Last and First Men is an extended think piece about the possible future history of humankind, extending from the 1930s into the extreme far future, hundreds of millions of years from now. It’s supposedly narrated by one of the “Last Men,” and dictated to a modern-day “First Man” by a kind of time-travel telepathy. As time moves further and further into the future, Stapledon switches to overviews of vast stretches of time rather than detailing the events in the lives of individual people. As the march of time progresses over an immense period, many successive and wildly different versions of the human form evolve—or are created.

This is Stapledon’s first work of fiction, and is considered a classic of the science fiction genre, influencing writers like C. S. Lewis , Brian Aldiss, James Blish, Arthur C. Clarke and H. P. Lovecraft . A multimedia adaptation was created in 2017 by Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson and subsequently turned into a film in 2018.