John W. Campbell Jr. wrote The Last Evolution in 1932, before he became the most influential editor in science fiction history. The story imagines humanity’s last stand against an alien invasion and the machine intelligences that humans have created — intelligences that will ultimately outlast and transcend their creators. It is an early and remarkably sophisticated meditation on artificial intelligence and cosmic scale that anticipates many of Campbell’s later editorial preoccupations.
This free EPUB makes this historically significant early Campbell story available in a clean reformatted edition. Anyone interested in the intellectual roots of golden-age science fiction — and the ideas that Campbell would spend decades nurturing as editor of Astounding — will find The Last Evolution a fascinating and surprisingly prescient document.