io9
Forget about story, or character development. When it comes to selecting your science fiction reading material, you want a story that spans millions of years, if not billions. Or why not trillions, while you're at it? A truly grand space saga needs a lot of elbow room across history to unveil its cosmic events. So which novel, or series of novels, spans the longest time period? We rank them below.
Note: I disqualified stories where the backstory goes back billions of years. If an entity turns up that's already billions of years old, big whoop. We have to follow the story across those millions or billions of years, or it's not worth anything. Sorry, Rama!
House of Suns by Alistair Reynolds. This forthcoming novel is a quasi-sequel to the novella Thousandth Night, which takes place in the year one million A.D. (and appears in the anthology One Million A.D., edited by Gardner Dozois.) The sequel takes place around 6.4 million A.D., meaning the whole loosely-connected story spans about five million years. A galactic civilization challenged by the impossibility of faster-than-light travel decides to move all the inhabited star systems closer together to allow for easier trading and contact. Meanwhile, a post-human family specializes in reclaiming ancient ringworlds.
Time span: five million years, sort of.
Evolution by Steven Baxter. This novel in stories follows human evolution, from tiny mammals 65 million years ago to our posthuman and non-biological descendants 500 million years from now, when Earth is uninhabitable.
Time span: 565 million years.
The First And Last Men by Olaf Stapledon. This 1930 novel describes 18 stages of human evolution, across two billion years, ending with humans living on Neptune and being destroyed by a supernova. Lots and lots of funny-shaped heads, until the humans move to Neptune and become dwarves due to the high gravity.
Time span: two billion years.
The Lensmen novels by E.E. "Doc" Smith. The saga begins over two billion years ago, when the Arisians first realize they need to defend our universe against the marauding Eddorians, and start their breeding program on Earth. This leads to the "Lensmen" two billion years later, and the formation of the Galactic Patrol. It takes hundreds of years for the most deserving of the Lensmen to be born, in the endgame of the Arisians' eugenics program.
Time span: Over two billion years.
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. This Hugo-winning novel cheats a bit on the aeons front, because alien machines put an artificial membrane around the Earth that blocks out the stars and causes time to pass much more slowly on Earth. One Earth year equals 100 million years for the outside world, so that four billion years pass within a single human generation. It turns out the alien machines put the membrane there because Earth's unsustainable development threatened its destruction.
Time span: four billion years.
The Xeelee sequence by Stephen Baxter. It stars, more or less, in the year 3000 when humans "open up" the solar system with wormhole technology. One of our heroes, Michael Poole, is born in 3621. Humans get embroiled in a long-running war with the alien Xeelee, and human planets are conquered by the Squeem and later by the time-traveling Qax. The Xeelee war begins in earnest in the year 100,000. The Xeelee defeat humanity in the year 1 billion, and then the story jumps forward to the distant future, with humans in the generation ship Great Northern on a five million year voyage, while an artificial intelligence named Lieserl explores the center of a sun. Humans learn how to leave our universe just in time to escape its destruction. The book Vacuum Diagrams has a Xeelee sequence chronology.
Time span: at least 10 billion years, probably more like 100 billion.
Macrolife by George Zebrowski. The Bulero family creates the super-strong (but highly explosive) material Bulerite which allowed humans to conquer space starting in 2021. And then in the year 3000, humans start merging with each other, and with cybernetic consciousnesses, into a kind of Borg-esque collective, which treats individual humans as cells in a body. And then finally in the year one hundred billion, one member of the Bulero family is "re-individualized" from the Macrolife collective to help figure out how to survive the end of the universe. He discovers some Macrolife survivors from previous universes.
Time span: one hundred billion years. In your face, Robert Charles Wilson!
Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. Perhaps realizing that he was never going to win this contest with a paltry two billion years, Stapledon went back to the drawing board and came up with this 1937 story about a disembodied consciousness who leaves Earth and roams time and space. The story includes the thoughts of sentient clouds in the early universe, and roams all the way up to the heat-death of the cosmos. At one point, the main character meets the "Star Maker," the dispassionate creator of the universe.
Time span: billions and billions of years.
OK, I'm sure I missed some vital and awesome time-spanning storylines. What did I miss?
Comments
What about Rama.
H. G. Wells Time Machine? A classic right? Too simple?
In one of Van Vogt's old stories, I think it was The Weapons Shops of Isher, a main character ends up see-sawing back in time to the beginning of the universe and causing the big bang. Does that count?
Star Was was long time ago in a glaxy far far away. Aeons?
What about Vernor Vinge's "Deep" novels? Or the novelized version of all his "baubilng" stories? Sorry I'm drawing a blank on the name of the book. But Pham from the Deep novels is thousands of years old in the first one, and I believe millions of years old in the second.
Dune?
@ratlas: That has a great last line
What about the Ender's Game Series by Orson Scott Card? Or do multiple books not count in this case?
Ken MacLeod's Cosmonaut Keep stuff has a pretty long time span, but not like Stapledon.
