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Last and First Men

499 statements
98 feature instances
49 referencing feature instances

Last and First Men	type	TVTItem
Last and First Men	label	Last and First Men
Last and First Men	page	LastAndFirstMen
Last and First Men	comment	Written by Olaf Stapledon in 1930, this future history is one of the oldest examples of future histories, as it relates a story of over two billion years in which the protagonist is mankind in a quest across three planets and eighteen species for greater intelligence.Mankind rises and falls many times, and, although it falls to the very depths of nonsentience (each time progressively more savage), each height it rises to is greater than the last.In a curious choice, the reader's glimpse of the future becomes increasingly broad and vague as time progresses. This is especially true when one compares the whole chapters devoted to modern Man and his immediate descendants to the single-paragraph mentions of the distant ones.
Last and First Men	fetched	2023-11-22T03:47:06Z
Last and First Men	parsed	2023-11-22T03:47:06Z
Last and First Men	processingComment	Dropped link to ThePlague: Not a Feature - ITEM
Last and First Men	isPartOf	DBTropes
Last and First Men / int_111f375d	type	HeavyWorlder
Last and First Men / int_111f375d	comment	Heavy Worlder: Invoked by the Eighth Men when engineering the Ninth Men to live on Neptune, when that still seemed possible. Apart from the (today) obvious uninhabitability of Neptune, the Ninth Men are a relatively realistic example — they're scaled-down Eighth Men that take advantage of the Square-Cube Law.
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Last and First Men / int_19944e8f	type	Terraform
Last and First Men / int_19944e8f	comment	Terraform: Happens twice. To escape a doomed Earth, the Fifth Men have to enrich Venus's atmosphere with oxygen. Too bad this means killing the whole native population. The Eighth Men intend to terraform Mercury to survive the shrinking of the Sun which will render their homeworld of Venus uninhabitable, but discover too late that the incursion of another star is going to cause the Sun to flare, wiping out both Mercury and Venus. (The Earth has already been rendered uninhabitable by the crash of the Moon, and Mars hasn't been habitable for a long time). They wind up quick-and-dirty terraforming Neptune, on which they are personally unable to live, planting the tragically-doomed Ninth Men there.
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Last and First Men / int_19f6e383	type	Transhuman Treachery
Last and First Men / int_19f6e383	comment	Transhuman Treachery: Three times, this results in the destruction of a species of Man. The Third Men engineer the Fourth Men, who conquer and eventually exterminate them. The Fourth Men engineer the Fifth Men, who wind up rebelling against their cruelty and exterminate them. The (winged) Seventh Men create the (flightless) Eighth Men, originally as an act of kindness toward their own cripples, The Eighth Men soon monopolize all the land and exterminate most of the Seventh Men; the survivors commit mass suicide rather than surrender.
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Last and First Men / int_1dd66104	type	Venus Is Wet
Last and First Men / int_1dd66104	comment	Venus Is Wet: Venus is an ocean world buffeted by fierce storms and torrential rains, covered in thick banks of clouds, stewing in temperatures so high that only the poles were just barely habitable to the Fifth Men and home to its own sort of aquatic lifeforms. As part of their terraforming process, the Fifth Men also seeded it with island-sized masses of floating marine plants.
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Last and First Men / int_1e39757d	type	Servant Race
Last and First Men / int_1e39757d	comment	Servant Race: The Fourth Men use genetic engineering to create from their Third Man predecessors a new strain linked directly to their will through wireless communication routed directly into their nervous systems, thus creating from the third human species a breed of entirely subservient slaves.
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Last and First Men / int_20e7ed4f	type	Adaptive Ability
Last and First Men / int_20e7ed4f	comment	Adaptive Ability: The Martians are described as doing this against the Second Men during their extremely long war. Every time the Martians come back, they are described as immune to what defeated them last.
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Last and First Men / int_22071825	type	I'm a Humanitarian
Last and First Men / int_22071825	comment	I'm a Humanitarian: The Last Men honor their dead by consuming their bodies with great ceremony — just to emphasize how different their culture is from ours.
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Last and First Men / int_2588feac	type	Winged Humanoid
Last and First Men / int_2588feac	comment	Winged Humanoid: Among the various myths that arose in the First Dark Age about the glories of the bygone global civilization was one claiming that ancient men had been winged and capable of flight. The Sixth Men — descendants of humans who had fled to Venus following Earth's destruction — became obsessed with flight, and, taking advantage of Venus's lighter gravity, ended up genetically engineering their own winged successors, the Seventh Men. Like bats, the Seventh Men's wings were part of their arms and hands, rather than being separate limbs, but they kept two fingers (thumb and index) reserved for use as actual fingers.
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Last and First Men / int_28d73447	type	Regional Redecoration
Last and First Men / int_28d73447	comment	Regional Redecoration: The World State of the First Men came to an end due to a combination of a catastrophic energy crisis, the ensuing starvation and mass rioting, and the accidental releases of the ancient nerve plague. The most extreme case, however, happens millennia later during the Patagonian civilization, when a riot in a mine leads to a colossal explosion. The resulting radiation then triggered an underground chain reaction that snaked its way up from Patagonia into North America and then across the Bering Sea into Eurasia and Africa. Global volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, the melting of the ice caps and atmospheric contamination resulted in the death of all but thirty-five members of the human race, who were at a research station in the North Pole.
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Last and First Men / int_2a090d00	type	Lampshade Hanging
Last and First Men / int_2a090d00	comment	After the Fourth Men create the Fifth Men, the book stops, admits both the author and the reader know where this is going, and picks up after the Fifth Men have eradicated the Fourth Men.
