The first story describes something like 2 million years of human evolution. I remember the earth is destroyed by the factories they were using for power and they expanded outward. Constantly evolving into post human creatures.
The next dealt with a small group of children who were more “wide awake” than others. Kind of like Savants. I think they formed their own island nation. With a lord of the flies feel.
I think the last story may involve a super intelligent dog that a woman develops a relationship with.
I read this collection YEARS ago, and my memories are very faint. Was just wondering if anyone could remember the title. I’m especially interested in the first story. Thanks All!
This one sounds like Olaf Stapledon’s “Sirius,” but I’m not familiar enough with the author’s other works to tell you if it was collected anywhere, or if those other stories are his, too.
There’s a collection of 4 novels by Olaf Stapleton - “Odd John” about a superintelligent child (and the others that he met), “Sirius” about a superintelligent dog (as Ranclhoth indicates), and “Last and First Men” and “Starmaker” both of which are about extremely long periods of history (first about mankind and its successors, second, about intelligent life in the universe as a whole). Sounds like this collection is what you read.
It’s clear that you read a collection of fiction by Olaf Stapledon, but I can’t figure out which collection. The novels you’re describing are Last and First Men, Odd John, and Sirius. The problem is that there is no collection with just those three novels:
Are you saying, perhaps, that these were just three of the novels in the collection that you read, but there were also other novels in it? In that case you read the collection To the End of Time (which I cam currently reading).
The collection I was thinking of is “To the End of Time” (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?TTHNDFTM4C1953). I think Sincere conflated “Last and First Men” with “Starmaker” (I had almost completely forgotten that “The Flames” was in the book I read).
Thanks, Andy L. O.K., it’s clear then that the OP was talking about the collection To the End of Time. He conflated Last and First Men with Starmaker and left out The Flames entirely (as well as the essay by Basil Davenport at the beginning of the book). Incidentally, when the OP describes the plot of Last and First Men as being the next two milion years of history, he’s underestimating. It takes place over a period of two billion years. And that’s chicken feed compared to Starmaker, which is the history of the entire universe and various other universes as well.
Since you’ve got the book in front of you, can you confirm the memory I have that that collection left out some of the early portion of “Last and First Men” (the near-future of America), replacing it with a brief summary?
Yes, that’s right. You can read the entire thing at any of the three websites mentioned at the bottom of the webpage:
The one that I find easiest to read is the last one (the Australian Project Gutenberg one). The Wikipedia entry says though that that has something missing. I don’t know what’s missing. Chapter 2, which was deleted from the version in To the End of Time, is in the Australian online one.