Cat's Cradle
Hugo-shortlisted and permanently canonical: the Cold War's sharpest fable of careless science, and the source of 'karass', 'granfalloon' and ice-nine as cultural shorthand.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is The Last Man about?
In the late twenty-first century, a plague spreads inexorably across the globe while England's last generation — thinly veiled portraits of Byron, Percy Shelley and the author's lost circle — watch civilisation gutter out. Lionel Verney, the narrator, is left wandering the depopulated monuments of Europe, the last man of the title. Savaged by critics on publication for its morbidity, it reads now as the prototype of the pandemic-apocalypse novel and as a raw act of mourning by a woman who had outlived nearly everyone she loved.
Why it matters
One of the earliest end-of-the-world novels in English and ancestor of everything from Earth Abides to Station Eleven. Rediscovered and rehabilitated by scholars in the twentieth century.
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