History Literature / LastAndFirstMen

** On the mostly oceanic Venus, where the Fifth Men's descendants became highly reliant on the sea for sustenance, some actively evolved into seal-like sub-men with sharp teeth, streamlined bodies, legs shrunken into rudders, and arms and hands transformed into flippers still retaining the thumb and forefinger.

* EveryoneCallsHimBarkeep: None of the characters mentioned or focused on are given any actual names.

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

* BreakTheHaughty: The narrator tells us, at some length, that we as the First Men are half-animal compared to his Last Men, that we can at best catch fleeting glimmers of the rationality and maturity that they achieve as a matter of course, that what intelligence we have lies in the teeth of self-destructive animal impulses and emotional drives, that a great deal of their society and lives is beyond our capacity to understand, and that they go to meet their end calm, composed, even dispassionately appreciative, being at last fully aware and fully awake as humans should be. The epilogue is written twenty thousand years later and is a LOL NEVERMIND. The Last Men stand reminded that all their intelligence was thanks to being made that way, and now that their health is failing they've fallen right back to their ancestors' follies.

* BreakTheHaughty: The narrator tells us, at some length, that we as the First Men are half-animal compared to his Last Men, that we can at best catch fleeting glimmers of the rationality and maturity that they achieve as a matter of course, that what intelligence we have is in the teeth of self-destructive animal impulses and emotional drives, that a great deal of their society and lives is beyond our ability to understand, and that they go to meet their end calm, composed, even dispassionately appreciative, having at last awakened to the full awareness that is humanity's birthright. The epilogue is written twenty thousand years later and is a LOL NEVERMIND, with the decaying Last Men reminded that their vaunted intelligence had a physiological basis and you can't make up for that by force of will.

* AlternateHistory: The immediate future concerns regional conflicts (UsefulNotes/WorldWarII never occurs) and the mutilation of Europe at the hands of the United States.

* DesignerBabies: Several species of Man design their own successors, most notably the Third Men creating the [[BrainInAJar Fourth Men]], which then design the Fifth Men.

* MyBrainIsBig: A frequent theme of the higher Races of Man, for the reason that their vast intellects require larger brains than ours to produce. Stapledon sees some of the [[AwesomeButImpractical problems with this]] as well. He also avoids the common early sci-fi misconception that evolving a giant brain will necessarily result in an atrophied body to go with it; while the Fourth Men have gigantic brains and atrophied vestigial bodies, they also have enormous factory-sized life support systems to provide them with oxygen and nutrition. When they design the Fifth Men to be their tools, they give them large brains (compared to the baseline First Men standard) and they understand that they will need giant-sized bodies to carry and sustain them.

* 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 heavily criticized for this.

* MyBrainIsBig: A frequent theme of the higher Races of Man, for the reason that their vast intellects require larger brains than ours to produce. Stapledon sees some of the [[AwesomeButImpractical problems with this]] as well. He also avoids the sci-fi misconception that evolving a giant brain will necessarily produce an atrophied body to go with it. It's {{Subverted}} with the Fourth Men who while having gigantic brains and atrophied vestigial bodies, have enormous factory-sized life support systems to provide them with oxygen and nutrition. When they design the Fifth Men to be their tools, they give them large brains (compared to the baseline First Men standard) and they understand that they will need giant-sized bodies to carry and sustain them.

* MyBrainIsBig: A frequent theme of the higher Races of Man, for the reason that their vast intellects require larger brains than ours to produce. Stapledon sees some of the [[AwesomeButImpractical problems with this]] as well.

** The Fourth Men create the Fifth Men, who are basically larger Second Men with better materials and designs, enabling their big brains to function with far fewer difficulties.

* CrystalDragonJesus: In addition to the Gordelphus cult of the First Men, their later Patagonian civilization eventually has one in the form of a youthful prodigy who preaches a creed celebrating vitality and wisdom to a culture defined by its aged. [[spoiler:This latter-day prophet's words were among those preserved in the stone tablets the Second Men discover countless generations later, who also take them to heart.]]

