* EveryoneCallsHimBarkeep - None of the characters mentioned or focused on are given any actual names, with the exception of a brilliant Chinese physicist [[spoiler:later deified as Gordelphus]].

* [[AlternateHistory Honorary Alternate History]] - The immediate future concerns regional conflicts (World War II never occurs as OTL) and the mutilation of Europe at the hands of the United States.

* BlueAndOrangeMorality - Invoked by many later men and especially the Martians.

* CulturalPosturing - The Last Men aren't above "expressing" their enlightened superiority, ''especially'' when comparing themselves to the First Men.

* HeavyWorlder - [[InvokedTrope Invoked]] by the Eighth Men when engineering the Ninth Men to live on Neptune, when that still seemed possible.

* HumansThroughAlienEyes - The narration has shades of this, given that it's coming from the most distant descendant of mankind as we know it.

* IntangibleTimeTravel - See the introduction to the book. The Last men can do this, as can other species, starting with the Fifth. It is the best and most reliable method of historical research.

* NotSoDifferent - Eventually, even the narrator, hailing from the Last Men, acknowledges how ironically similar they are to the First despite the immense differences.

* OutgrownSuchSillySuperstitions - Played with. Though patterns of faith/rationalism conflict recur over the course of Man's future history.

* ScienceMarchesOn - For instance, the outer planets (and Neptune especially) are treated like they have a solid surface. See also Heavyworlder on this same page.
** This also extends to how geology and evolution itself is treated.
** This also applies to the nuclear chain reaction, one actual feared outcome of nuclear weapons.

* StandardSciFiHistory - Subverted to a degree. Yes progress beings Man to ever greater heights...but not before experiencing ever darker lows.

* EveryoneCallsHimBarkeep - None of the characters mentioned or focused on are given any actual names, with the exception of a brilliant Chinese physicist [[spoiler:later deified as Gordelphus]].
* FlingALightIntoTheFuture - Several examples abound over the long timespan. One such attempt is a cavern where the First Men survivors [[spoiler:of Patagonian civilization's cataclysmic end]] tried to painstakingly preserve as much of their culture, sciences and worldview as they can into stone in the hopes of rekindling civilization among their descendants. [[spoiler:The cavern is eventually discovered by the Second Men, who by then had surpassed many of the First Men's achievements. Although they did take the records of their ancient predecessors' beliefs to heart.]]
* RagnarokProofing - Structures and artifacts made by a species of Man at their zenith (or sometimes its end) tend to stay sturdy long enough for their descendants to recognize the relics as such.

* WouldBeRudeToSayGenocide - Type B: as the author puts it, humans are terribly sorry they have to kill all Venusians in the terraforming process, but there's no other solution. Stapledon was quite critiqued for this.

* InsufferableGenius - The "true inspirer" of the book wound count. Given that it's coming from one of the Last Men attempting to reach out to the First Men, the narration can come across at times as patronizing and condesending. This becomes especially evident later on, when said "true inspirer" resorts more and more to analogies and metaphors to recount the future histories of the later species of Man.

* NowYouTellMe: The Fifth Men are never able to figure out why the Moon is spiraling towards the Earth, or how to reverse it. It is suggested that their guilt over the inability to save Earth was part of why they died out on Venus. Many many years later their successors figure out why it happened (their powerful mental abilities actually had an unknown side-effect in the physical world, causing the moon to slow down and fall towards the Earth). Of course by that time it's an academic point.

* LookOnMyWorksYeMightyAndDespair

* WingedHumanoid: The Sixth Men--descendants of humans who had fled to Venus following Earth's destruction--became obsessed with flight, and, taking advantage of Venus's lighter gravity, ended up genetically engineering their own winged successors, the Seventh Men. Like bats, the Seventh Men's wings were part of their arms and hands, rather than being separate limbs, but they kept two fingers (thumb and index) reserved for use as actual fingers.

* HostileTerraforming: The Fifth Men escape a dying earth by terraforming Venus. Halfway through the process they discover that Venus is inhabited and oxygen is lethal to the natives, they keep at it anyways.

* PlanetLooters - The Martians colonize earth during the reign of the Second Men seeking our plants, water, and diamonds.

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* [[AlternateHistory Honorary Alternate History]] - The immediate future concerns regional conflicts (World War II never occurs as OTL) and the mutilation of Europe in the hands of the United States.

* GreyAndGreyMorality - The First Men.

* LiteraryAgentHypothesis - The book is supposedly being narrated by one of the Last Men, who has taken over the mind of Stapledon so subtly that even Stapledon still believes it's a work of fiction.

Written by Creator/OlafStapledon in 1930, this future history is perhaps the TropeMaker of future histories, as it relates a story of over two billion years in which the protagonist is mankind in a quest across three planets and eighteen species for greater intelligence. Mankind rises and falls many times, and, although it falls to the very depths of nonsentience (each time progressively more savage), each height it rises to is greater than the last. In a curious choice, the reader's glimpse of the future becomes increasingly broad and vague as time progresses. This is especially true when one compares the whole chapters devoted to modern Man and his immediate descendants to the single-paragraph mentions of the distant ones.

* LiteraryAgentHypothesis - Obviously.

* AmericaTakesOverTheWorld: The Americans' success was what led to the [[OneWorldOrder First World State]].

* CrystalSpiresAndTogas - The Second, Fifth, and Eighteenth Men.
** The First Men were shown to be approaching this only to crumble just short of it.

* StandardSciFiHistory: Subverted to a degree. Yes progress beings Man to ever greater heights...but not before experiencing ever darker lows.