-Kle.
There is a late period Poul Anderson novel, whose name escapes me, where a spaceship get sent to the end of the universe, where everything is expanded and the suns are red dwarfs
It might have been "Tau Zero" he worked that theme often. There is a story "To Outlive Eternity"
And of course, "The Restaurant At the End of the Universe" deserves a mention, don't you think?
The Last Question spans billions of years, but that's not a novel.
No question, The Star Maker. Just look at the Chapters.
Earth
The Starting Point
Earth among the Stars
Interstellar Travel
The Other Earth
On the Other Earth
A Busy World
Prospects of the Race
I Travel Again
Worlds Innumerable
The Diversity of Worlds
Strange Mankinds
Nautiloids
Intimations of the Star Maker
More Worlds
A Symbiotic Race
Composite Beings
Plant Men and Others
Concerning the Explorers
The Community of Worlds
Busy Utopias
Intermundane Strife
A Crisis in Galactic History
Triumph in a Sub-Galaxy
The Tragedy of the Perverts
A Galactic Utopia
A Vision of the Galaxy
Stars and Vermin
The Many Galaxies
Disaster in Our Galaxy
Stars
Galactic Symbiosis
A Stunted Cosmical Spirit
The Beginning and the End
Back to the Nebulae
The Supreme Moment Nears
The Supreme Moment and After
The Myth of Creation
The Maker and his Works
Immature Creating
Mature Creating
The Ultimate Cosmos and the Eternal Spirit
Epilogue: Back to Earth
Appendix: A Note on Magnitude
That last story reminds me of Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino. It's not really hard science, but it is really lovely and unusual science fantasy starting with sentient abstract mathematical principles, and continuing to clouds of matter, dinosaurs, humans and so on.
Everyone needs to read more Calvino, anyway. He's wonderful.
@codydog: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe definitely deserves a mention. In the Milliway's carpark, Marvin runs through the relative boringness of several groups of 30 million years (I think that's the number) and that piles up pretty quick...
@deckard97: The Time Machine only spans about 800,000 years I think. I actually checked.
@ratlas: Yeah, that totally counts!
How about the -shortest- span of time? Time travel stories where the protagonist returns to the same point not included.
Cordwainer Smith's "The Rediscovery of Man" saga? Not a novel, but a set of stories set in the same timeline.
Another vote here for the Ender Saga. It was one of the first sci-fi series I read that felt truly "epic" in its handling of time.
Dan Simmon's Hyperion series also comes to mind...
Comment on What Novels Span The Most Aeons? Stephen Baxter's Manifold series spans the entirety of time, from the beginning of the universe until a time I think trillions of years in the future, with humanity's descendants actually deciding to wipe the entirety of time to restructure the universe.
Well, it's not a novel, but Asimov's "The Last Question" spans human time to the end of the universe.
Yeah, I'd have to agree with two earlier commenters.
Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy Anthology
From the crash-landing on pre-historic earth to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
the Dune series
starting chronologically with the Butlerian Jihad and ending in the Sandworms novel. Speaking of which I should read those most recent two additions.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Charles Sheffield. I remember reading it and then seeing previews for "The Fountain" which it reminded me of somewhat.
You forgot the other Alastair Reynolds novel dealing with deeptime -- Pushing Ice. An ancient galactic civilization realizes that intelligent life is so rare that two cultures won't exist in the same galaxy at the same time. So they seed the universe with artifacts that grab spaceships, drag them across the universe at relativistic speeds, and drop them in a giant structure where the species can interact with each other. I don't remember how far in the future this structure exists, but it's certainly hundreds of millions, if not billions of years.
Asimov's Foundation series? Does that only span 100 centuries or so? I can't remember, it's been over a decade since I've read those books.
@ratlas: I think you may be thinking of The Universe Maker by VanVogt. Not a great book, but it has some cosmic moments.
@codydog:
Tau Zero is the book. It also extends for an infinitesimile amount of time into the next universe created by the explosion of their ship.
Piers Anthony's - Isle of Woman & Shame of Man ?
I believe the Manifold Time/Space/Destiny series by Stephen Baxter spans a larger amount of time then the Evolution book. The Manifold series go back to the begining of the universe and go till the very end(ish) of the universe. Although one might argue that it fits in with the Xeelee saga. His book Ring could also fit in there somewhat as well.
@papercup mixmaster: I think it was billions... "The first billion, that was boring..." But i didn't check either.
Greg Egan's DIASPORA starts a few hundred years in the future with a post-human software species, and ends several quadrillion years (maybe more, I don't have the book in front of me) later, in a different universe.
@PeteRR: That ought to be the winner..
@NefariousNewt: Asimov's story spanned much of one life of previous universe, and continues in this one today.
Comment on What Novels Span The Most Aeons? How about The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, if I remember correctly it covered a few thousand years from one soldiers perspective.
