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?

Really, it's impossible to recapture the era when something originated completely. The past is a foreign country, and all that. And the older the work in question, the more stuff there's likely to be that a 21st century audience would find bizarre or offensive. The best you can hope for is a kind of retro-futurist look back at the golden age.

(I was inspired to think about this by yesterday's discussion of the rumored John Carter movie, and how many people were violently opposed to a WotW-style update.)

How likely is it that film-makers will be able to reconstruct the look of a bygone era and make us understand the real-world issues that the old stories were dealing with metaphorically? (Even Watchmen, which only takes place 23 years ago, is going to have a hard time hauling our asses back into a Cold War mindset.)

And there's another dimension to the issue of filming Golden Age science fiction: stories set in the future, like the Lensmen saga or The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, both in development right now. Should movies of those books try to recapture a 1930s or 1960s vision of the future? How far should film-makers go in trying to pay a retro-futurist tribute to these classic works, maybe in a sort of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow style?

Instead of doing a poll, I'm just throwing the question out there. On one level, it's just a yes-or-no question: should film-makers try to be faithful to the eras when classic SF texts were written? On another level, it's a much more complex issue. What do you think?

Lensmen begins two billion years in the past, when a race of noble philosophers, the Arisians, have developed awesome mental powers. Invaders from another universe, the Eddorians, come to our universe because they detect that our galaxy is passing through another one. This galactic do-si-do will lead to the creation of countless new inhabited worlds for the Eddorians to conquer.

So the Arisians breed a new super-race of humans to defend the galaxy. And they give the Lens, which focuses thought the way a lens focuses light, to our heroes. (It's sort of like the Guardians giving a super ring to Green Lantern.) Only the Lens' proper owner can wear it without dying. The Arisians only give Lenses to worthy individuals, and if you try to get a Lens but aren't worthy, you just disappear.

In the end, the heroic Kimball Kinnison marries the ultimate product of the Arisians' billion-year breeding program, Clarissa MacDougall. She's the first female to receive the coveted Lens. Their genetically perfect offspring have amazing powers and become the Children of the Lens.

Not only is Lensmen the sort of sprawling saga that does badly in the movies (not unlike Dune), but its themes of eugenics and oddball sexism are obviously a product of the 1930s, when the series began. Can Howard and Universal make a non-sucky version? Probably only by changing it beyond recognition. Luckily, there's some precedent: fans complain that the anime version of Lensmen has nothing in common with the novels except the title and a few character names. Image from cover of Second Stage Lensmen. [SciFi Wire]