Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men fast-forwards through two billion years of human evolution. In that book, the U.S. establishes a world state. It’s not a nice U.S. (it depopulates Europe in a fit of pique). It’s not entirely clear how long the American world state lasts. It is said to fall “rather less than five thousand years after the life of Newton,” so it might have collapsed sometime between AD 6200 to 6700. Not a bad run. The sequel consisted of millennia of impoverished savagery (thanks to resource depletion), but at least the Americans didn’t accidentally reduce the human population from two hundred million to three dozen survivors (as did the next human civilization).Read about another entry on the list.
Stapledon’s Last and First Men is among Joshua Glenn's ten best apocalypse novels of pre-golden age SF.
--Marshal Zeringue
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