Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) was a professor of psychology, philosophy and industrial history at the University of Liverpool, a writer whose work made a lasting impression on the most popular SF writers of the 20th century. Stanislaw Lem, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss have repeatedly spoken of Stapledon’s novels with great warmth, considering him in many ways their teacher. In 1930, Stapledon wrote his debut novel, “The Last and First Men: A History of the Near and Far Future,” which truly presents the most a large-scale science fiction history of the future, covering the two-billion-year evolution of the mind on Earth and in the solar system. The history of the origin and development of humanity, the diversity of forms of living and intelligent matter, countless wars and disasters that form new types of development, the access of people of the future to Mars, Venus, Neptune and further - beyond the limits of the studied universe... A premonition of something important, great, absolute, an eternal search and an eternal struggle with inertia - this book was so charged with ideas that subsequent generations of science fiction writers received an inexhaustible well of inspiration...