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Last and First Men / int_2a3e0069	type	Amazonian Beauty
Last and First Men / int_2a3e0069	comment	Amazonian Beauty: The women of the Second Men share the chiseled features, towering height and heavy frames of their brothers, but it's stated that the First Men would have still found their vitality and expressiveness to be beautiful.
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Last and First Men / int_2af6bbeb	type	Break the Haughty
Last and First Men / int_2af6bbeb	comment	Break the Haughty: The narrator tells us, at some length, that we as the First Men are half-animal compared to his Last Men, that we can at best catch fleeting glimmers of the rationality and maturity that they achieve as a matter of course, that what intelligence we have lies in the teeth of self-destructive animal impulses and emotional drives, that a great deal of their society and lives is beyond our capacity to understand, and that they go to meet their end calm, composed, even dispassionately appreciative, being at last fully aware and fully awake as humans should be. The epilogue is written twenty thousand years later and is a LOL NEVERMIND. The Last Men stand reminded they only had all this thanks to being made that way, not out of some kind of inherent nobility, and with their bodies failing they've fallen back to their ancestors' follies.
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Last and First Men / int_2b9ae056	type	World-Wrecking Wave
Last and First Men / int_2b9ae056	comment	World-Wrecking Wave: This happens at least three times to humanity. The titanic mining accident that puts paid to the Late First Men. The nova flare that destroys Mercury and Venus, wiping out the Eighth Men. The final eruption of the Mad Star that sterilizes the Solar System, wiping out the Eighteenth Men and (possibly) all Humanity forever.
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Last and First Men / int_2bdae2ae	type	Awesome, but Impractical
Last and First Men / int_2bdae2ae	comment	A frequent theme of the higher Races of Man, for the reason that their vast intellects require larger brains than ours to produce. Stapledon sees some of the problems with this as well. He also avoids the common early sci-fi misconception that evolving a giant brain will necessarily result in an atrophied body to go with it; while the Fourth Men have gigantic brains and atrophied vestigial bodies, they also have enormous factory-sized life support systems to provide them with oxygen and nutrition. When they design the Fifth Men to be their tools, they give them large brains (compared to the baseline First Men standard) and they understand that they will need giant-sized bodies to carry and sustain them.
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Last and First Men / int_3012325a	type	Exotic Extended Marriage
Last and First Men / int_3012325a	comment	Exotic Extended Marriage: The Second Men have group marriages, and the Last Men have group mind marriages formed from one member of each of their ninety-six sexes.
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Last and First Men / int_3126c34a	type	Insufferable Genius
Last and First Men / int_3126c34a	comment	Insufferable Genius: The "true inspirer" of the book would count. Given that it's coming from one of the Last Men attempting to reach out to the First Men, the narration can come across at times as patronizing and condescending. This becomes especially evident later on, when said "true inspirer" resorts more and more to analogies and metaphors to recount the future histories of the later species of Man out of the perception that it would be nigh incomprehensible to "limited" minds like the First Men.
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Last and First Men / int_31c5e7fb	type	Starfish Aliens
Last and First Men / int_31c5e7fb	comment	Starfish Aliens: The Martians are sapient, airborne clouds of sub-microscopic organism held in contact by electromagnetic radiation. Their bodies are subdivided into units specialized for different tasks (such as gathering energy, or seeing by turning clusters of their components into lenses to focus light into globules of water held in midair) and their entire species works as a single interconnected organism based on the same principles. They spend a long time assuming that the radio transmitters of the Second Men are in fact Earth's dominant life-form. The Venerians are a race of trilaterally symmetrical swordfish-like creatures that move by corkscrewing through the water and do not actually feed. Rather, they are powered by radioactive decay of heavy atoms within their tissues; they obtain years' worth of these in infancy and, when their stock runs out, are buried in mines of radioactive elements to rejuvenate. They are also marked by numerous alien behaviors, including feverish production of items which are them discarded or destroyed and a ritual where three individuals tear one another to pieces for no observable reasons, whose purposes the Fifth Men are never able to discover.
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Last and First Men / int_31d6fd00	type	Legend Fades to Myth
Last and First Men / int_31d6fd00	comment	Legend Fades to Myth: The achievements of the First World State — a civilization based in massive tower-cities, obsessed with aircraft and destroyed by mass riots and plagues — quickly fade to dim myth during the First Dark Age, whose barbaric inhabitants recall the past as a time of flying palaces, winged men and arrogant people who were struck down for trying fly to the stars to oust the gods.
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Last and First Men / int_334e48a1	type	After the End
Last and First Men / int_334e48a1	comment	After the End: Happens repeatedly, as the end of one civilization or race of Man is implicitly the beginning of the next one. The most detailed such tale involves the small band of survivors of the Late First Men who colonize what used to be Northern Siberia and become the ancestors of the Second Men.
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Last and First Men / int_350df8dc	type	Anti-Intellectualism
Last and First Men / int_350df8dc	comment	Anti-Intellectualism: This mindset also contributed to the collapse of the First World State, as the rioting masses not only grew disillusioned with the Gordelpus cult but also turned on the elite and intellectuals. By the time it was finished, the survivors were almost wholly ill-equipped to rebuild civilization, further exasperated by the depletion of easily accessible metals and a species-wide Despair Event Horizon.
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Last and First Men / int_36c64123	type	Gentle Giant
Last and First Men / int_36c64123	comment	Gentle Giant: The Second Men, for the most part. It's the final attack of the Martians that pushes them too far.
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Last and First Men / int_37d0083d	type	MindLinkMates
Last and First Men / int_37d0083d	comment	The Racial Mind of the Eighteenth Men, which was both benevolent and much more intelligent than any single Eighteenth Man or Group Marriage thereof.
