Last and First Men

by Olaf Stapledon

Release: 1930
Format: Novel
Genre: Science Fiction
Audience: Adults
Content: Definite Time Travel
Original Language: English

Time travel plays only a tiny role in this classic story of the history of men over the coming two billion years—in that the story itself is transmitted through time into the brain of a 20th century writer.

This book has two authors, one contemporary with its readers, the other an inhabitant of an age which they would call the distant future. The brain that conceives and writes these sentences lives in the time of Einstein. Yet I, the true inspirer of this book, I who have begotten it upon that brain, I who influence that primitive being's conception, inhabit an age which, for Einstein, lies in the very remote future.

DEBUT

Last and First Men (Methuen, 1930).

VARIANTS

1 English variant

TAGS(SPOILERS!)

Groupings

Cited in Worlds Enough and Time, edited by Gary Westfahl ()
Cited in Time Machines by Paul J. Nahin ()

TIME TRAVEL ITINERARY: We haven’t yet mapped out the time travel itinerary.