Some utter classics of SF available c/o the Australian Project Gutenberg…
…a history of all the human species over the next two aeons. From Earth to Neptune. Written 1930.
…a visit by the Neptunian Last Men to our day via mental time-travelling. From 1932.
…a history of our Cosmos, its Mind, and its ascent towards the Infinite. A glimpse across Eternity. From 1937.
Curiously the stellar physics reflects the change in understanding that astrophysicists had achieved in the 1930s. Prior to nuclear fusion being understood, the stars were believed to potentially be many trillions of years old, slowly burning away their total rest-mass energy. In “Last and First Men” the Sun’s life-span is 10 trillion years, but the planets only appear mid-way through after a James Jeans style near-collision. However by “Star Maker” the lives of the stars were seriously curtailed to mere billions of years and the ‘Big Bang’ provides the cosmic time-scale.
What about prior to Einstein? See my next post…