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

INTRODUCTION

BY

ONE OF THE LAST MEN


THIS book has two authors, one contemporary with its readers, the other
an inhabitant of an age which they would call the distant future. The brain
that conceives and writes these sentences lives in the time of Einstein. Yet
I, the true inspirer of this book, I who have begotten it upon that brain, I
who influence that primitive being's conception, inhabit an age which, for
Einstein, lies in the very remote future.
The actual writer thinks he is merely contriving a work of fiction.
Though he seeks to tell a plausible story, he neither believes it himself, nor
expects others to believe it. Yet the story is true. A being whom you would
call a future man has seized the docile but scarcely adequate brain of your
contemporary, and is trying to direct its familiar processes for an alien
purpose. Thus a future epoch makes contact with your age. Listen patiently;
for we who are the Last Men earnestly desire to communicate with you, who are
members of the First Human Species. We can help you, and we need your help.
You cannot believe it. Your acquaintance with time is very imperfect,
and so your understanding of it is defeated. But no matter. Do not perplex
yourselves about this truth, so difficult to you, so familiar to us of a later
aeon. Do but entertain, merely as a fiction, the idea that the thought and
will of individuals future to you may intrude, rarely and with difficulty,
into the mental processes of some of your contemporaries. Pretend that you
believe this, and that the following chronicle is an authentic message from
the Last Men. Imagine the consequences of such a belief. Otherwise I cannot
give life to the great history which it is my task to tell.
When your writers romance of the future, they too easily imagine a
progress toward some kind of Utopia, in which beings like themselves live in
unmitigated bliss among circumstances perfectly suited to a fixed human
nature. I shall not describe any such paradise. Instead, I shall record huge
fluctuations of joy and woe, the results of changes not only in man's
environment but in his fluid nature. And I must tell how, in my own age,
having at last achieved spiritual maturity and the philosophic mind, man is
forced by an unexpected crisis to embark on an enterprise both repugnant and
desperate.
I invite you, then, to travel in imagination through the aeons that lie
between your age and mine. I ask you to watch such a history of change, grief,
hope, and unforeseen catastrophe, as has nowhere else occurred, within the
girdle of the Milky Way. But first, it is well to contemplate for a few
moments the mere magnitudes of cosmical events. For, compressed as it must
necessarily be, the narrative that I have to tell may seem to present a
sequence of adventures and disasters crowded together, with no intervening
peace. But in fact man's career has been less like a mountain torrent hurtling
from rock to rock, than a great sluggish river, broken very seldom by rapids.
Ages of quiescence, often of actual stagnation, filled with the monotonous