My freshman year in college I took a science fiction literature course (aside: it turned out that my dad took the same course with the same professor some 40 years earlier). The professor said that Stapledon's Last and First Men was the most ambitious and significant work in the genre's history, and I am inclined to agree.
... we can expect to have bases on the planets in this century ...
Lem wrote this in 1986, a year when the Cold War space race was still in full effect. The Soviet Union had just built the Mir station and the country's miserable economic state had not yet been fully revealed. NASA's Challenger disaster looked more like a tragic bump in the road than a systemic failure of the Shuttle program.
30 years later it feels like we're actually further off from having bases on other planets than in 1986.
I don't know, in that year I was a space enthusiast in high school but already iffy about human spaceflight going anywhere interesting before I got old. Even if the disaster was just a tragic bump, the shuttle was already so much worse than promised that no evolution of it plausibly led to the really ambitious programs like O'Neil colonies. (See http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/ for the kind of thing we got excited about back then. It's a much more compelling vision than going to Mars.)
Nowadays there's real private spaceflight in development. Still a long way from asteroid mining and such, but it feels a little closer than it did then.
I think that was and always was gross overoptimism, though. Even today a moon base would be massively ambitious, and it would not even remotely be self-sustaining. We are, presumably, 30 years closer to a self-sustaining moon base, but it is still not very clear how we'd build one, let alone build a moon base that could grow without external resources.
The fact that it feels farther away than it did back then may be little more than the fact that we have a much better understanding of the difficulty of the problem than they did.
It is remarkable how fundamentally optimistic both Lem and Stapledon (and most science-fiction authors) are about our long-term prospects! All of humanity lives on the thin slime on a tiny rock hurtling around an ongoing massive fusion event. There is no warp drive, no anti-gravity - and not even a glimmer of physical theory that will lead to it.
We send tiny rockets into space, sometimes with robotic probes. That is the limit of chemical rocketry, for now and for the foreseeable future. Founding a self-sustaining colony on Mars appears to be impossible - a colony might exist, with frequent deliveries from earth, but such a thing would hardly qualify as a "backup" for humanity, as it would die shortly after the Earth dies.
And of course interstellar travel is totally out-of-the question with chemical rockets.
Meanwhile, the world (especially the First World) consume the truly unique and precious life-support systems in the bonfire of consumerism. Not to mention that the threat of total nuclear annihilation is still present.
So, despite all the interesting talk about Stapledon, the fact remains that it is an optimistic fantasy that distracts us from the stark truth that the laws of physics conspire to prevent us from living anywhere but in this one biosphere, naked to whatever calamity befalls us.
Last and First Men doesn't feel enormously optimistic to me... [Spoilers] It's a long history of struggle, humanity barely existing, occasionally bursting into brief civilisation before destroying itself through accident or hubris. And when humanity does finally attain some kind of peak existence, it finds it can't escape the solar system and is doomed anyhow. Despite its long history, humanity warrants only a footnote in history of the whole cosmos (sentient nebulae onwards) given in Stapledon's Star Maker. So given your pessimistic outlook, you might rather enjoy it :)
But humanity a) survives long term, and b) he predicts extremely long-lived, stable societies between calamities. It's much more realistic to assume that no humans would survive a global extinction level event on Earth. Life itself would probably survive all but the most extreme events, but it would have to evolve into intelligent life for another species to attempt to spread life beyond earth.
Optimistic SF was very much in vogue last century despite two world wars and the cold war. In contrast, early SF writers in the 19th century had a very dark outlook on the future. Despite the fact that Europe was at the peak of it's influence and the relatively small amount of conflict in the back half of the century (particularly compared to the era of turmoil in the first half), many writers thought the human race was done for and science was at it's limit (Kelvin didn't help that thought).
Obviously there are outliers on both fronts (lots of Verne, Orwell, Ellison, etc)
Stapledon is not exactly optimistic, his book has multiple descendants of humans coming close to extinction several times while still on this planet, as culture, technology and biology are manipulated.
A lot of science fiction is just current socity transported into a fantasy future. For example The Jetsons is the post-WWII nuclear family 100 years hence. We can basically identify with "us" in a new world.
The problem I have reading Stapledon is that his humans are so removed from current society that I cant really identify with them and get bored.
Some of his characterizations are timeless riffs on politics, religion and science, e.g. these passages are relevant to modern entertainment and transhumanism, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601101h.html
"… music had a special significance for this race. So intense was their experience of it, that they were ready to regard it as in some manner the underlying reality of all things. In leisure hours, snatched from a toilful and often tragic life, groups of peasants would seek to conjure about them by song or pipe or viol a universe more beautiful, more real, than that of daily labour. Concentrating their sensitive hearing upon the inexhaustible diversity of tone and rhythm, they would seem to themselves to be possessed by the living presence of music, and to be transported thereby into a lovelier world. No wonder they believed that every melody was a spirit, leading a life of its own within the universe of music. No wonder they imagined that a symphony or chorus was itself a single spirit inhering in all its members. No wonder it seemed to them that when men and women listened to great music, the barriers of their individuality were broken down, so that they became one soul through communion with the music.
… It was amongst the rebel peoples that the biological interest of the race, hitherto subordinate, came into its own. Mating, at least among the more devout sort of women, began to be influenced by the desire to have children who should be of outstanding musical brilliance and sensitivity. Biological sciences were rudimentary, but the general principle of selective breeding was known. Within a century this policy of breeding for music, or breeding "soul," developed from a private idiosyncrasy into a racial obsession. It was so far successful that after a while a new type became common, and thrived upon the approbation and devotion of ordinary persons. These new beings were indeed extravagantly sensitive to music, so much so that the song of a sky-lark caused them serious torture by its banality, and in response to any human music of the kind which they approved, they invariably fell into a trance. Under the stimulus of music which was not to their taste they were apt to run amok and murder the performers."
Inded. I personally think Star Maker is better for sheer wonder and scope. I love how Stapledon will casually dash off a whole civilization in two pages that other authors may spend a dozen books fleshing out.
