(ii) The Last Man by Alfred Noyes.
(iii) "But there is among us one, moving from place to place and company to company, whose voice all long to hear. He is young, the last born of the Last Men; for he was the latest to be conceived before we learned man's doom, and put an end to all conceiving. Being the latest, he is also the noblest."
-Olaf Stapledon, Last And First Men IN Stapledon, Last And First Men/Last Men In London (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1972), pp. 5-327 AT EPILOGUE, p. 326.
(iv) "...- the last man left.'"
-JB Priestley, "Mr Strenberry's Tale" IN Peter Haining, Ed., Timescapes: Stories Of Time Travel (London, 1997), pp. 34-43 AT p. 43.
(v) "The last man on Earth knew not that he was. Nor would he have cared."
-Poul Anderson, "In Memoriam" IN Anderson, All One Universe (New York, 1996), pp. 57-67 AT p. 59.
A fair sample of last men.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And of all these "last men" you quoted about, the most grimly evocative was the bit you cited from Anderson's "In Memoriam."
And I thought the bit from Stapledon on his "last man" being the noblest would be more correctly described as "it does not necessarily follow."
Ad astra! Sean
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