I have been reading Olaf Stapledon - Starmaker, having read First and Last Men a year or two ago. He has an amazing imagination for 'worlds' - a Spengler-derived (I suspect) sense of civilisations that rise and fall, 'races' that come and go. First and Last Men was like a million-year history of Earth, and the many forms of human being and human society that develop, including a completely aerial stage of bird-men.  

With Starmaker the same impetus has taken his imagination into the far reaches of space, life-supporting planets in distant galaxies. But so far I would have say the worlds he imagines are rather anthropocentric -  they all have things like class, industrial revolution, racism, property, sex, religion etc. There's one where a piscine civilisation develops where the creatures evolve into boat-beings, with sails and rudders etc. Yet they still have factories and rich and poor. 

If they're not anthropocentic, they are Earthcentric - so there's yet another alien race where consciousness develops across flocks of birds, each bird is like a neuron in a sort of mind, connected by magnetic waves of information. So that is just starlings and their murmurations projected into some alien solar system. 

It's a weird combo of very imaginative yet also trapped within the conceptions and frameworks of our world. The classic fault-line of science fiction maybe - and showing how impossibly hard it is to conceive of the utterly otherly. Lem's Solaris and Fiasco come closest. 

Stapledon was left-wing and had political involvements, as did H.G. Wells another figure I have recently become fascinated by. In large part it's because of the insane, awe-inspiring amount of work these early 20th Century authors did - book after book, fiction and non-fiction,,, an endless stream of critical essays and reviews, often they had political involvements in various reform movements, did lectures and radio programs...  They were probably tremendous letter writers as well, giving the epistolary norms of the time.  

J.B. Priestley is another one. A book a year was the average rate. I guess they didn't have the Internet or TV to distract , and if they were married, they weren't exactly doing any domestic stuff or helping raise the kids. Still it's pretty extraordinary, I always imagine them rising at 7-am and cranking out 2000 words before lunch - a big chunk of the latest book, a review for The Listener. Then bunking off to go down the pub, walk the dog, or read. Pipe smoking all the while.