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Last and First Men / int_382c7a57	type	Now You Tell Me
Last and First Men / int_382c7a57	comment	Now You Tell Me: The Fifth Men are never able to figure out why the Moon is spiraling towards the Earth, or how to reverse it. It's suggested that their guilt over the inability to save Earth was part of why they died out on Venus. Many many years later their successors figure out why it happened (their powerful mental abilities actually had an unknown side-effect in the physical world, causing the moon to slow down and fall towards the Earth). Of course, by that time it's an academic point.
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Last and First Men / int_3a9a910d	type	Solar Sail
Last and First Men / int_3a9a910d	comment	Solar Sail: The Martians, being creatures whose body is composed of trillions of nanoscopic (not microscopic) viruses that communicate on a central nervous system of radiation, are able to conform their bodies into thin solid sheets that can traverse interplanetary distances, allowing them to reach the Earth.
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Last and First Men / int_3bce9346	type	RagnarÃ¶k Proofing
Last and First Men / int_3bce9346	comment	Ragnarök Proofing: Structures and artifacts made by a species of Man at their zenith (or sometimes its end) tend to stay sturdy long enough for their descendants to recognize the relics as such.
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Last and First Men / int_40b308f3	type	Biotech Is Better
Last and First Men / int_40b308f3	comment	Biotech Is Better: Definitely the opinion of the Third Men. Even their mechanically-oriented civilizations pursue the artistic and practical breeding of animals and plants on a wide scale, and their ultimate civilization is obsessed with eugenics and genetic engineering.
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Last and First Men / int_413c475b	type	Space Age Stasis
Last and First Men / int_413c475b	comment	Space Age Stasis: This happens to the more advanced Races of Man, such as the Fifth, Eighth, Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Men. They generally attain atomic energy (including antimatter power), a fair degree of robotics, and miles-long interplanetary spacecraft, but can't push beyond the Solar System or easily establish permanent homeworlds on other planets. The last two problems may be connected with the tendency of the Fifth and Eighteenth Men in general to value telepathic communion, which cannot be achieved far from home.
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Last and First Men / int_44a893af	type	Humans Through Alien Eyes
Last and First Men / int_44a893af	comment	Humans Through Alien Eyes: The Martians, being essentially sapient clouds of gas whose sub-microscopic components communicate through radiation, mistake the Second Men's radio devices for Earth's dominant lifeforms. The narration has shades of this when discussing the various human species, given that it's coming from the most distant descendant of mankind as we know it.
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Last and First Men / int_474a2a5e	type	Cultural Posturing
Last and First Men / int_474a2a5e	comment	Cultural Posturing: The Last Men aren't above "expressing" their enlightened superiority, especially when comparing themselves to the First Men.
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Last and First Men / int_483152c4	type	The Resenter
Last and First Men / int_483152c4	comment	The Resenter: What leads the Fourth Men to finally enslave the Third Men, killing them off and turning the rest into mindless slaves. The Great Brains aleady had de facto control of the world, but they reached an upper limit to their imagination in pursuing new intellectual problems, and they started to crave the ability to find pleasure in life in the way their mobile ancestors did. Since they could not revert to mobile forms capable of experiencing recreation, out of self-denied yet obvious jealousy they restricted and oppressed the Third Men until destroying them completely.
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Last and First Men / int_4921aad7	type	Expanded States of America
Last and First Men / int_4921aad7	comment	Expanded States of America: The United States grows to encompass all of North and South America. Japan is incorporated at one point, but later overthrows them and joins the Chinese bloc.
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Last and First Men / int_4aafd3c8	type	Fling a Light into the Future
Last and First Men / int_4aafd3c8	comment	Fling a Light into the Future: Several examples abound over the long timespan. One such attempt is a cavern where the First Men survivors of Patagonian civilization's cataclysmic end tried to painstakingly preserve as much of their culture, sciences and worldview as they can into stone in the hopes of rekindling civilization among their descendants. The cavern is eventually discovered by the Second Men, who by then had surpassed many of the First Men's achievements, although they did take the records of their ancient predecessors' beliefs to heart and considered it to be a very useful source of historical knolwedge. At the end of the book, when the Last Men are facing destruction from the Sun's imminent death, they create specially tailored subatomic particles meant to combine to form primitive life more prone to developing intelligence than normal, which they then send out upon the solar winds in the hope that at least a small fraction might reach suitable environments and cause thinking life to arise again.
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Last and First Men / int_4e3d253b	type	Downer Ending
Last and First Men / int_4e3d253b	comment	Downer Ending: Humankind is wiped out every time and gets worse every time civilization rebuilds. Even if the Last Men are the most advanced human civilization, they too are wiped out along with (possibly) the last traces of Humanity.
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Last and First Men / int_546e23f6	type	Evilutionary Biologist
Last and First Men / int_546e23f6	comment	Evilutionary Biologist: An all-too-common type of genius among the nastier and more ruthless of the Third Men. This is their racial downfall, when they create the Fourth Men.
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Last and First Men / int_5c36f1df	type	Future Primitive
Last and First Men / int_5c36f1df	comment	Future Primitive: After the fall of the First World State, a combination of the sheer devastation of the collapse of civilization, the indolence induced by millennia of decadence and the exhaustion of all metal deposits cause mankind to regress to a barbaric existence, spending millennia afterwards as struggling, tribal farmers, petty warlords and roving bands of raiders and brigands, equipped with stone tools cruder than even the ones of the Neolithic, before the eventual rise of the Patagonian civilization. After the Patagonian civilization's own collapse, the small band of survivors in northern Siberia descends into another period of savagery, due to a combination of inbreeding and an early tradition of dogmatism rendering them mentally inflexible, as well as the Earth's ravaged state blocking both population growth and technical advancement. This lasts for about ten million years until some of these survivors are able to spread beyond their refuge, gradually redeveloping mental vitality and evolving into the Second Men, who in turn remained hunter-gatherers for a long time after before rebuilding agricultural civilization. Over the rest of humanity's history, most of the future human species cycle through stages of barbarism and civilization numerous times — the Second Men, for instance, are thrown back to the stone age numerous times by devastating pandemics — but these are largely skimmed over as the narration covers greater and greater stretches of time.
