William Olaf Stapledon

Last And First Men - Large Print Edition William Olaf Stapledon

A controversial part of the book depicts humans, in the far-off future, escaping the dying Earth and settling on Venus-in the process totally exterminating its native inhabitants, a marine intelligent species. Stapledon's book has been interpreted by some as condoning such interplanetary genocide as a justified act if necessary for racial survival, though a number of Stapledon's partisans denied that such was his intention, arguing instead that Stapledon was merely showing that although mankind had advanced in a number of ways in the future, at bottom it still possessed the same capacity for savagery as it has always had.