Last Men in London



Last Men in London is a 1932 sequel to the science fiction novel Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon, featuring small amounts of prehistoric content.

Plot
The novel follows one of the 18th men described in the previous book, detailing his life as one of their psychic time travellers, and his interference in the life of a man of the early 20th century. The scenes of ambulance driving in World War I are drawn from Stapledon's own experience.

Prehistoric Content
The narrator relates that even in his youth he had been obsessed with fossils and ancient history. During his life in the Land of the Young, he lived as a hunter and tracker using bow and arrows. Due to his attraction to the primitive, he was persuaded to take a vow to join the Old Young, physically mature 18th men who remain in the Land of the Young, but decided that attaining full maturity would be the best way to satisfy his inclination. While attempting to mentally travel back to the pre-World War I Europe, the narrator sees glimpses of other random eras, including "an Aurignacian, engraving his cave wall with vivid shapes of deer and bison, while my fellow hunters peered with admiration through the smoke". The narrator claims that such time travelers has gone as far back as our pre-mammalian reptile ancestors.

While explaining the psychological causes of the war, the narrator relates the tale of the "Philosophical Lemurs", a pre-human species of lemurs which might have achieved a level of intelligence as great as humanity, but in a more peaceful and empathetic mode. Living on an island, they evolved the ability to use primitive tools, but also an ability to introspect and understand the feelings of others far greater than that found in the ancestors of humanity. Early in their development, what might have become a genocidal war was averted by a gestural performance of their equivalent of a genius, expressing hatred and revulsion for war and killing. The participants, recognizing in the performance their own revulsion toward violence, and that same revulsion in all others who saw it, were able to resolve their conflicts. This performance was so powerful that the lemurs attained a level of spiritual understanding the first men were never able to achieve. These lemurs in their development built wattle and daub shelters in trees, wooden tools and ceramic pots, planted trees, preserved fruits, and used traps to eliminate arboreal cats which were there only predators. From there, their main developments were mental and spiritual, with their members "surpassing the intuitions of Socrates and Jesus". Unfortunately, their spiritual development had stalled their material development, and when geologic upheaval connected their island with mainland, the simian ancestors of humanity invaded the island and slaughtered them, rendering them extinct.

The narrator then relates the mental growth of our pre-human ancestors, first as the use of tools became more common and ingrained in the psyche, than as memory becomes more and more continuous, evolving into the ability to imagine the future. They then become more and more conscious of themselves as thinking beings, as well as their companions as individuals persons. However, the image of the individual as all-powerful hero becomes far more ingrained in the pre-human mind than any consciousness of groups being composed of individuals equal in worth to the self. He follows by describing the emergence of civilization and moving into the historical period.

At the end of the novel, the first man "author" of the work relates a later transmission from the narrator, in which the 18th men have degenerated due to the intrusion of the Mad Star described in the first book, reverting to barbarism and worship of the Mad Star as an angry god.