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Last and First Men / int_5fb6411f	type	We Are as Mayflies
Last and First Men / int_5fb6411f	comment	We Are as Mayflies: Most of the other species of Man, but especially the Last Men, who usually live about 250,000 years and do not die of old age.
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Last and First Men / int_60783afa	type	Standard Sci-Fi History
Last and First Men / int_60783afa	comment	Standard Sci-Fi History: The creation of a world state, the removal of modern cultures and nations from consideration, the cyclic rise and fall of empires and humanity facing its final fate are all duly explored, although the cycle of empires happens across entire species rather than cultures or governments.
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Last and First Men / int_66181568	type	Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions
Last and First Men / int_66181568	comment	Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Played with. Patterns of faith/rationalism conflict recur over the course of Man's future history. For the First Men, traditional religion is superseded during the One World Order period by a dogmatic rationalism that over time becomes a scientific cult dedicated to Gordelpus, ironically cribbing Christian elements in the process. The Second Men meanwhile are mentioned as being "natural Christians" in their behavior and practices, though their creed would be unrecognizable to their ancestors. The Last Men tend to follow a vague spiritualism derived from a more advanced form of rationalism, while treating religion itself as juvenile folly.
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Last and First Men / int_666648a3	type	Hostile Terraforming
Last and First Men / int_666648a3	comment	Hostile Terraforming: The Fifth Men escape a dying earth by terraforming Venus. Halfway through the process they discover that Venus is inhabited and oxygen is lethal to the natives; they keep at it anyway, reasoning that the Venusians are ultimately doomed (for other reasons) regardless.
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Last and First Men / int_67f26dcc	type	Planet of Hats
Last and First Men / int_67f26dcc	comment	Planet of Hats: Defied. The narrator makes it clear that while he describes the different human species in a way that makes them seem stereotypical (e.g., the Third Men were all about manipulating life), from the perspective of those species themselves they were extremely diverse and encompassed the full breadth of human activity and experience. Only when viewed over extremely long time periods do the dominant themes of each one become visible.
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Last and First Men / int_6a3c49f	type	Direct Line to the Author
Last and First Men / int_6a3c49f	comment	Direct Line to the Author: The book is supposedly being narrated by one of the Last Men, who has taken over the mind of Stapledon so subtly that even Stapledon still believes it's a work of fiction. Which it probably is, considering that Neptune has a rocky surface and Venus Is Wet in this story.
Last and First Men / int_6a3c49f	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_6a3c49f	featureConfidence	1.0
Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_6a3c49f
Last and First Men / int_72595768	type	Darwinist Desire
Last and First Men / int_72595768	comment	Darwinist Desire: Particularly true of the last and highest culture of the Third Men.
Last and First Men / int_72595768	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_72595768	featureConfidence	1.0
Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_72595768
Last and First Men / int_72601f48	type	Ominous Message from the Future
Last and First Men / int_72601f48	comment	Ominous Message from the Future: The whole novel is this, both on the relatively small scale (there are going to be some really horrible World Wars to come), the moderate scale (our own civilization is doomed in a matter of millennia), and the longest term human scale (the Sun will fatally flare in 2 billion years). The Last Man narrator is part of a project which hopes to alter history in ways that will make it more likely that something of humanity will survive this last event.
Last and First Men / int_72601f48	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_72601f48	featureConfidence	1.0
Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_72601f48
Last and First Men / int_72856b70	type	Godzilla Threshold
Last and First Men / int_72856b70	comment	Godzilla Threshold: Humanity goes through several of these over their eons-long history: As the First World State crumbled, the authorities resorted to increasingly dire measures just to maintain order. This leads to the accidental release of the ancient nerve plague, putting the nail in the coffin for the First Men's civilization for thousands of years, especially without the means to undo the damage. The Second Men become so desperate to win their Forever War against the Martians that they consider a Synthetic Plague that winds up almost wiping themselves out to be an acceptable tradeoff. The Fifth Men's desire to save themselves from Earth's destruction led to their regretful genocide of the native Venusians.
Last and First Men / int_72856b70	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_72856b70	featureConfidence	1.0
Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_72856b70
Last and First Men / int_7335ffa9	type	Grey-and-Gray Morality
Last and First Men / int_7335ffa9	comment	Grey-and-Gray Morality: The First Men.
Last and First Men / int_7335ffa9	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_7335ffa9	featureConfidence	1.0
Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_7335ffa9
Last and First Men / int_747c12e1	type	Creating Life Is Bad
Last and First Men / int_747c12e1	comment	Creating Life Is Bad: The experience of several races, notably: The Third Men when they create the Fourth Men and the Fourth Men first make themselves their masters and then annihilate them. Also, the experience of the Fourth Men when they create the Fifth Men, which leads to the Fifth Men rebelling against them and annihilating them. And of the Seventh Men when they create the Eighth Men, who proceed to take over Venus from under their control and drive their makers into extinction.
Last and First Men / int_747c12e1	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_747c12e1	featureConfidence	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_7568eb84	type	Human Subspecies
Last and First Men / int_7568eb84	comment	Human Subspecies: A work dedicated to exploring this trope, detailing the history of over a dozen of humanity's descendants (also note that in several cases these are distinct species, and, in the case of the various Neptunian Men, genera, families or even orders descended from the human lineage).
