The Narrator (One of the Last Men)
A member of the Eighteenth species, writing from Neptune two thousand million years hence, who claims to be dictating this chronicle through the brain of a twentieth-century writer. Urbane, ironic, and infinitely patient, he treats all eighteen human species — his own included — with mingled pity and admiration.
The First Men
Our own species, portrayed as brilliant but half-formed animals whose ideals persistently outrun their nervous systems. They build a world state on the worship of movement, squander the planet's fuel, decline into ritualized stupidity, and finally incinerate their civilization with mishandled atomic energy, leaving thirty-five survivors at the North Pole.
The Young Chinese Physicist (the Discoverer)
The scientist who achieves the annihilation of matter, demonstrates it by vaporizing Lundy Island, annihilates an American air fleet at his colleagues' urging, then burns his instrument and papers and wills himself dead rather than leave the secret among savages. Later ages venerate him as prophet, incarnate Buddha, and second Christ.
The Daughter of Man
A woman of blended ancestry, raised by a hermit on a Pacific island outside the modern world, who interrupts the secret peace conference between America and China. She chooses the American envoy — soon the first President of the World — as the father of her child, and her televised image becomes the erotic and religious symbol of the unified planet.
The Divine Boy
The Patagonian prophet of youth, a biological throwback whose vigor and sexual energy seem miraculous to a prematurely aging race. He preaches keeping young while growing up, sees life as a game watched by a cosmic playwright, laughs at the idol of Power in its own temple, and is executed for sacrilege — becoming the distorted god of the next world religion.
The Second Men
Titans with two-century lifespans and an inborn generosity the narrator likens to natural Christianity, nearly incapable of selfishness. Their glory is broken not from within but by fifty thousand years of Martian invasion and by a spiritual defeat: they cannot make themselves experience racial tragedy as beauty, and sink into a thirty-million-year trance.
The Martians
Cloudlike swarms of ultramicroscopic units held together by radiation — sometimes millions of separate cloudlet minds, sometimes a single planetary will. Intelligent but spiritually stunted, they mistake radiation for mentality, revere rigid crystals and above all diamonds as sacred, and are finally exterminated, along with most of humanity, by a manmade virus.
The Third Men
Small, golden-eyed, six-fingered, and short-lived, with vast mobile ears, a genius for music, and an obsessive sympathy with living things. Their civilizations practice vital art — the breeding of animals as living sculpture — and their final project, the creation of a superhuman brain, becomes their own destruction.
The Fourth Men (the Great Brains)
Immortal brains housed in forty-foot concrete turrets, tended by machinery, designed by the Third Men as pure intelligence. Devoid of love, fear, and every motive but curiosity, they enslave and then exterminate their makers and nearly all animal life, discover that their own blindness to value is incurable, and design their perfected successors.
The Fifth Men
The first fully human species, in the narrator's judgment: giants living for millennia, telepathic through inherited Martian units, builders of the greatest terrestrial civilization. They learn to inspect past minds directly through eternity, despair over the everlasting suffering of history, and, when the moon begins to fall, exterminate the Venerians and lead humanity to Venus.
The Venerians
The swordfish-shaped natives of the deep oceans of Venus, powered by radioactive decay, builders of coral-like submarine cities and practitioners of rituals no human mind could interpret. Already doomed by their dwindling radioactive stores, they resist the terraforming of their world and are deliberately wiped out by man — a genocide whose guilt haunts the species for ages.
The Seventh Men (the Flying Men of Venus)
Bat-winged pygmies whose whole civilization is an aesthetic of flight: airborne they know a dispassionate ecstasy, and grounded they wither and die of grief. When flightless mutants seize the world and outlaw natural flight, the last million fliers rise together and fly in procession into a volcano.
The Last Men (the Eighteenth species)
A million million potential immortals on Neptune, wildly various in body, equipped with an upward-gazing astronomical eye, organized in ninety-six-member sexual groups that wake into group minds and, rarely, into a single racial mind spanning the species. Philosophers of a dark-bright cosmos, they meet the sun's infection as artists judging a finished work.
The Youngest of the Last Men
The final child conceived before the species learned its doom, and the noblest, able to withstand the poisoned sunlight longer than any other. Moving among the Brotherhood of the Condemned, he speaks the book's closing words: man, conceived by one star and killed by another, remains forever a beauty in the eternal shape of things.