In a dystopian future plagued by a devastating pandemic, Lionel Verney, one of the few remaining survivors, navigates a world on the brink of collapse. As society crumbles around him, Lionel forms unlikely alliances and embarks on a quest for meaning and purpose in a desolate landscape. The Last Man is one of the first instances of dystopian fiction and solidifies Mary Shelley as a pioneer of science fiction and apocalyptic literature. MARY SHELLEY [1797-1851] was the daughter of philosopher William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstone­craft. In the summer of 1816, spent by Lake Geneva in Switzerland, her nightly conversations with poet Lord Byron and her husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, sparked the idea for Frankenstein.