Last and First Men / int_7568eb84	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_7568eb84	featureConfidence	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_7f3e75b6	type	Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair
Last and First Men / int_7f3e75b6	comment	Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: Grand marvels are described, the ruins and relics of which occasionally stumbled upon by Man's descendants.
Last and First Men / int_7f3e75b6	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_7f3e75b6	featureConfidence	1.0
Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_7f3e75b6
Last and First Men / int_83641c73	type	Logical Weakness
Last and First Men / int_83641c73	comment	Logical Weakness: A recurring theme. Each species and culture tends to develop weaknesses related to their strengths. For example, the Second Men were so strongly spiritual and high-minded that they ultimately sank into a species-wide depression that prevented them from recovering from their Pyrrhic Victory over the Martians, and were replaced by the feral Third Men.
Last and First Men / int_83641c73	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_83641c73	featureConfidence	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_83adb272	type	Crystal Dragon Jesus
Last and First Men / int_83adb272	comment	Crystal Dragon Jesus: In addition to the Gordelpus cult of the First Men, their later Patagonian civilization eventually has one in the form of a youthful prodigy who preaches a creed celebrating vitality and wisdom to a culture defined by its aged. This latter-day prophet's words were among those preserved in the stone tablets the Second Men discover countless generations later, who also take them to heart.
Last and First Men / int_83adb272	featureApplicability	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_863fa679	type	What Happened to the Mouse?
Last and First Men / int_863fa679	comment	What Happened to the Mouse?: Stapledon never explains what happened to the Sixth Men, who endured 250 million years on Venus, and whose last and greatest culture created the Seventh Men. They are obviously gone 100 million years later, when the Seventh Men create the Eighth Men (else the Eighth Men couldn't have conquered the land areas), but Stapledon never says what happened to them.
Last and First Men / int_863fa679	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_863fa679	featureConfidence	1.0
Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_863fa679
Last and First Men / int_87f13be4	type	Designer Babies
Last and First Men / int_87f13be4	comment	Designer Babies: Several species of Man design their own successors, most notably the Third Men creating the Fourth Men, which then design the Fifth Men. This often dips into eugenics territory, especially for the evolution of the First Men (several races are viciously stereotyped) or when breeding for intelligence or sanity. Justified in that, at the time of writing, eugenics was considered a genuine science and wasn't yet discredited. The Sixteenth Men design the Seventeenth Men, who after "only" a few hundred thousand years design the Eighteenth (and Last) Men.
Last and First Men / int_87f13be4	featureApplicability	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_8c4b72dd	type	United Nations Is a Superpower
Last and First Men / int_8c4b72dd	comment	United Nations Is a Superpower: Or rather, the League of Nations of the Early First Men, which over time evolved into an actual global government before splintering into American and Chinese halves. The Americans were the ones who founded the First World State.
Last and First Men / int_8c4b72dd	featureApplicability	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_8d12bb8d	type	Doomsday Device
Last and First Men / int_8d12bb8d	comment	Doomsday Device: Several wars feature weapons which destroy both combatants, but the most explicit example is the biological weapon by which the Second Men finally end the Martian Invasions, utterly annihilating both Colonial and Homeworld Martians — and almost annihilate themselves in the process. (Special bonus points because the Second Men thought that they would completely annihilate themselves, but proved biologically just a bit tougher than they predicted. That's how deeply the Second Men hated the Martians after 350 thousand years of utterly-senseless attacks on Earth!)
Last and First Men / int_8d12bb8d	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_8d12bb8d	featureConfidence	1.0
Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_8d12bb8d
Last and First Men / int_8e5c28c	type	Crystal Spires and Togas
Last and First Men / int_8e5c28c	comment	Crystal Spires and Togas: The Second, Fifth, Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Men. The First Men were shown to be approaching this only to crumble just short of it.
Last and First Men / int_8e5c28c	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_8e5c28c	featureConfidence	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_8f37b	type	Medieval Stasis
Last and First Men / int_8f37b	comment	Medieval Stasis: Happens repeatedly to many races after the Early First Men, because only them (us) had access to immense reserves of coal and oil all over the planet. These exhausted, it was difficult for successors to rise above a pre-industrial level of technology; generally, most cultures never got beyond a sophisticated version of the Early Modern Era (1500-1750 AD equivalent).
Last and First Men / int_8f37b	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_8f37b	featureConfidence	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_90965cc7	type	Hive Mind
Last and First Men / int_90965cc7	comment	Hive Mind: Two examples, one malign, the other benign. The Martian clouds, and the racial mind they form. Subverted in that the racial mind is actually less intelligent, and is far less imaginative, than the individual cloud-minds. The Racial Mind of the Eighteenth Men, which was both benevolent and much more intelligent than any single Eighteenth Man or Group Marriage thereof.
Last and First Men / int_90965cc7	featureApplicability	-0.3
Last and First Men / int_90965cc7	featureConfidence	1.0
Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_90965cc7
Last and First Men / int_90abf35b	type	Formerly Sapient Species
Last and First Men / int_90abf35b	comment	Formerly Sapient Species: After the fall of the late First Men and their one surviving band splits into two groups, one crosses the Atlantic, losing most of its members in the attempt. Three survivors are shipwrecked into the barely habitable jungles of Labrador and, through inbreeding and the hostile climate, evolve into animals that, on encountering the Second Men long after, have come to resemble giant baboons more than anything else and often become livestock to the sapient descendants of the original crew's pet monkeys. On the mostly oceanic Venus, where the Fifth Men's descendants became highly reliant on the sea for sustenance, some actively evolved into seal-like sub-men with sharp teeth, streamlined bodies, legs shrunken into rudders, and arms and hands transformed into flippers still retaining the thumb and forefinger. They and their terrestrial cousins (who spent a good long time not being much better off) would occasionally end up preying upon each other. After the Ninth Men's civilization collapses due the harsh conditions on Neptune, they degenerate into a number of animal species, most quadrupedal to deal with Neptune's high gravity and including hoofed grazers, predators, seal- and later porpoise-like aquatic forms and minute flying humans descended from a bat-like glider. This remains the nature of humanity until a rabbit-like species redevelops sapience and evolves into the Tenth Men.
