The Last Man

Mary Shelley's The Last Man is an uncanny experience for us today. Set in the late 21st century after a species-decimating plague, climatic disruptions on a planetary scale, and a civilizational struggle between Western democracy and Eastern autocracy (with its ground zero in Constantinople, not far as the crow flies from the southestern oblasts of Ukraine), her apocalyptic story of Lionel Verney, who ends up being the last human alive, reads almost like a contemporary thriller. How Shelley could be quite so cannily prescient is a mystery explored in the new introduction to this volume by Stefan Mattessich.