Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon

Greek dramatists aimed to show how a tragedy can unfold over the course of 24 hours—the so-called Aristotelian unity of time. Olaf Stapledon, in contrast, lets his tragedies play out over the course of four billion years. This book runs a bit longer than 100,000 words, which translate into approximately 5,000 sentences—so do the math: each sentence need…