The Last Human (a novel)

My sincere apologies to Mary Shelley. Her thoughts and her writing are of much better quality than mine. When I was writing the screenplay, I sometimes felt, with some guilt, that she was looking over my shoulder. And several times I thought I saw her in crowds on downtown streets, once getting on a bus where she turned and looked at me. This updated tale for our time I only humbly submit.

THE LAST HUMAN INTRODUCTION Mary Godwin was born on August 30, 1797 and died on February 1, 1851. She was the daughter of an outstanding champion of women's rights and liberation, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and a minorly successful publisher and author of, among other works, early science fiction novels, William Godwin. Her outstanding mother died as a result of giving birth to her. She herself almost died like her mother, giving birth to a child.

In the summer of 1816, Napoleon's empire had recently been defeated. British youth were suddenly free to roam continental Europe. Mary and her lover and future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley were some of them. Analogous to modern hippies, they holed up in mansions along the shore of Lake Geneva in Geneva, Switzerland and apparently generated considerable gossip.

When Mary was nineteen, she wrote the first version of her most famous novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus as result of a contest-of-sorts among a group of British friends who were living in mansions on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. It was worked up into a novel and published in 1818 by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mayor, & Jones. The title has been in continuous publication ever since. She later rewrote the novel, and this version was published in 1831 by Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley. She kept the same title, and this is the version of Frankenstein that we know and that is available in bookstores public libraries.

In between writing these two versions of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley wrote, among other things, an equally spooky science fiction novel that was about the end of the human species on the planet. She titled it The Last Man. The title gives away the ending. She began writing The Last Man in 1824 when men's three-cornered hats were still being worn and Thomas Jefferson was still alive. She finished it and it was published in 1826.

Devastating pandemic plagues were in recent human historical memory when Mary Shelley wrote her novel. A frightening and deadly plague had struck London in 1664-65.

Daniel Defoe's The Journal of the Plague Year, titled A History of the Plague in its second edition, had been written a century earlier in 1721 and was still being read. People knew that it could happen again.

Science was in style, and Mary Shelley was not only the daughter of a science fiction writer but attended lectures given by early scientists like Sir Humphrey Davy. She understood science. She could extrapolate the progress of science. She could understand the concept of biological warfare. Very likely the rumor that we hear about the Governor