Only after a long-drawn agony of economic distress and maniac warfare, haunted by an increasingly clear vision of a happier world, could the second stage of waking be achieved. And individualism, together with the traditional tribal spirit, now threatened to wreck the world. Consciousness had already been violently awakened out of the primitive trance into a state of excruciating individualism, of poignant but pitifully restricted self-awareness. The world-situation had grown too complex for lowly intelligences, and it demanded a degree of individual integrity in leaders and in led, such as was as yet possible only to a few minds. The dialectic of the world's history had confronted the race with a problem with which the traditional mentality could never cope. The starting point, it will be remembered, was a plight like that in which our own Earth now stands. The sequence of events in the successfully waking world was generally more or less as follows. And the book's climax leaves you with lifelong matters to mull over - one of these being, 'Boy, and I thought I was pretty intelligent.' The final few short chapters really have you reading a couple of paragraphs, and then putting the book down to have a long ponder over what has just been addressed. Far from being stuffy, this book is really a very good read indeed, considering the scope of its subject.

There are uplifting victories and crushing defeats. There are touching moments and there are exciting battles. He puts mankind's existence into perspective in both universal time and space.

He shows how certain conditions inhibit the appearance of life, or intelligent life, and how certain evolutionary pathways cause life to stagnate or wipe itself out. He describes how galaxies of stars formed from nebulae that were born flying apart from each other, how these cooling nebulae condensed into galaxies of stars, and how the rare occurrences of young stars that passed each other, formed planets, and how, on a few rare planets, intelligent life evolved. A contemplative man is whisked off on an imaginary journey through space and time by an ever-gathering mass consciousness. The vehicle used was, of course, the best man has going for him - his imagination. All of this in less pages than 'Last and First Men'! My immediate reaction was simply, 'No way, Jose' and I wondered how he was going to set about such an immense task. A quick scan of the appendices yielded the impression that this book would embrace not just the tiny fragment of history that was mankind's stay in the universe, but that all history of the universe would be described, and that of other universes too. After reading 'Last and First Men', I approached Olaf's next masterpiece, 'Star Maker' ( first published in 1937), with some disbelief as to how on earth he could possibly better the span, pathos and magnanimity he had already laid out.

Star maker by olaf stapledon