The Purple Cloud
The first great "last man" novel, published in 1901, decades before the genre became fashionable. When Adam Jeffson returns from a polar expedition to find a purple cloud has swept across the earth, killing every living thing, he becomes humanity's unlikely survivor. What follows is an extraordinary journey through a silent, dead world - Jeffson wandering the empty cities, scavenging the remnants of civilization, slowly losing his grip on sanity as years of solitude stretch into decades. He builds a palace to his own glory, crowns himself king of the corpse-strewn earth, and descends into increasingly dark psychological territory. H.G. Wells called it brilliant; H.P. Lovecraft praised its "actual majesty." This is proto-science fiction at its most ambitious, blending apocalyptic vision with a haunting meditation on what survival means when there's nothing left to survive for.
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“...the special quality of works of Art being to produce the momentary conviction that anything else whatever could not possibly be so good.””
— M. P. Shiel
“It was while I was seated in an easy-chair in the street the following evening, smoking, watching the combustion of this structure, that something was suddenly born in me, something out of Hell, and I smiled a smile that never man smiled. And I said: 'I will burn: I will return to London...””
— M. P. Shiel
“It was, therefore, mainly by the random workings of winds and currents that this fragrant ship of death had been brought hither to me. And this was the first direct intimation which I had that the Unseen Powers (whoever and whatever they may be), who through the history of the world had been so very, very careful to conceal their Hand from the eyes of men, hardly any longer intended to be at the pains to conceal their Hand from me.””
— M. P. Shiel
