English · Advanced
Read Last and First Men in Englishwith every sentence explained
Olaf Stapledon · 1930
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About the book
Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon was first published in 1930. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under science fiction. It runs to about 112,500 words.
Two billion years. Eighteen human species. The whole future of mankind, told by one of the last.
A voice speaks from the far future, reaching back into the mind of a writer in the 1920s. It belongs to one of the Last Men, living on distant Neptune, and it has a story to tell: everything that will happen to humanity after us.
It begins close to home, with wars between European powers, the rise of America and China, and a world state built on science and pride. Then the scale explodes. Civilisations rise and collapse, dark ages last for millennia, and humanity reshapes itself again and again, growing new bodies and new minds as it moves from Earth to Venus and beyond.
There are few characters and no ordinary plot: the hero is the human race itself. Last and First Men founded the "future history" genre, inspired Arthur C. Clarke, and became Jóhann Jóhannsson's haunting 2020 film.
- Author
- Olaf Stapledon
- First published
- 1930
- Language
- English
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Science Fiction
- Length
- About 112,500 words
How it opens
Observe now your own epoch of history as it appears to the Last Men.
Long before the human spirit awoke to clear cognizance of the world and itself, it sometimes stirred in its sleep, opened bewildered eyes, and slept again. One of these moments of precocious experience embraces the whole struggle of the First Men from savagery towards civilization. Within that moment, you stand almost in the very instant when the species attains its zenith. Scarcely at all beyond your own day is this early culture to be seen progressing, and already in your time the mentality of the race shows signs of decline.
Reading Last and First Men in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate English book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
