Although my heavy scifi reading occurred many years ago, during the 60s and 70s, I must admit I've never heard of any of those authors. Granted, I focused on a smallish group of the more well-known authors, its still a bit surprising that I'd never come across at least some of these people.
After reading Last and First Men (1930), many news stories seem familiar.
> as time passed the mental difference between the two classes increased. Superior intelligence became rarer and rarer among the proletariat; the governors were recruited more and more from their own offspring, until finally they became an hereditary caste. The gulf widened. The governors began to lose all mental contact with the governed. They made a mistake which could never have been committed had their psychology kept pace with their other sciences. Ever confronted with the workers' lack of intelligence, they came to treat them more and more as children, and forgot that, though simple, they were grown men and women who needed to feel themselves as free partners in a great human enterprise.
> Formerly this illusion of responsibility had been sedulously encouraged. But as the gulf widened the proletarians were treated rather as infants than as adolescents, rather as well-cared-for domestic animals than as human beings. Their lives became more and more minutely, though benevolently, systematized for them. At the same time less care was taken to educate them up to an understanding and appreciation of the common human enterprise. Under these circumstances the temper of the people changed. Though their material condition was better than had ever been known before, save under the First World State, they became listless, discontented, mischievous, ungrateful to their superiors.
Olaf Stapledon is amazing but he isn't writing adventures or even narrative in the traditional sense. He is very well known among science fiction authors because they use his material heavily [0]. I often wonder if there is some secret argument among some scifi authors never to speak of Stapledon. For instance one interesting line was that C.S. Lewis was inspired heavily by Stapledon to write "That Hideous Strength" which in turn inspired George Orwell's 1984.
If in one thousand years one science fiction author will be remembered from our time there is a decent chance it will be Olaf Stapledon.
In the book: African scientists were experts in breeding humans and apes. The Jews were responsible themselves for being hated. And in the long run both groups didn't make it into the next round, the next mankinds. So you can be sure all the following humans had no black or Jewish blood.
I've read it twice and I didn't remember any of that, however I looked it up and you are correct the book does use antisemitic tropes.
>And in the long run both groups didn't make it into the next round, the next mankinds. So you can be sure all the following humans had no black or Jewish blood.
I'm not sure what you are referring to. Do you mean at the end of World State? I don't see any specific exclusion of African or Jewish people from the next chapter of history but the book covers so much I may be missing something. In the long run no present racial groups make it into the next round.
I'm rereading the first few chapters and I can't find it. After the fall of the world state it it is said that the next civilization comes from the indigenous Peruvian. Pretty much every group but Peruvians is excluded.
"It happened also that in South America the racial conditions were more favourable than elsewhere. After the fall of the First World State the European element in this region had dwindled, and the ancient "Indian" and Peruvian stock had come into dominance. Many thousands of years earlier, this race had achieved a primitive civilization of its own. After its ruin at the hands of the Spaniards, it had seemed a broken and negligible thing; yet it had ever kept itself curiously aloof in spirit from its conquerors. Though the two stocks had mingled inextricably, there remained ever in the remoter parts of this continent a way of life which was foreign to the dominant Americanism. Superficially Americanized, it remained fundamentally "Indian" and unintelligible to the rest of the world. Throughout the former civilization this spirit had lain dormant like a seed in winter; but with the return of barbarism it had sprouted, and quietly spread in all directions. From the interaction of this ancient primitive culture and the many other racial elements left over in the continent from the old cosmopolitan civilization, civil life was to begin once more. Thus in a manner the Incas were at last to triumph over their conquerors. Various causes, then, combined in South America, and especially in the new and virgin plains of Patagonia, to bring the First Dark Age to an end." -Last and First Men
"Dancing was especially associated with the Negro race, which occupied a very peculiar position in the world at this time. As a matter of fact the great colour distinctions of mankind were now beginning to fade. Increased aerial communication had caused the black, brown, yellow and white stocks so to mingle that everywhere there was by now a large majority of the racially indistinguishable. …"
Hmm. Strange. But I'm sure there was something in the later chapters about the later mankinds. I've only read it on paper but I see no indications that the Project Gutenberg version is different from the printed book.
Maybe I'm wrong. But it really doesn't need any more racism than in the first few chapters. The paragraph after the one I've quoted is terrible.
I don't think he was intending to denigrate particular racial groups. For instance he isn't arguing that any particular racial or cultural group is superior and he views the weaknesses that bring about the destruction of the "first men" as encompassing of all of humanity. Unfortunately the racial essentialism that is central to the book builds on racist stereotypes in the first few chapters.
>Hmm. Strange. But I'm sure there was something in the later chapters about the later mankinds. I've only read it on paper but I see no indications that the Project Gutenberg version is different from the printed book.
According to an amazon review some vandals did release a version of the book in which the first few chapters are changed so that they more accurately reflect 20th Century history:
>"I bought this book because I was interested in Stapledon's depiction of the possible future of humanity. I wasn't aware when I bought the 'Millennium Edition' that the entire section on the First Men- Stapledon's prediction of human society's development between 1930 and the eventual collapse into worldwide barbarism- had been completely rewritten to make it 'easier' for modern readers to digest without excessive disbelief. Yes, Stapledon's predictions of a League of Nations world power and the various wars in Europe and the unification of science and religion in the United States have no resemblance to the reality we've lived through so far, but so what." - https://www.amazon.com/First-Dover-Books-Literature-Drama/dp...
Maybe they also increased the racism of the first few chapters?
Stapledon's Sirius, the awakening of a pet dog retrofitted with emerging sentience completely freaked me out when I was tween - brilliant stuff - relevant to the AI debate, but a new angle: enhanced animal minds !
You may have stuck to novels then, Fredric Brown was a big name in SF short stories. Most anthologies of the time have at least one of his stories.
He was one of my favorites as a kid, for his humor and his mastery of the very short format (which is in an art in itself).
