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Literature / The Purple Cloud

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The Purple Cloud is a 1901 novel by M.P. Shiel. It follows Adam Jeffson, the Sole Survivor of an expedition to the North Pole, who discovers as he travels south again that nearly all human and animal life besides himself has been wiped out by a poisonous purple mist.

The Purple Cloud contains examples of:

  • 20 Minutes into the Future: The book takes place 'some fifteen or thirty years' into the future. The main difference is that most ships are propelled with liquid air, allowing Adam to travel the seas without a crew. (In real life, there was a lot of buzz around the idea of liquid air engines during the time the book was written, but they turned out not to be commercially viable.)
  • Burial at Sea: Adam returns from the North Pole to the ship Boreal, where he finds the twelve remaining crew members dead. For many months he keeps their bodies aboard the ship, where the cold preserves them, but once he gets far enough south that they start to rot, he throws them overboard.
  • Burn Baby Burn: Adam's main source of joy is burning and blowing up cities. He starts with London and goes on to destroy major cities all over the world.
  • Cassandra Truth: Before Adam joins the expedition, he hears a parson named Mackay give a sermon about how man is not meant to visit the Poles and if the expedition is a success, a terrible punishment will be visited upon the entire human race, like when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge. Adam listens raptly during the sermon, but the effect wears off as soon as he leaves the chapel.
  • Cat Scare: Adam returns to Peters' house in London. While trying to navigate in the dark, he accidentally touches a body, and as he pulls back, he stumbles over a table. Then he hears the unearthly voice of his fiancée Clodagh say, 'Things being as they are in the matter of the death of Peter...' Adam flees the house in horror. The next morning he returns to the house and discovers what actually happened: someone was listening to a phonograph, which became stopped up when the cloud hit. Adam knocked the phonograph off the table and jolted it into playing for a few more seconds.
  • Crowd Panic: Adam learns from discarded newspapers that the cloud originated somewhere in the south Pacific and expanded north and west at a rate of about four miles per hour, giving millions of people months to try to escape. In Norway and England, the bodies of Europeans are outnumbered by foreigners who travelled thousands of miles before the cloud caught up with them. Docks and train stations in particular are completely packed with bodies, some of whom were run over by trains trying to outrun the cloud. Adam also finds that some people tried to hide in blocked-off mines, only for panicked hordes to break down the barriers and let the cloud in.
  • Cynic–Idealist Duo: Adam and Leda debate whether to restart the species. Adam doesn't want to because humans were bad, but Leda says that humans had good in them and that if she and Adam raised their children with enough to eat and no bad influences, they wouldn't turn to crime. At one point Adam reads Leda the poem 'The Prisoner of Chillon' as an example of man's inhumanity to man, but Leda points out that at the end of the poem good people set the protagonist free, and says, 'If those who set him flee were so good when all the lest were cluel, what would they have been at a time when all the lest were kind? They would have been just like Angels!'
  • Dead Guy Junior: Adam names the young woman Clodagh, after his murderous fiancée, to remind himself that she is not to be trusted, that humanity is evil, and that giving in to his attraction to her would create a race as cruel and wicked as the one killed off by the cloud. Once she learns enough English to understand why she was named, she objects to being named after a poisoner. Instead she asks Adam to call her Leda, a name she saw in a book.
  • Death by Cameo: Adam finds the corpse of Shiel's friend Arthur Machen, who was trying to complete his last poem when the cloud reached him. Adam thinks about how noble it was for him to keep writing even though no one except God would read his work.
  • Depopulation Bomb: As Adam travels south, he finds increasing quantities of dead animals, mostly birds, scattered across the ice. When he reaches Norway and later England, he finds streets clogged with the dead. He only occasionally sees living animals, mostly either aquatic creatures or insects.
  • Dies Wide Open: Most of the cloud's victims died instantly. Adam finds ghost ships full of corpses who suddenly dropped dead in the middle of various tasks, all with their eyes open.
  • Due to the Dead: Adam visits his childhood home and finds the bodies of his mother and sister. He gives them a proper burial, unlike all the other bodies.
