Weekly Recommendation Thread: November 30, 2018

You might be interested in Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon.

A work of unprecedented scale in the genre, it describes the history of humanity from the present onwards across two billion years[1] and eighteen distinct human species, of which our own is the first. The book employs a narrative conceit that, under subtle inspiration, the novelist has unknowingly been dictated a channelled text from the last human species.

Stapledon's conception of history is based on the Hegelian Dialectic, following a repetitive cycle with many varied civilisations rising from and descending back into savagery over millions of years, but it is also one of progress, as the later civilisations rise to far greater heights than the first.

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