Sequels By Stapledon And Anderson

Any futuristic sf novel creates a unique future environment that becomes a possible basis for one or more sequels. Thus, in Olaf Stapledon's second Last Men novel, the Sun has been enlarged, Mercury, Venus and Earth have been destroyed and the Eighteenth Human Species inhabits Neptune. Because the Solar System had been transformed in precisely these ways in the first novel, that transformed system necessarily provided the background setting for the framing sequence of the second novel which is mainly about the Last Men's exploration of the past.

Similarly, Poul Anderson's first three Harvest of Stars novels had established major civilizational changes within the Solar System and also some extra-solar colonization. On this basis then, the fourth novel, The Fleet Of Stars, opens on Amaterasu, the colonized fourth planet of Beta Hydri. Beginning to reread this novel without having first reread any of its three predecessors, I rely both on my memory of earlier readings and on Anderson's text to make for comprehensible reading. 

Both Last Men In London and The Fleet Of Stars begin with a man and a woman seeking solitude on a beach but these accounts are in no way parallel or comparable. Stapledon's imagined future is dated in ways that Anderson's is not, yet.