0Mary Shelley founded modern science fiction with her 1816 classic Frankenstein. A decade later, she inaugurated the subgenre of post-apocalyptic sf with the less-lauded and less-known The Last Man. Shelley used the found-manuscript trope for this book, claiming to have discovered a series of seemingly connected stories on various pages in the Cumaean Sibyl's Cave, and stitched them together into this originally three-volume work. The story told here, of a far-future (late 21st century), is relat