Olaf Stapledon published his first epic cosmic novel, "Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future," in 1930. It is a speculative history of humanity’s evolution told from the vantage point of one of the Last Men, the people of the 18th era of humanity, 2 billion years in the future.

"Last and First Men" eschews the dramatic conventions of the novel form: There are few significant characters or particularities of place. Instead, the plot is a causal chain of civilizations rising and falling. There is a voice, infused with a distant sense of beauty and tragedy as it considers humanity in the abstract. Stapledon described the novel as "an essay in myth creation."

In his autobiography, Stapledon relates the "Anglesey vision" that inspired the novel. He was scrambling on an island off the rugged coast of Wales when he came across a colony of seals surrounded by crashing waves. He had "a sudden fantasy of man’s whole future, aeon upon aeon of strange vicissitudes and gallant endeavours in world after world."

Stapledon’s imagination is profuse. He can be read as a compendium of science fiction ideas: his "Odd John" (1935) seeds the ground for Marvel’s X-Men; in "Star Maker" (1937) he describes the stellar structure that Freeman Dyson conceptualized as the Dyson sphere; in "Last and First Men" and its sequel, human evolution is driven to produce telepathy, as in Frank Herbert’s "Dune"; in the age of the Fifth Men, the Moon is destroyed and falls to Earth — Neal Stephenson’s "Seveneves" is powered by the same conceit. A further astonishing influence is upon Jorge Luis Borges and his short story "The Garden of Forking Paths." Borges reviewed Stapledon and went on to cite a section of "Star Maker" that anticipates the idea of the multiverse. The long future of "Last and First Men" is influenced by the interwar concern with deep time. Doris Lessing observed that archaeology in the period inspired Stapledon. Lessing’s own science fiction sequence, "Canopus in Argos: Archives," is a similarly eon-spanning future history.