This book is amazingly entertaining and, by coincidence, extremely topical. I wonder why it never became that popular worldwide. Perhaps it will soon.

Just think about the trouble we're currently having with that Icelandic vulcano, the tongue-twister Eyjafjallajokull.
What if those spiteful ashes were

H.P. Lovecraft lo tenía claro: ”La mejor novela de ciencia ficción escrita hasta la fecha.”

Siempre me han fascinado las historias que tratan sobre “el último hombre sobre la tierra”. ‘La nube púrpura’ (The Purple Cloud, 1901) ha entrado por méritos propios en mi olimpo personal sobre este particular

This is a strange and unsettling novel, quite original. It chronicles one man's discovery that he is the last man on earth. The central character, Adam, returns from an Arctic expedition to find that a purple cloud has passed over the surface of the earth, killing everything. The main plot of the no

Creepy, influential and accomplished… what else is there to say about Matthew Phipps Shiel’s 1901 landmark “last man on Earth” novel - ‘The Purple Cloud’?

Well, quite a bit really, if like me you want to exorcise its somewhat baleful shadow from your mind. Don’t get me wrong, this is a remarkable wo

Those who know me know that I self-identify as a loner. But a loner with a social side. So a novel about what it is to be utterly alone (as in everyone else in the human race has died off) could seem like the perfect segue to delightful flights of fancy. But I did mention I have a social side. Shiel

Set text for University

This was a strange apocalyptic novel which follows Adam Jeffson: the first man to reach the North Pole and the last man left alive on earth. Upon discovering that a peach-smelling purple cloud of poisonous gas has obliterated the world, he travels around the silent globe in se

Il folle di Babilonia, l'uguale del Cielo

“E adesso volavo in preda a una demente ilarità, perché una follia, una vertigine, si erano impossessati di me, finché alla fine, come sollevato nell'aria, pazzamente ballando, correvo, turbinavo, stringendo i denti che chiacchieravano e farfugliavano per con

La nube purpurea è alla sorgente della narrativa fantastica, c'è poco da aggiungere.
O meglio sì, c'è da dire che dietro una storia agghiacciante e crudele, dietro un misticismo folle, c'è anche un orgasmo visivo. Immaginare la nube purpurea è sentire l'odore di pesco che invade l'aria, è vedere un l

A very strange book combining an accomplished fin-de-siecle prose style with the cosmic horror of Poe, it possesses an apocalyptic savagery and fierce isolation all its own.

Immediately upon finishing The Purple Cloud I had to reread H.P. Lovecraft's novella "At the Mountains of Madness." Both stories deal with forbidden polar expeditions and world-shattering revelations. Where Lovecraft's story revealed a past and a cosmos where humans hardly signified, Shiel's is a re