Across the 1930s, Olaf Stapledon produced three novels of unprecedented scale – 1930's Last and First Men, 1932's Last Men in London and 1937's Star Maker. Each spans billions of years, imagining potential trajectories for the development of humankind and its relationship to the universe at large. In so doing, Stapledon probes the limits of the novel as a form, testing the binding of the novel to individualism through rescaling far away from the lifespan of the individual, to cover the rise and fall of species and solar systems. Zoomed out to this degree, Stapledon's cosmic novels challenge the most basic interpretative apparatus. For Frederic Jameson, the scale of Stapledon's cosmic novels means that ‘human beings can scarcely even recognize themselves any longer’ (168), meaning, in his view, that the novels must ‘be allegorized […] in order to bring such figuration back to any viable anthropomorphic and Utopian function’ (168). In effect, for Jameson, the absence of individuated human beings in these novels implies a need to read as if there were individuated human beings, that being how novels are read. However, while there is mirrored exploration of the cosmos and the self in Stapledon's work, underlying this is not allegory, for Stapledon, but interfusion of humanity and cosmos. Not only, in his view, can human thought be transmitted, but moreover that possibility speaks for a universe structured, perhaps designedly, to make that transmission possible. Telepathy, taken by Stapledon as real, allows for human thought to exist outside human minds, and so, he finds, the universe must contain something human across its expanse. Stapledon's project, then, points at a core question underlying a literature of psychic connection: that of how we are to read the spaces between people if thought can fill them. Stapledon's optimism that the cosmos is innately knowable and accommodating to the human is a vision rejected by later novels of cosmic exploration offered by the likes of Naomi Mitchison, Stanisłav Lem and Doris Lessing.

Writing at a time when J. B. Rhine's experiments at Duke University were giving telepathy the veneer of academic backing, Stapledon follows the Rhines in taking as possible not only the emanations of psychic force, but the transmission of thought with content.