Comment on What Dune, even more so if you include the prequels by Herbert's son, and the final two books in the original Dune series by his son as well. Also, Ender Saga was mentioned... I agree, but really only if you include the parallel novels that extend *past* the end of the killing of the Bugs. I also think that the following series (Pigges, Angels, etc.) are *not* part of the Ender Saga, and Orson Scott Card has said as much himself. --Kyle Brady http://www.oneswirl.com/KyleBrady
Someone help me out here I can't remember the name of this book I read.
The story was of a guy moving backward in time fighting a Neanderthal who was moving forward in time trying to destroy the world. They kept meeting at certian points in history and he kept defeating the Neanderthal, until his last meeting with him in the ancient past where he realizes the Neanderthal is fighting to preserve/avenge his people (can't remember which). In the end (or begining for his antagonist), he's actually the one who gives the Neanderthal the ability to move through time and fight in the first/last place.
I read it so long ago I can't recall the name but I thought someone here might have read it.
The Many Colored Land by Julian May.
@brett_l: The "bobbling" stories were The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime. Those and Baxter's Xeelee Sequence were the first books to come to my mind.
How about Eternity by Greg Bear? That story has characters that go to the end of the universe, if I remember correctly.
@mattclary: Shucks, beat me to it, first one that came to mind when I saw the topic. Cosmic scope series, highly recommend it.
"Cowl" by Neal Asher. A time-travelling teenage hooker zaps from the 22nd Century CE backwards to the Pre-Cambrian Era with plent of stops anong the way. Also has a pantload of gruesome violence, a really nasty transhuman villain, and a giant monster that makes Dragon from Asher's Polity books look like a slightly cranky guinea pig.
Fun for the whole family!
hey dont forget the german "perry rhodan". it's big. since 1961 every week a new 80page booklet (#2431) and around 400 paperbacks. The main timeline centered around Earth starts 1971 and at the moment the are at something about the year 5000. but there are many cycles with timemachines and long(over more than one book) flashbacks. the last booklet i read played 70 million years ago...
Hyperion for sure. I love that series.
I know its been said, but you cannot leave Dune off of this list. The fact that it both spans multiple centuries and that many of the same characters are persistent throughout makes this one of the more interesting, aeon-spanning novel-series.
How about "THE FOREVER WAR" by Joe Haldeman???
"(gasp)... need... chart..."
I just started re-reading the Lensmen books a couple of days ago, so the whole Eddore/Arisia thing was uppermost in my mind.
Two Poul Anderson books come to mind:
The Boat of a Million Years
and
Starfarers
Neither is time travel related, but both carry the same characters through very long spans of time.
@DearEditor: I love your profile pic. You can tell what it is even this small.
And, hey, don't those stories span a few eons?
The World At The End Of time by Frederik Pohl. Through a combination of a significant amount of time spent in "cold Sleep" and the relativistic effects of travel near the speed of light the main character lives until near the heat death of the universe.
Also, I agree that the dune series should definitely be on the list.
There's a distinct human bias to this list. The Cheela in Robert Forward's Dragon's Egg evolve on the surface of a neutron star and live in a time frame about a million times faster than the observing humans. In the space of a couple days human time, the cheela evolve from a backwards hunter-gatherer tribal system to inventing space travel and passing human tech levels.
Also missing is Larry Niven's A World Out Of Time. The lead character travels to the center of the galaxy and due to relativistic effects, returns to earth three million years later.
@salamander42: Aha! I was trying to remember the title and author of that story earlier. It's a pity Pohl never wrote the sequel he was clearly setting up.
I went back and checked DIASPORA, and it "only" spans 90 billion years. Bah. Kind of a piker when compared to some of the other stories that have been listed.
The Algebraist by Iaian. M Banks covers a lot of ground, er.. space. especially the Dwellers.
@salamander42: Yeah, The World at the End of Time is what came to mind for me too. From the relatively near future to a universe 10^40 years old, it covers a lot of ground. And, in a way, you could say that it extends the life of the universe itself (at least a small part of it), so I'd say Fred gives our good friend Olaf a run for his money...
Another of Stephen Baxter's book, (I think it's 'Time') has a character that goes right to the end of time and beyond.
The Time Ships, Stephen Baxter's sequel to The Time Machine spans "the beginning of time" to a point around 2 million years in our future.
Some Dr Who novelizations may cover some long periods.
Brian Stableford: The Walking Shadow runs until 'the end of time'.
Comment on What Novels Span The Most Aeons? If you're looking for science fiction that really spans eons, there's one book that starts with the creation of time and matter, and ends with the obliteration of everything... The Bible.
Greg Egan is the only author I've read who has used time spans like Billion in a way that I could relate to at all.
In case no one else mentioned it, what about "The Saga of Pliocene Exile" and "The Galactic Milieu." It may not be a record setter as far as length of time, but it should at least be an honorable mention for a few million years.
@mattclary: Oops. I guess I didn't do a text find for the book name, just the series. Sorry!