Mary Shelley's landmark novel that invented the human extinction genre and initiated climate
fiction imagining a world where newly-forged communities and reverence for nature rises from
the ashes of a pandemic-ravaged society now for the first time in Penguin Classics with a
foreword by Rebecca Solnit A Penguin Classic Written while Mary Shelley was in a self-imposed
lockdown after the loss of her husband and children and in the wake of intersecting crises
including the climate-changing Mount Tambora eruption and a raging cholera outbreak The Last
Man (1826) is the first end-of-mankind novel an early work of climate fiction and a prophetic
depiction of environmental change. Set in the late twenty-first century the book tells of a
deadly pandemic that leaves a lone survivor and follows his journey through a post-apocalyptic
world that's devoid of humanity and reclaimed by nature. But rather than give in to despair
Shelley uses the now-ubiquitous end-times plot to imagine a new world where freshly-formed
communities and alternative ways of being stand in for self-important politicians serving
corrupt institutions and where nature reigns mightily over humanity-a timely message for our
current era of climate collapse and political upheaval. Brimming with political intrigue and
love triangles around characters based on Percy Shelley and scandal-dogged poet Lord Byron the
novel also broaches partisan dysfunction imperial warfare refugee crises and economic
collapse-and brings the legacy of her radically progressive parents William Godwin and Mary
Wollstonecraft to bear on present-day questions about making a better world less centered
around man. Shelley's second major novel after Frankenstein The Last Man casts a
half-skeptical eye on romantic ideals of utopian perfection and natural plenitude while looking
ahead to a greener future in which our species develops new relationships with non-human life
and the planet--
