The Last Man
Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, wrote the apocalyptic novel The Last Man in 1826. Its first person narrative tells the story of our world standing at the end of the twenty-first century and - after the devastating effects of a plague - at the end of humanity. In the book Shelley writes of weaving this story from a discovery of prophetic writings uncovered in a cave near Naples. The Last Man was made into a 2008 film.
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What Hacker News says
- The silly version of Frankenstein almost kept me from reading this excellent book. After finally reading it this year, I was irked that I had only known Hollywood's cheesy version for so long. Here are some of the major misconceptions:
1. The monster is not called Frankenstein. Frankenstein is the Doctor.
2. The monster is not a bumbling fool but rather extremely intelligent.
3. There is no definite description of the appearance of the monster in the book and certainly no bolts in the neck.
4. It is also unclear how the monster was animated. There is no lightning rod and no "it's alive" moment.
Frankenstein is at or near the top of many best of all time book lists. Shelly's The Last Man is also one of my favorites.
- I tend to rate Mary Shelley as the earliest sci-fi author. Not just for 'Frankenstein', but also for 'The Last Man'.
I would strongly recommend tackling Issac Asimov's 'Foundation' series as one of the all time classics.
Another pretty early one to take a look at is 'We' by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It was the first book banned by the USSR and was the inspiration for Orwell's 1984.
- Both Star Trek and Star Wars treat high technology instrumentally as a source of excuses to cause, allow and embellish the desired plot. Exploration of science and technology is rarely important compared to exploration of characters and adventures.
In both settings artificial gravity reduces visual weirdness and special effects costs; ST replicators minimize boring and challenging starship logistics; SW mass cloning allows uniform, socially rootless and irrelevant armies in an absurdly varied universe; ST dilithium crystals are always available as something crucial to repair and acquire whenever a complication is needed or the Enterprise needs to be immobilized; SW hyperspace travel allows hopping between planets rather casually with enough flight time to offer interludes, while the "technically" similar ST warp drive is used more often to meet other ships in deep space and never to land on planets; and so on as the writers find convenient.
In science fiction, on the other hand, the story follows from a coherent and usually simple speculative premise: what if ants went to war with humans? What if someone had a submarine? What if a man became invisible, or extraordinarily fast? What would it be like to fly to the moon? What would it be like to spend generations of subjective time in a generation ship? Given the empirically proven forbidden magical knowledge contained in the Necronomicon, who might be interested enough in it to break into the Miskatonic University library? What kind of trouble would the Three Laws of Robotics prevent or not, and what alternatives to them might be considered?
Soft science fiction mixes rigorous speculation with other priorities but still takes it seriously. For example, long-range balloon travel in Mary Shelley's The Last Man is an atrophic and naive earnest extrapolation of the bleeding edge technology of the time that is clearly meant to establish that the tragic story is a vision of a far future (which, despite this little touch, still looks exactly like the 1820's); the balloon flights in Verne are much harder science fiction because technology is the main subject.
On the other hand fantasy makes the speculative elements arbitrary and therefore magical, hopefully compensating this sin of bullshitting with symbolism and consistency, a good story, etc.
