Trivia / The Last Man

• Accidentally-Correct Writing: The spread of the plague is aided by the climate mysteriously becoming warmer and the intensity and frequency of storms increasing. The world seems to have made no effort to switch from fossil fuels, so this is disturbingly similar to the global warming we’re currently facing, even though that was discovered only near the end of the nineteenth century. By the end, when civilization has collapsed, the climate seems to return to normal.
• Trope Makers: As a Meta-inversion of the novel’s story being about the last man, Mary Shelley’s novel is itself among the first Apocalypse/Post-Apocalyptic Novels and is one of the earliest examples of modern apocalyptic fiction alongside Lord Byron‘s poem Darkness and Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s novel Le Dernier Homme (The Last Man), even classic novels The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells which both had apocalyptic themes were published over 60 years after Mary Shelley’s novel.