Last and First Men / int_90abf35b	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_90abf35b	featureConfidence	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_90e31482	type	Laser-Guided Karma
Last and First Men / int_90e31482	comment	The Fourth Men engineer the Fifth Men, who wind up rebelling against their cruelty and exterminate them.
Last and First Men / int_90e31482	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_90e31482	featureConfidence	1.0
Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_90e31482
Last and First Men / int_91c651a1	type	Guilt-Free Extermination War
Last and First Men / int_91c651a1	comment	Guilt-Free Extermination War: After fifty thousand years of intermittent warfare between the Second Men and the Martians there is no hesitation to use a bioweapon that kills all the Martians and leads to the downfall of the Second Men.
Last and First Men / int_91c651a1	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_91c651a1	featureConfidence	1.0
Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_91c651a1
Last and First Men / int_91e894b4	type	Apocalypse How
Last and First Men / int_91e894b4	comment	Apocalypse How: Happens repeatedly to most of the Races of Men, to the point that after the First Men destruction less than continental gets glossed over, and by the emigrations to Venus and Neptune anything that doesn't wipe out a whole species gets essentially ignored. Some notable ones: The Early First Men often suffer Urban to Regional and occasionally Continental Extinction events, mostly due to the use of advanced chemical weapons — nerve gas on steroids, for instance, wipes out most of Europe's population in its war with America, while an engineered plague designed to destroy higher nervous functions later devastates China. The First World State later falls in a Planetary Societal Collapse resulting from a catastrophic energy crisis and ensuing starvation and mass rioting, in addition to accidental releases of the ancient nerve plague which quickly spreads all over the world, effectively sending humanity back to the stone age. The Late First Men accidentally manage to chain-detonate massive amounts of radioactives in situ underground, causing massive volcanic eruptions that result in multiple Continental Total Extinction events, with Earth life only surviving in a few isolated areas, mostly in the Arctic, where humanity hung on through twenty-seven survivors. The Second Men, who are especially vulnerable to disease, suffer repeated diebacks from plagues, generally at the level of Continental to Planetary Societal Collapse, before they finally attain the relative stability of their zenith. Similar collapses are also caused by an extensive ice age and a single world war. The Fifth Men's exodus to Venus is prompted by an eventual Planetary Annihilation event, as the Moon's decaying orbit causes it to fragment and bombard the Earth into uninhabitability. The Fifth Men later undergo a near-total Social Collapse as imperfect adjustments to Venus' environment, an incurable gastric disease and a degenerative neurological affliction devastate their race and reduce them to scattered island-dwelling barbarians. The Eight Men's era is ended by an event edging the line between Planetary and Stellar Annihilation, as a mass of gaseous materials from interstellar space enters the Solar System, annihilates Saturn, Earth and Venus as it collides with each in turn, and merges with the Sun to turn it into a giant star whose heat renders everything closer to it than Neptune uninhabitably hot. Humanity's history ends with a full-scale Stellar Annihilation event, as a stellar "disease" that causes stars to expend their energy in vast outbursts of light and heat powerful enough to annihilate their entire systems spreads through the local stellar neighborhood and will infect the sun too quickly for mankind to be able to escape.
Last and First Men / int_91e894b4	featureApplicability	1.0
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Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_91e894b4
Last and First Men / int_9323741	type	Planet Looters
Last and First Men / int_9323741	comment	Planet Looters: The Martians colonize earth during the reign of the Second Men seeking our plants, water, and diamonds.
Last and First Men / int_9323741	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_9323741	featureConfidence	1.0
Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_9323741
Last and First Men / int_984ef9ef	type	"Not So Different" Remark
Last and First Men / int_984ef9ef	comment	"Not So Different" Remark: Towards the end, the narrator admits that for all the immense technological and mental superiority of the Last Men, they find themselves having more in common with the First Men than they realize.
Last and First Men / int_984ef9ef	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_984ef9ef	featureConfidence	1.0
Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_984ef9ef
Last and First Men / int_9eb7e397	type	Long-Lived
Last and First Men / int_9eb7e397	comment	Long-Lived: Several future human species develop extremely long lifespans. The Fifth Men were created with three thousand-year lifespans and later increased their life expectancy to fifty thousand years. The Eighteenth Men typically live for a quarter of a million years.
Last and First Men / int_9eb7e397	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_9eb7e397	featureConfidence	1.0
Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_9eb7e397
Last and First Men / int_aabe2fb	type	Deliberate Values Dissonance
Last and First Men / int_aabe2fb	comment	Deliberate Values Dissonance: Applies both for the author and the different species of Man. This is especially true in the case of the Last Men, who treat ritual cannibalism as a sacred death practice.
Last and First Men / int_aabe2fb	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_aabe2fb	featureConfidence	1.0
Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_aabe2fb
Last and First Men / int_ab5eea65	type	Dramatic Irony
Last and First Men / int_ab5eea65	comment	Dramatic Irony: The unknown Chinese physicist who found the means to "utilize the energy locked up in the opposition of proton and electron" sought to keep his discovery a secret, uttering "God help us." The scientists of the First World State, however, not only appropriated his work and research to forge the cult of Gordelpus, but had ironically turned science itself into a religion.