-->... for the relation between the sexes was much more consciously dominated by the thought of offspring than among the First Men. Every individual knew the characteristics of his or her hereditary composition, and knew what kinds of offspring were to be expected from intercourse of different hereditary types. Thus in courtship the young man was not content to persuade his beloved that his mind was destined by nature to afford her mind joyful completion; he sought also to persuade her that with his help she might bear children of a peculiar excellence. Consequently there was at all times going on a process of selective breeding toward the conventionally ideal type.
* DeliberateValuesDissonance: Applies both for the author and the different species of Man. This is especially true to the Last Men, who treat ritual cannibalism as a sacred death practice.

* LogicalWeakness: A recurring theme. Each species and culture tends to develop weaknesses related to their strengths. For example, the [[GentleGiant Second Men]] were so strongly spiritual and high-minded that they ultimately sank into a species-wide depression that prevented them from recovering from their PyrrhicVictory over the martians, and were replaced by the feral Third Men.

* PyrrhicVictory: The Second Men managed to finally win their ForeverWar against the the martians by attacking them with an ArtificialPlague that drove them extinct - and almost did the same to the Second Men themselves and all other life on Earth.

* PlanetOfHats: Defied. The narrator makes it clear that while he describes the different human species in a way that makes them seem stereotypical (e.g., the Third Men were all about manipulating life), from the perspective of those species themselves they were extremely diverse and encompassed the full bredth of human activity and experience. Only when viewed over extremely long time periods do the dominant themes of each one become visible.

* RegionalRedecoration: The World State of the First Men came to an end due to [[spoiler: a combination of a catastrophic energy crisis, the ensuing starvation and mass rioting, accidental releases of the ancient nerve plague, and, most extreme, a riot in a mine leads to a colossal explosion. The resulting radiation then triggered an underground chain reaction that snaked its way up from Patagonia into North America and then across the Bering Sea into Eurasia and Africa. Global volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, the melting of the ice caps and atmospheric contamination resulted in the death of all but ''thirty-five'' members of the human race, who were at a research station in the North Pole.]]

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

* MyBrainIsBig: A frequent theme of the higher Races of Man, for the reason that their vast intellects require larger brains than ours to produce. Stapledon sees some of the [[RealityEnsues problems with this]] as well.

* AlternateHistory: The immediate future concerns regional conflicts (UsefulNotes/WorldWarII never occurs as OTL) and the mutilation of Europe at the hands of the United States.

** The experience of the Sixteenth Men, who deliberately create the Seventeenth Men to supplant them, who in turn deliberately create the Eighteenth Men to supplent ''them''. This is all done voluntarily, unlike the earlier succession from Third to Fifth Men.

%%* GreyAndGrayMorality: The First Men.

%%* InteractiveNarrator: The "true inspirer" of this work would technically qualify.%%How?

* SpaceAgeStasis: This happens to the more advanced Races of Man, such as the Fifth, Eighth, Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Men. They generally attain atomic energy (including fission, fusion and antimatter power), a fair degree of robotics, and miles-long interplanetary spacecraft, but can't push beyond the Solar System or easily establish permanent homeworlds on other planets. The last two problems may be connectected with the tendency of the Fifth and Eighteenth Men in general to value telepathic communion, which cannot be achieved far from home.

* Downer Ending: [[spoiler: Humankind is wiped out every time and gets worse every time civilization rebuilds. Even if the Last Men are the most advanced human civilization, they too are wiped out along with (possibly) the last traces of Humanity.]]

* MindLinkMates: Normal in one of the 96-fold Group Marriages of the Eighteenth Men.

** Early First Men often suffer Urban to Regional and occasionally Continental Extinction events, mostly due to the use of advanced chemical weapons (think "nerve gas on steroids"), before the Planetary Societal Collapse resulting from a [[spoiler: catastrophic energy crisis]].
** The Late First Men accidentally manage to [[spoiler:chain-detonate massive amounts of radioactives ''in situ UNDERGROUND'', causing massive volcanic eruptions]] that result in ''multiple'' Continental Total Extinction events, with Earthlife only surviving in a few isolated areas, mostly in the Arctic.
** The Second Men, who are specially vulnerable to disease, suffer repeated diebacks from plagues, generally at the level of Continental to Planetary Societal Collapse, before they finally attain the relative stability of their zenith.

* 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.]]

* GreyAndGrayMorality: The First Men.

* 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.

* OneWorldOrder: The Americanized World State. It lasts for millennia; yet its downfall [[spoiler:''rapidly'' leads to a new dark age.]] It's also mentioned as happening ''numerous'' times over the eons.