  • Dwindling Party: Adam sets out to the North Pole with a large crew. The plan is for the ship Boreal to get as close to the Pole as possible, and then for a small party to travel across the ice to the Pole. During their journey, Adam shoots a man who had dressed in a bear skin as a prank. Then another man challenges him to a Duel to the Death, which he wins. Then Adam leaves the Boreal with two other men, both of whom are killed by an upheaval in the ice. When Adam returns from the Pole to the Boreal, he finds that the remaining crew members have been killed by the cloud.
  • Fainting: When Adam reaches the North Pole, he finds it surrounded by a circular lake a mile across with a low, broad pillar of ice in the center. The pillar has unreadable symbols carved into it, and Adam gets the sense that the liquid in the lake is a living creature. Having reached the Sanctity of Sanctities which no living person was supposed to see, Adam faints.
  • Femme Fatale: At the beginning of the book, Adam is engaged to a beautiful but wicked woman named Clodagh who is always 'joking' about her admiration of Lucrezia Borgia and her desire to poison someone. Clodagh encourages Adam to agree to join the expedition to the North Pole so she can share in his wealth and glory. Adam agrees, but protests that the expedition already has a doctor, botanist, and meteorological assistant: Clodagh's nephew, Peter Peters. Shortly afterwards, Peters mysteriously falls ill and dies, leaving an opening for Adam. During the voyage, Adam dreams of Clodagh giving Peters poisoned water. He jerks upright screaming 'Clodagh! Clodagh! Spare the man!'
  • Fiction 500: Adam realises that this trope applies to him now that all other property owners are dead. He spends sixteen years constructing a massive palace of gold and jet with a self-replenishing lake of wine, and decorates the house with paintings he took from the Louvre.
  • First Time in the Sun: Leda is the daughter of the Sultana, whose husband had her locked in a large cellar when she was heavily pregnant. After the cloud hit, anyone who could have released her was dead, so she gave birth to Leda in the cellar. A few years later, she died too. Leda spent most of her first twenty years alone in the cellar, eating dates and drinking white wine from the stores. She is finally freed when Adam decides to burn down Constantinople, which causes part of the cellar to collapse. Adam finds her wandering the nearby forest, entranced by everything she sees. At first she's a Wild Child who Never Learned to Talk, but Adam teaches her to read, write, and wear clothes.
  • Fog of Doom: Adam concludes, based on the peachy odour of the fog and the yellow particles he sees when he examines the dust left behind under a microscope, that the purple cloud was either cyanogen or a product of cyanogen. Adam was far enough north that he only breathed a little of the fog, which made him violently ill but didn't kill him.
  • Framing Device: The book presents itself as the work of a seer who can look into the future and read as yet unwritten texts, as do two of Shiel's other novels, The Last Miracle and The Lord Of The Sea.
  • Godiva Hair: When Adam first meets Leda, she's naked, but her hair, which falls below her hips, is described as a 'garment to her nakedness'.
  • Go Mad from the Isolation: Adam's years of solitude warp his mind so badly that when he first sees Leda, his first instinct is to kill and eat her.
  • Grim Up North: During the expedition, the unbearable cold and the blank whiteness of the environment cause many of the crew members to fall into depression. It's especially bad during the polar night.
    Ah me, none but those who have felt it could dream of one half the mental depression of that long Arctic night; how the soul takes on the hue of the world; and without and within is nothing but gloom, gloom, and the reign of the Power of Darkness.
  • Humanity's Wake: As the years pass, all the bodies rot away, fields return to their wild state, and towns (that Adam hasn't destroyed) become overgrown.
  • The Last Man Heard a Knock...: Adam often imagines that he hears voices or footsteps or sees someone out of the corner of his eye, but after the first few years, he realises that he's truly alone. Until twenty years later, when he's walking in a forest near the ruins of Constantinople and sees an impression in a bed of moss and violets that could only have been made by a human or other large animal. Then he hears a faint laugh. He follows the sound through a thicket and finds a naked young woman studying her reflection in a streamlet.
  • Speech Impediment: Even after Leda becomes fluent in English, she pronounces her Rs as Ls. At the end of the book, Adam wonders if their children will have the same impediment.
  • Stopped Clock: Every clock in London has stopped at 3:10, when they became clogged with purple dust.
  • Tears of Joy: After several years on the Arctic Ocean, Adam lands on a tiny, deserted northern island. Not yet knowing that everyone is dead, he sits down in the snow and cries from relief at finally being on land.
  • While Rome Burns: Most of the victims Adam finds on land died in a state of panic, but a few died partying or writing poetry. He finds one pair of corpses locked in a passionate kiss.

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