Review by Marian Powell   —   March 31, 2003

I once had a friend who hated science fiction. In conversation, she revealed her reason. Science Fiction stories suggested that man had a future. In her view, the human race was wholly evil and therefore had no right to continue. Leaving aside the question of what such an attitude says about the person who has it, her condemnation actually can be taken as praise. Science Fiction is about hope and about all the possible futures man can create for himself.

Therefore, when SF deals with the end of the world, the plot traditionally centers on a nice guy and a nice girl struggling to restart civilization. The problems they face are physical problems, obstacles to overcome or enemies to defeat. That theme is so common in end of the world stories it's a cliche. Even The Last Man by Mary Shelley (reviewed here) leaves hope for a fresh start for the human race. In all these stories, saving the human race is seen as something good, as the ideal to work towards. The adventures of the few survivors revolve around efforts to survive as in Alas Babylon, or to restart civilization as in Earth Abides or to defeat enemies who represent the forces of chaos and evil as in the Mel Gibson movie, The Road Warrior. All of these stories and the many others like them say that the survival of the human race is a good thing and a valuable goal to work towards.

By contrast, in The Purple Cloud, Adam Jeffers finds himself the last man left on earth. He had engaged in a race to be the first man to reach the north pole and, on his return journey, sees a purple cloud distantly on the horizon. Soon he finds dead birds that fell from the sky after flying through the cloud. Then he finds a dead polar bear and then his sled dogs die from eating the bear. Increasingly frantic, he makes his way to a port and finds everyone dead. The purple cloud has covered the earth in his absence, killing all animal life, leaving no one but him alive.

He is truly, absolutely hopelessly alone. No other last man on earth story that I've read has dealt so honestly with the effects of absolute isolation. Adam has the the entire world to himself and after a year or so he quietly goes insane in a very interesting way. London was his belovedhome. He decides to burn it down and then becomes addicted to destroying the world's greatest cities. Then he repents and decides to build a palace as a monument to man. Then he goes back to destruction for awhile. It's an interesting back and forth and it makes complete sense. He's a man caught in a cage even though his cage is the size of the earth. He comes to see himself as a kind of emperor and, even though he still searches for other survivors, he feels in himself the desire to kill them. Eventually, he sees a woman and his first reaction is that she must die. Instead he runs away but then he rages at fate. He understands the significance of his name, feels that he has been chosen to give the human race and second chance, and rebels.

Other novels have imagined the death of civilization as a good thing and that maybe man would be happier leading a simpler life close to nature. Earth Abides wrestles with the question and comes to an interesting conclusion. No other novel however, has questioned whether man has the right to survive. Undoubtedly, my friend Elaine would have agreed with Adam when he says that humanity consisted of "...putrid wretches--covetous, false, murderous, mean, selfish, debased, hideous, diseased, making the earth a very charnel of festering vices and crimes." In his eyes, the human race is evil, too evil to live.

It's a strange and powerful question for the reader. If you held the fate of the human race in your hands, how would you choose? If you could decide on the future of the human race, what would your decision be? Would you give humanity a second chance, a new start, or would you end it?

It's interesting that The Purple Cloud was written in 1901 over a century ago. Some people look back to the Victorian era as a golden age. In reality, it was a time of intense social criticism based on very real injustices. M.P. Shiel skips over society and goes straight for humanity's throat. Unfortunately having gone this far, he goes no further. The whole final section of the novel is rather lame and conventional. This is especially true if you happen to read the rewritten version of the novel. In the late 1920s, the author decided his writing style had been old fashioned and out of date and he smoothed out his story, polishing it and in the process, removed its intensity. I know because I happened to read that version some years ago and found myself losing interest halfway through. The more polished version makes you painfully aware of the thinness of the story.

A short time ago, while wandering through a used book store, I found the original version and my experience of it was quite different. The version I now have is from The Gregg Press Science Fiction Science Fiction Series, 1977 by G. K. Hall & Co. It has an introduction by a David G. Hartwell who has much of interest to say about Shiel's career. In his Introduction, he says, "The Purple Cloud is...one of the few Poesque science fiction novels. The Poesque approach mixes the rational and the mystical, and considers the physical and the metaphysical alik as the province of science."

Poesque, of course, refers to Edgar Allen Poe. M.P. Shiel, born in 1865, was an admirer of Poe's work and apparently imitated his style in all his early stories and novels. This made him a popular writer of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century. The style can best be described as intensely emotional and self-absorbed. The style suits this story perfectly for it can carry the reader along with Adam, wondering what will happen to him and to the human race. The more modern version unfortunately has the effect of making you want to grab him by the shoulders, smack him across the face and tell him to quit feeling sorry for himself. The older version keeps you intensely focused with the narrator so that you sympathize even when he's unsympathetic. You really feel what emotion he's trying to convey when he says things like "I felt definitely, for the first time, that shoreless despair which I alone of men have felt, high beyond the stars, and deep as hell; and I fell to staring again that blank stare of Nirvana and the lunacy of Nothingness, wherein Time merges in Eternity, and all being, like one drop of water, flies scattered to fill the bottomless void of space, and is lost."

I can't resist a few words about the author. There is a common image of science fiction writers as pretty dull fellows. It never was true but maybe to counteract that stereotype, imagine a science fiction writer born in the Carribbean to a mother who was a freed slave and a father who was so pleased at the birth of a son that he bought an island, crowned himself king and then when the boy was 15, passed the crown to him. That makes M.P. Shiel the last monarch crowned in the western hemisphere. By the way, I did not believe the story so I checked it out on the internet and it's true. (www.redonda.org).

So the author was a reigning monarch of an unihabitable rock in the Caribbean! He was a popular writer in his day but his work did not wear well with time. Only The Purple Cloud has lasted. If you read it, you will be taken on a very peculiar ride through the end of humanity, the end of civilization accompanied by a question. If you held the fate of the human race in your hands, what would you decide?