On Stapledon's “Last and First Men” (1986)

Of course, Lem tried to top it with _Star Maker_, where multiple universes are too small for his canvas :)

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.

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 :)

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.

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.