Clarke and the biologist John Maynard Smith read the same copy in the Porlock, Somerset, village library, while Doris Lessing, as she says in her Afterword, read it in a farmhouse in the Rhodesian bush. First published in 1930, by 1937 it was so widely known that Jorges Luis Borges reviewed it in Spanish. A work of fiction with no plot and almost no characters (a few individuals appear, though never named), LAST AND FIRST MEN may have only one precursor, Winwood Reade’s Victorian world history, THE MARTYRDOM OF MAN. Stapledon uses Reade’s sweeping approach, not being afraid to cover long periods in which human life becomes inhuman, when civilisations have collapsed, or as Stapledon has it at times, when the next human species has so far failed to evolve that its creatures are not sentient. They are both firmly secular in their approach. Although some of the later species engage in elaborate rites, for instance learning to fly in fantastic patterns and doing nothing else, the narrator denies that it is apotropaic. Similarly, while the narrator is one of the Last, eighteenth, men who has taken over the present day writer in order to record the history of the solar system, that narrator’s powers of telepathy and time-travel are explained away scientifically.

Hidden at the back of the book are five pages of Time Scales, each one covering longer and longer periods than the last. Yet there is still not time for everything: LAST AND FIRST MEN remains a novel of this solar system – Stapledon expanded his vision in 1937’s STAR MAKER- but here humanity grows on the Earth, is invaded by aetherial Martians who leave their telepathic powers, migrates to Venus, where the native race is exterminated, and then migrates finally to Neptune, from whence there is nowhere to run when the sun extinguishes. In that finality, this also suggests that Stapledon is not interested in “space opera” despite the series name in which this volume has re-appeared. The invasion from space and, later, the vessels in which mankind migrates receive little technical attention, while later still Stapledon either cannot or will not envisage pan-galactic voyages to extend the range of humanity. That does not stop this book being a space epic, though, and that is what it is.