Creation of the Sixteenth Men

The Creation of the Sixteenth Men marks a deliberate turn in humanity’s development: the Fifteenth Men did not simply pass away and leave successors to emerge, but designed and produced a new species to replace them. The result combined engineered bodily capacities with a transformation of social and psychological life, making the Sixteenth Men both a biological successor and an answer to evils that earlier generations had struggled to overcome.

The Fifteenth Men’s Project

The Sixteenth Men were created after the Fifteenth Men had made the abolition of five great evils their first undertaking: disease, suffocating toil, senility, misunderstanding, and ill-will. The account places the new species at the end of a long project of devotion, disastrous experiments, and eventual triumph. It does not recount those experiments in detail, nor explain the other technical achievements of the Fifteenth Men, but presents the creation as the culmination of their effort to produce a successor capable of surpassing them.

The new species was designed to supersede its makers. That decision gives the creation a distinct place in the book’s account of progress: improvement is not only a matter of extending the capabilities of existing people, but of deliberately remaking the human type. The Sixteenth Men inherit an accumulated project while embodying a break with the physical and psychological limits that project sought to overcome.

An Engineered Body and Expanded Perception

The Sixteenth Men were modeled in one respect on the earlier species that had colonized Venus. Artificial rigid atoms were incorporated into their bone tissues, allowing them to support great stature and an ample brain. Their cellular structure was exceptionally fine-grained, providing the basis for a more complex organization. These are presented as designed features of the new body, not as incidental variations.

Their sensory powers were also greatly enhanced. Most strikingly, they had a pair of eyes at the back of the head, giving them a circular rather than semicircular field of vision. The change makes their altered body immediately legible: their awareness extended around them instead of facing in only one direction. The narrator also associates the new race’s general intelligence with a capacity for solving problems formerly considered insoluble in a single flash of insight.

Telepathy and the End of Normal Selfishness

The Sixteenth Men achieved telepathy through newly synthesized molecular groups resembling those of an earlier kind, rather than through the long-extinct Martian units. The distinction matters: the ability was recovered by a new means, as part of the Fifteenth Men’s own engineering, rather than preserved unchanged from an older civilization.

Telepathic rapport greatly increased mutual understanding. Combined with improved coordination of the nervous system, it abolished selfishness from the normal human being. Egoistic impulses that resisted subordination were henceforth treated as symptoms of insanity. The creation therefore altered not only what individuals could perceive, but the terms on which they could relate to one another: misunderstanding and ill-will, two of the evils the Fifteenth Men had set out to abolish, were countered by changes built into the successor species’ capacities and norms.

A Successor with Planetary Powers

The creation also begins the career of a species capable of acting on a planetary scale. The Sixteenth Men gained control of their world’s movement. Early in their history, they used their unlimited energy to direct the planet into a wider orbit, tempering its average climate; as the sun later grew less ferocious, they gradually shifted the planet nearer to it. Their powers thus served not only individual perception or social coordination but the management of the conditions of life itself.

After nearly fifty million years, they learned to enter past minds. The encounter with the past initially dismayed them with the immense volume of earlier misery, but they eventually came to regard that suffering as a challenge and resolved to remember a crusade to liberate the past, though they could not yet conceive how to carry it out. This later ambition extends the significance of their creation: the species engineered to overcome inherited limitations would eventually turn its extraordinary capacities toward the history of humanity itself.