Last and First Men / int_ab5eea65	featureApplicability	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_ad9fbc1e	type	Pyrrhic Victory
Last and First Men / int_ad9fbc1e	comment	Pyrrhic Victory: The Second Men managed to finally win their Forever War against the the Martians by attacking them with a Synthetic Plague that drove them extinct — and almost did the same to the Second Men themselves and all other life on Earth.
Last and First Men / int_ad9fbc1e	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_ad9fbc1e	featureConfidence	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_afebbd7	type	And Man Grew Proud
Last and First Men / int_afebbd7	comment	And Man Grew Proud: The primitive people of the First Dark Age come to believe that their ancestors, the people of the First World State, were struck down for growing arrogant and trying to equal or oust the gods.
Last and First Men / int_afebbd7	featureApplicability	1.0
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Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_afebbd7
Last and First Men / int_b1033d4a	type	Maniac Monkeys
Last and First Men / int_b1033d4a	comment	Maniac Monkeys: The sapient monkeys are possessed of a large selection of unpleasant traits, including immense avarice, high aggressiveness and bellicosity, a delight in chaos and mischief and an almost sociopathic inability to process the experiences of other beings. They consequently tend to be very cruel to their subhuman livestock, which they routinely force into humiliating, obscene or painful situations, and react with offended rage when they lash out. They also often bait, trick and harass each other in gleeful and sometimes deadly confrontations.
Last and First Men / int_b1033d4a	featureApplicability	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_b3eecaae	type	Colony Drop
Last and First Men / int_b3eecaae	comment	Colony Drop: Due to changes in the laws of physics, the Moon starts spiraling in towards the Earth. Rather slow-mo, however, as it takes ten million years for the Moon to hit, giving the Fifth men time to genetically engineer the Sixth Men to live on a newly terraformed Venus.
Last and First Men / int_b3eecaae	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_b3eecaae	featureConfidence	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_b6cd707f	type	Strolling on Jupiter
Last and First Men / int_b6cd707f	comment	Strolling on Jupiter: Neptune is terraformed by the Eighth Men, with the only concern being the higher gravity, for which the Ninth Men are created. There's no indication whether it had a solid surface beforehand or if it was somehow added. The Eighteenth Men are mentioned to use the gas giants as agricultural colonies as well.
Last and First Men / int_b6cd707f	featureApplicability	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_bb40e7e0	type	Failed Future Forecast
Last and First Men / int_bb40e7e0	comment	Failed Future Forecast: The immediate future concerns regional conflicts (World War II never occurs) and the mutilation of Europe at the hands of the United States.
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Last and First Men / int_bc848be9	type	Intangible Time Travel
Last and First Men / int_bc848be9	comment	Intangible Time Travel: See the introduction to the book. The Last Men can do this, as can other species, starting with the Fifth. It is the best and most reliable method of historical research.
Last and First Men / int_bc848be9	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_bc848be9	featureConfidence	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_bf1f379a	type	Sense Freak
Last and First Men / int_bf1f379a	comment	Sense Freak: The extremely sharp senses of the Third Men made them relish all physical experience to the point of getting lost in it. Beautiful music, in particular, could practically hypnotise them.
Last and First Men / int_bf1f379a	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_bf1f379a	featureConfidence	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_c05de85d	type	Mindlink Mates
Last and First Men / int_c05de85d	comment	Mindlink Mates: Normal in one of the 96-fold Group Marriages of the Eighteenth Men.
Last and First Men / int_c05de85d	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_c05de85d	featureConfidence	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_c145f69b	type	Subverted Trope
Last and First Men / int_c145f69b	comment	The Martian clouds, and the racial mind they form. Subverted in that the racial mind is actually less intelligent, and is far less imaginative, than the individual cloud-minds.
Last and First Men / int_c145f69b	featureApplicability	-0.3
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Last and First Men / int_c6ae3121	type	Modern Stasis
Last and First Men / int_c6ae3121	comment	Modern Stasis: Happens to many cultures which manage to get past Medieval Stasis, because in the Stapledon Verse nuclear energy is very difficult and dangerous to achieve, usually requiring super-intellect to attain without self-destruction. Generally this leads to a World State, which endures for some millennia before collapsing due to civil war, plague or more exotic problems.
Last and First Men / int_c6ae3121	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_c6ae3121	featureConfidence	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_c9597a03	type	Self-Deprecation
Last and First Men / int_c9597a03	comment	Self-Deprecation: At the end, the narrator complains that the story they sent back in time was flawless, but that numbskull they're telling it through has made a complete mess of it.
Last and First Men / int_c9597a03	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_c9597a03	featureConfidence	1.0
Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_c9597a03
Last and First Men / int_d16e293f	type	Creating Life Is Awesome
Last and First Men / int_d16e293f	comment	Creating Life Is Awesome: On several occasions. The opinion of the Third Men during most of their history, as they greatly valued and enjoyed the creation of new forms of life. The experience of the Sixth Men when they create the Seventh Men in fulfillment of a long mystical obsession with flight (though note, we don't know what actually happened to the Sixth Men). The experience of the Sixteenth Men, who deliberately create the Seventeenth Men to supplant them, who in turn deliberately create the Eighteenth Men to supplant them. This is all done voluntarily, unlike the earlier succession from Third to Fifth Men.
Last and First Men / int_d16e293f	featureApplicability	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_d18027f8	type	America Takes Over the World
Last and First Men / int_d18027f8	comment	America Takes Over the World: The Americans' success was what led to the First World State.
Last and First Men / int_d18027f8	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_d18027f8	featureConfidence	1.0
Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_d18027f8
Last and First Men / int_d355ba37	type	Turned Against Their Masters
Last and First Men / int_d355ba37	comment	Turned Against Their Masters: The bestial baboon-humans, who had for centuries been enslaved and tormented by the sapient monkeys, eventually revolt against them and quite literally devour their oppressors. After the Fourth Men create the Fifth Men, the book stops, admits both the author and the reader know where this is going, and picks up after the Fifth Men have eradicated the Fourth Men.
