The Last Man

Mary Shelley founded modern science fiction with her 1816 classic Frankenstein. A decade later she inaugurated the subgenre of post-apocalyptic sf with the less-lauded and less-known The Last Man. Shelley used the found-manuscript trope for this book claiming to have discovered a series of seemingly connected stories on various pages in the Cumaean Sibyls Cave and stitched them together into this originally three-volume work. The story told here of a far-future (late 21st century) is related by the last man the sole survivor of a planet-wide plague that has brought an end to human civilization. The Last Man was published during a more optimistic time and arrived on the scene to poor reviews and poor sales it was a novel out of time. It languished for a century and a half until its scholarly rediscovery in the 1960s which had its own pessimistic outlook. Now in an era where global disaster through causes seen or unforeseen becomes increasingly plausible Shelleys tale of the stormy and ruin-fraught passions of man finds a new home and a new audience. The Last Man is published here complete and unabridged in one-volume with Shelleys own footnotes and introduction. Mary Wollsteonecraft Godwin was born in 1797 the daughter of author Mary Wollstonecraft (who wrote Vindication of the Rights of Woman) and radical philosophy William Godwin. Raised by her father following her mothers early death her education came through contact with her fathers intellectual circle and her own reading. She met poet and author Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1812 married him in 1814 and in response to a bet among her husbands circle of friends wrote Frankenstein in 1816. Mary bore four children three of whom died in infancy. Her husband died in 1822 and she returned to England with her surviving son to support herself as a writer of novel short stories and travelogues and as the editor of her husbands works. She died in 1851.