Week Ten: The Fiction of ideas

This week I read LAST AND FIRST MEN by Olaf Stapeldon. To me, both Starmaker and Last and First Men are both great examples of futuristic thought experiments taken to their extreme. To me what makes them such worthy thought experiments is how they build gradually in complexity from small cultural ideas, to large cosmic patterns. In Star maker, the focus is on consciousness, and the story builds from the mind of one man, to the consciousness of the universe. In LAFM the focus is on human and cultural complexity, and the story builds from just before World War One to the last and final form of the human race on Neptune. A few things that stood out to me in LAFM, was the accuracy and inaccuracy of his predictions about how the 20^th century would pan out. It was interesting how his ideas about the future seemed to come from his particular cultural biases and his view of the world at that time.  It was also interesting how he seemed to predict that the release of greater and greater weaponized energy would play a role in future, and even seemed to predict the atom bomb with his “matter destroying energy weapon”. Overall, I think what really pulls both stories together is Stapleton’s grasp of the core principals that unity and complexity depend on.