* SpaceAgeStasis: Happens to the more advanced Races of Man, such as the Fifth, Eighth, Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Men. They generally attain atomic energy (including fission, fusion and antimatter power), a fair degree of robotics, and miles-long interplanetary spacecraft, but can't push beyond the Solar System or easily establish permanent homeworlds on other planets. The last two problems may be connectected with the tendency of the Fifth and Eighteenth Men in general to value telepathic communion, which cannot be achieved far from home.

* StarfishAliens: The Martians, a kind of sapient, electromagnetic gas-cloud. They spend a long time assuming that the radio transmitters of the Second Men are in fact Earth's dominant life-form.

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

* 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.

* BlueAndOrangeMorality: {{Invoked}} by many later men and especially the Martians.
* BrainInAJar: The Fourth Men are ''literally'' this. The 'jar' in question is a large tower, with their brains occupying the upper compartments and power and life support systems in the lower ones.

** The opinion of the Third Men during most of their history,

* DesignerBabies[=/=]SuperBreedingProgram: Several species of Man design their own successors, most notably the Third Men creating the [[BrainInAJar Fourth Men]], which then design the Fifth Men.
** Often dips into eugenics territory, especially for the evolution of the First Men (several races are viciously stereotyped) or when breeding for intelligence or sanity. Justified in that, at the time of writing, eugenics was considered a genuine science and [[ScienceMarchesOn wasn't yet discredited]].

* 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.

** The Racial Mind of the Eighteenth Men, which was both benevolent and much more intelligent than any single Eighteenth Man, or even [[MindLinkMates Group Marriage]] of them.

* HumanSubspecies: The TropeMaker, which details the history of over a dozen of humanity's descendants (also note that in several cases these are distinct species, and in the case of Neptunian evolution genera, families or even orders descended from the human lineage).
* HumansThroughAlienEyes: The narration has shades of this, given that it's coming from the most distant descendant of mankind as we know it.
* 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.

* InteractiveNarrator: The "true inspirer" of this work would technically qualify.

* MarsNeedsWater: Which is part of why the Martians try to colonize Earth.

* SolarSail: The Martians, being creatures whose body is composed of trillions of nanoscopic (not microscopic) viruses that communicate on a central nervous system of radiation, are able to conform their bodies into thin solid sheets that can traverse interplanetary distances. This is how they reach an Earth inhabited by the Second Men to begin their crusade to 'liberate' terrestrial diamonds which they believe are being handled sacrilegiously by the planet's dominant species, which the Martians also mistakenly think are the humans' radio devices.

* StandardSciFiHistory: {{Subverted}} to a degree. Yes progress brings Man to ever greater heights...but not before experiencing ever darker lows.
* StarfishAliens: the Martians, a kind of sentient, electromagnetic gas-cloud. They spend a long time assuming that the radio transmitters of the Second Men are in fact Earth's dominant life-form.
* {{Terraform}}: Succeeds twice.

* TranshumanTreachery: Three times results in the destruction of a species of Man.

* UnitedNationsIsASuperpower: Or rather, the ''League of Nations'' in the First Men sections, which over time evolved into an actual global government before splintering into American and Chinese halves. [[spoiler:The Americans were the ones who founded the First World State.]]

* [[WhatHappenedToTheMouse What Happened To The Species?]]: Stapledon never explains what happened to the Sixth Men, who endured 250 million years on Venus, and whose last and greatest culture created the [[WingedHumanoid Seventh Men]]. They are obviously gone 100 million years later, when the Seventh Men create the Eighth Men (else the Eighth Men couldn't have conquered the land areas), but Stapledon never says what happened to them.

* WorldWreckingWave: Happens at ''least'' three times to humanity.

* ApocalypseHow: Happens ''repeatedly'' to most of the Races of Men, to the point that after the First Men destruction less than continental gets glossed over and by the emigrations to Venus and Neptune, anything that doesn't wipe out a whole species gets essentially ignored. Some notable ones:
** Early First Men often suffer Urban to Regional, and occasionally Continental Extinction events, mostly due to the use of advanced chemical weapons (think "nerve gas on steroids"), before the Planetary Societal Collapse resulting from a [[spoiler: catastrophic energy crisis]].

* DirectLineToTheAuthor: 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.