![]() One by one, they fall to the plague’s wrath.Īll but Lionel, that is. Survivors huddle together in tribe-like factions. Around this time, a plague begins to spread across Europe and into the Americas. Still, Lionel does his best to care for his little sister.Įventually, Lionel goes off to fight in a war between the Greeks and the Turks. They grow up largely without parental supervision, or any kind of guidance at all. His parents die, leaving him to look after his younger sister. The story is told in the first person point-of-view, from Lionel’s perspective, and it’s mostly a flashback. The story is set in the future (well into the future, from the time when Mary Shelley wrote it). The Last Man tells the story of Lionel Verney, the adopted son of an impoverished nobleman. Shelley’s The Last Man was published in 1826, eight years after the publication of her most famous work, Frankenstein. The Last Man: the First Post-Apocalyptic Novel Let’s start by looking at this trailblazing work from the author of Frankenstein. My main purpose here is to further explore the origin and evolution of post-apocalyptic stories and novels. īut this isn’t a critique of Mary Shelley’s novel. Leave it to those 19th-century English writers to suck the life out of a thrilling genre. This might be the dullest and driest post-apocalyptic novel you ever read. The novel is called The Last Man, and you can read it for free through Project Gutenberg, Google Books, and other sources.Ī word of warning though. Today, most literary historians point to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as one of the first - if not the first - authors to write a work of post-apocalyptic fiction. (Or subgenre, if you like.) When and where did it all start? What was the first post-apocalyptic novel? Who were the first writers to tackle this weighty subject, and why? ![]() Recently, while writing a rambling love letter to the post-apocalyptic fiction genre, I began to wonder about the origins of that genre. We’re traveling back in time to Georgian and Victorian England, to discover two of the first post-apocalyptic novels ever written…
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