History Literature / LastAndFirstMen

* 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 they only had all this thanks to being made that way, not out of some kind of inherent nobility, and with their bodies failing they've fallen back to their ancestors' follies.

* ManiacMonkeys: The sapient monkeys are possessed of a large selection of unpleasant traits, including immense avarice, high aggressiveness and bellicosity, a delight in chaos and mischief and an almost sociopathic inability to process the experiences of other beings. They consequently tend to be very cruel to theie subhuman livestock, which they routinely force into humiliating, obscene or painful situations, and react with offended rage when they lash out. They also often bait, trick and harass each other in gleeful and sometimes deadly confrontations.

* TurnedAgainstTheirMasters: The bestial baboon-humans, who had for centuries been enslaved and tormented by the sapient monkeys, eventually revolt against them and quite literally devour their oppressors.

** Over the rest of humanity's history, most of the future human species cycle through stages of barbarism and civilization numerus times -- the Second Men, for instance, are thrown back to the stone age numerous times by devastating pandemics -- but these are largely skimmed over as the narration covers greater and greater stretches of time.

* 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.

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Welcome to the future of mankind.

Written by Creator/OlafStapledon in 1930, this future history is one of the oldest examples 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.

Compare ''Literature/AllTomorrows''.

--->''The population was derived almost wholly from the agriculturists of the old order, and since agriculture had been considered a sluggish and base occupation, fit only for sluggish natures, the planet was now peopled with yokels. Deprived of power, machinery, and chemical fertilizers, these bumpkins were hard put to it to keep themselves alive.''

--->... 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.

** 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. They and their terrestrial cousins (who spent a good long time not being much better off) would end up preying upon each other.