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Start giftingThe Last Man
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreThe Last Man is an apocalyptic, dystopian science fiction about a future Earth at the time of the late twenty-first century, ravaged by an unknown pandemic which quickly sweeps across the world.
It also includes a discussion of English culture as a republic, with Mary Shelley sitting in meetings of the House of Commons to gain an insight into the governmental political system of the romantic era. Within the novel, she dedicates it highly to her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley who drowned in a shipwreck four years before the book’s publication. It is also dedicated to her dear friend Lord Byron who adored the Greek isles which were eventually his place of death.
The Last Man was severely suppressed at the time. It was not until the 1960s that the novel resurfaced for the public as a work of fiction, not prophesy. The Last Man is the first piece of dystopian fiction published, yet it is debated among literary critics whether The Last Man can be classed as a dystopian novel as it excludes political themes of repression and totalitarianism of the novels of later periods such as Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World.
Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the daughter of pioneering thinkers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, eloped with the poet Percy Shelley at the age of sixteen. Three years later, during a wet summer on Lake Geneva, Shelley famously wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein. The years of her marriage were blighted by the deaths of three of her four children, and further tragedy followed in 1822, when Percy Shelley drowned in Italy. Following his death, Mary Shelley returned to England and continued to travel and write until her own death at the age of fifty-three.
Michelle Myers Berg trained at the University of Minnesota and the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. She has performed everything from the classics to live interactive theatre and has enjoyed over thirty years of doing voice over for radio and TV.
Reviews
“[The Last Man] in its refusal to place humanity at the center of the universe, its questioning of our privileged position in relation to nature…constitutes a profound and prophetic challenge to Western humanism.”
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