The Last Man
About this audiobook
The 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.
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About the author
Mary Shelley (1797–1851), née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was born in London, the second daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, well known feminist, philosopher, educator, and writer, and William Godwin, famous English philosopher, novelist, and journalist. She was best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, written when she was eighteen and published when she was twenty-one. She was married to the Romantic writer Percy Bysshe Shelley.
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.