Last and First Men / int_d355ba37	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_d355ba37	featureConfidence	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_d397657d	type	Hoist by His Own Petard
Last and First Men / int_d397657d	comment	Hoist by His Own Petard: The Fourth Men had complete control over the Earth and could have dominated it forever, but they still couldn't get past their intellectual brick wall that stopped them from discovering any new sources of knowledge. They decided that what they lacked was the human quality of connection to life through lived experience, so they engineered the Fifth Men to engage in this activity as their servants. Unfortunately they treated the Fifth Men with the same callousness as the Third Men, yet their own creations were far more advanced and capable of opposing them than the Third Men ever were. The author utterly glances over the ensuing events where the Fifth Men Turned Against Their Masters, treating it as a foregone conclusion.
Last and First Men / int_d397657d	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_d397657d	featureConfidence	1.0
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Last and First Men / int_d7b34c31	type	Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep"
Last and First Men / int_d7b34c31	comment	Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": We learn nobody's name save the First Men deity Gordelpus, and even that's a bastardization of "God help us." Benito Mussolini does a cameo where he gets ignominiously killed, but doesn't go by name.
Last and First Men / int_d7b34c31	featureApplicability	1.0
Last and First Men / int_d7b34c31	featureConfidence	1.0
Last and First Men	hasFeature	Last and First Men / int_d7b34c31
Last and First Men / int_d8f3dc8	type	Eternal Recurrence
Last and First Men / int_d8f3dc8	comment	Eternal Recurrence: Stressed over and over all throughout.
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Last and First Men / int_dda99fa8	type	Despair Event Horizon
Last and First Men / int_dda99fa8	comment	Despair Event Horizon: The narrator posits that a species-wide sense of existential despair as the First World State collapsed helped prolong the barbarism of the First Dark Age, while a similar mindset among the Second Men after their Pyrrhic Victory over the Martians finally brought an end to their civilization
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Last and First Men / int_de56f2bf	type	Would Be Rude to Say "Genocide"
Last and First Men / int_de56f2bf	comment	Would Be Rude to Say "Genocide": As the author puts it, humans are terribly sorry they have to kill all Venusians in the terraforming process, but there's no other solution. Stapledon was heavily criticized for this.
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Last and First Men / int_e34541d	type	One World Order
Last and First Men / int_e34541d	comment	For the First Men, traditional religion is superseded during the One World Order period by a dogmatic rationalism that over time becomes a scientific cult dedicated to Gordelpus, ironically cribbing Christian elements in the process.
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Last and First Men / int_e4d39e54	type	Mars Needs Water
Last and First Men / int_e4d39e54	comment	Mars Needs Water: This one of the reasons why the Martians try to colonize Earth.
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Last and First Men / int_e5a93e61	type	Homeworld Evacuation
Last and First Men / int_e5a93e61	comment	Homeworld Evacuation: The Fifth Men migrate to Venus when the Moon (destabilized millions of years earlier in the Martian/Second Men war) starts to crash into the Earth. And the Eighth Men design the Ninth to colonize Neptune when the sun expands to cover the Inner System. But eventually the sun goes nova too quickly for the Eighteenth Men to devise a means of escaping to another system, though they do manage to send out "seeds" of life that might eventually evolve into new humans.
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Last and First Men / int_e88e8a8f	type	Writer on Board
Last and First Men / int_e88e8a8f	comment	Writer on Board: Mr. Stapledon had some gripes with Americans, which shows in the earlier segments. He acknowledges and apologizes for this, however, in the prelude.
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Last and First Men / int_ea9f0351	type	My Brain Is Big
Last and First Men / int_ea9f0351	comment	The Third Men engineer the Fourth Men, who conquer and eventually exterminate them.
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Last and First Men / int_eee89c8f	type	Species Loyalty
Last and First Men / int_eee89c8f	comment	Species Loyalty: Fealty to the "race" of humanity is described as the only enlightened and valid form of patriotism, which carries over into the later descendants of Man.
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Last and First Men / int_f3fac450	type	Brain in a Jar
Last and First Men / int_f3fac450	comment	Several species of Man design their own successors, most notably the Third Men creating the Fourth Men, which then design the Fifth Men.
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Last and First Men / int_f97a063c	type	Metal-Poor Planet
Last and First Men / int_f97a063c	comment	Metal-Poor Planet: Earth itself becomes this due to the Early First Men (meaning modern-day humanity up until the collapse of the world state four thousand years hence) exhausting all metal deposits in the shallow crust (alongside all coal and oil deposits, for that matter). Thus, after the collapse of global civilization, humanity has no readily accessible sources of workable metal and remains stuck in a stone-age agricultural state for millennia. This is eventually resolved when the devastating eruptions that destroyed the last First Man civilization scatter layers of metal-rich debris throughout the Earth's surface.
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Last and First Men / int_fbb54ba6	type	Forever War
Last and First Men / int_fbb54ba6	comment	The Second Men become so desperate to win their Forever War against the Martians that they consider a Synthetic Plague that winds up almost wiping themselves out to be an acceptable tradeoff.
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Last and First Men / int_fcae81a2	type	We Will Not Have Appendixes in the Future
Last and First Men / int_fcae81a2	comment	We Will Not Have Appendixes in the Future: The Second Men are noted to lack several of the First Men's "useless excrescences"; for instance, they have no toes, tonsils or appendixes.
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Last and First Men / int_ff37e104	type	Treetop Town
Last and First Men / int_ff37e104	comment	Tree Top Town: The sapient monkeys who coexist with the Second Men live in woven cities built into the treetops of tropical forests.
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