"Olaf Stapledon - Last And First Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

and its potentialities. Today we should welcome, and even study, every serious
attempt to envisage the future of our race; not merely in order to grasp the
very diverse and often tragic possibilities that confront us, but also that we
may familiarize ourselves with the certainty that many of our most cherished
ideals would seem puerile to more developed minds. To romance of the far
future, then, is to attempt to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and
to mould our hearts to entertain new values.
But if such imaginative construction of possible futures is to be at all
potent, our imagination must be strictly disciplined. We must endeavour not to
go beyond the bounds of possibility set by the particular state of culture
within which we live. The merely fantastic has only minor power. Not that we
should seek actually to prophesy what will as a matter of fact occur; for in
our present state such prophecy is certainly futile, save in the simplest
matters. We are not to set up as historians attempting to look ahead instead
of backwards. We can only select a certain thread out of the tangle of many
equally valid possibilities. But we must select with a purpose. The activity
that we are undertaking is not science, but art; and the effect that it should
have on the reader is the effect that art should have.
Yet our aim is not merely to create aesthetically admirable fiction. We
must achieve neither mere history, nor mere fiction, but myth. A true myth is
one which, within the universe of a certain culture (living or dead),
expresses richly, and often perhaps tragically, the highest admirations
possible within that culture. A false myth is one which either violently
transgresses the limits of credibility set by its own cultural matrix, or
expresses admirations less developed than those of its culture's best vision.
This book can no more claim to be true myth than true prophecy. But it is an
essay in myth creation.
The kind of future which is here imagined, should not, I think, seem
wholly fantastic, or at any rate not so fantastic as to be without
significance, to modern western individuals who are familiar with the outlines
of contemporary thought. Had I chosen matter in which there was nothing
whatever of the fantastic, its very plausibility would have rendered it
unplausible. For one thing at least is almost certain about the future,
namely, that very much of it will be such as we should call incredible. In one
important respect, indeed, I may perhaps seem to have strayed into barren
extravagance. I have supposed an inhabitant of the remote future to be
communicating with us of today. I have pretended that he has the power of
partially controlling the operations of minds now living, and that this book
is the product of such influence. Yet even this fiction is perhaps not wholly
excluded by our thought. I might, of course, easily have omitted it without
more than superficial alteration of the theme. But its introduction was more
than a convenience. Only by some such radical and bewildering device could I
embody the possibility that there may be more in time's nature than is
revealed to us. Indeed, oniy by some such trick could I do justice to the
conviction that our whole present mentality is but a confused and halting
first experiment.
If ever this book should happen to be discovered by some future
individual, for instance by a member of the next generation sorting out the
rubbish of his predecessors, it will certainly raise a smile; for very much is
bound to happen of which no hint is yet discoverable. And indeed even in our