Those are good points, and I hadn't even heard of Stapledon. Thank you!

Last and First Men isn't really a story in the normal sense, so if you're quite plot and character driven it can be fairly hard to get through, but the perspective it gives you is like being woken up by a blast of icy air in the face.

Last & First men and Starmaker are in a single book, and it's great. One of the classics of SF, if you can't find a copy let me know and I'll send you mine when I'm back in NL.

'Last and First Men' tends to be a book that science fiction authors read and borrow from.

I suspect that there is a slight conspiracy: "the first rule of science fiction writers club is that you don't talk about Stapledon". It inspired most of modern science fiction but very few outside of the field have heard about it. Accelerando, The Shape of Things to Come, 1984, That Hideous Strength, 2001, Blindsight, most of HP Lovecraft, etc... all borrow from him.

To C.S. Lewis and AC Clarke's credit, they do acknowledge the importance of Stapledon to their work.

I got quite seriously ill when I was 22, right after starting my first company. Bad timing. 3 months in bed with nothing to do. My neighbour Erik donated me his entire SF collection, which he'd been putting together for more than 2 decades, a gift for which I'll be eternally grateful. This was one of the gems in that stack of books. I'd have never heard of it until this thread today otherwise.

I often encourage people to view current events from the 30,000 foot view of Stapledon, but people don't this naturally. Recent events loom extremely large in our minds. To my surprise US policy people have told me that the United States will "never end".

Do you think 'Last and First Men' changed your perspective?

Absolutely, and the 'everything is temporary' bit really hit me. It makes you look in a completely different way at your own life, both the parts already past and the parts still in the future. Think 'total perspective vortex' but without cheating.

The timescale of the book is staggering. It's like that 'pale blue dot' picture.

http://www.wscribe.com/parables/pass.html

For those that haven't read the book or that don't have access to it, the book follows the 'first men' (us) and their successors across billions of years. Not all movement in time is progress and not all change is natural. Very much recommended, I won't write any more here to not spoil the book for future readers.

> US policy people have told me that the United States will "never end".

Cut them some slack. If they say anything different it's likely some lunatic will label them "unamerican". While the country, as it presently stands, will not endure for long in a planetary timescale, we'll be fortunate if some of the core ideals behind its foundation last for a longer time and help guide our descendants into the deep future.