The English writer Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) is usually credited with writing the first novels that successfully depicted the immensity of the universe. His books Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) have narratives that span the cosmos, as does The Avatar. Other precedents extend at least a far back in the past as 1776, when the Declaration of Independence made explicit the idea that people are born with the right to seek their own happiness and that oppressed people have the right to overthrow oppressive governments. The American view of the frontier as a place where people could truly seek their own ways in life has a long history in literature, including the novels of James Fenimore Cooper such as The Last of the Mohicans (1826) in which society is depicted as destructive of not only aspirations for freedom, but of the environment in which modern people had...