The Last Man (1826) is a dystopian novel by Mary Shelley. Dedicated to the recently deceased Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, The Last Man was controversial upon publication and was immediately suppressed by British authorities. Resurrected by dedicated critics and readers, the novel is now recognized as a pioneering work of science fiction and as the first work of dystopian literature to be published in English. The ambitious and semi-autobiographical...

Presents seventeenth-century author Daniel Defoe's fictionalized account of what it was like to live in London in 1665 when the city was in the grip of plague.

"Plague: A Very Short Introduction explores the historical and social impact of plague from the earliest times. Throughout history, plague has been the cause of many major catastrophes, from the Black Death of 1348 to devastating epidemics in China and India in the late 1800s. Today, Corona-virus serves as a powerful reminder that we have not escaped the global impact of epidemic diseases. This VSI demonstrates the influence of plague on modern notions...

"The planet Kerenza is attacked, and Kady and Ezra find themselves on a space fleet fleeing the enemy, while their ship's artificial intelligence system and a deadly plague may be the end of them all"--

A sweeping look at how the major transformations in history - from the rise of Homo sapiens to the birth of capitalism - have been shaped not by humans but by germs. According to the accepted narrative of progress, humans have thrived thanks to their brains and brawn, collectively bending the arc of history. But in this book, a professor argues that the myth of human exceptionalism overstates the role that we play in social and political change. Instead,...

In this twist on Edgar Allen Poe's gothic short story, a wealthy teenaged girl who can afford a special mask to protect her from the plague that decimated humanity in the mid-1800s, falls in love, becomes caught up in a conspiracy to overthrow an oppressive government, and faces the threat of a new plague.

"There is a cancer at the heart of the mighty Cerani Empire: a plague that attacks young and old, rich and poor alike. Geometric patterns spread across the skin, until you die in agony, or become a Carrier, doing the bidding of an evil intelligence, the Pattern Master. Anyone showing the tell-tale marks is put to death; that is Emperor Beyon''s law...but now the pattern is running over the Emperor''s own arms. His body servants have been executed,...

Eleven-year-old Gregor and his younger sister, Boots, return to the Underworld beneath New York City to find the cure for a terrible plague that threatens the life of their mother, as well as the lives of the people, bats, and rats who populate the underworld.

First the birds disappeared. Then the insects took over. Then the madness began . . . They call it Wanderer's Folly--a disease of delusions, of daydreams and nightmares. A plague threatening to wipe out the human race. After two years of creeping decay, David Arlen woke up one morning thinking that the worst was over. By midnight, he's bleeding and terrified, his wife is dead, and he's on the run in a stolen car with his eight-year-old daughter,...

In a dark future, when North America has split into two warring nations, fifteen-year-old Day, a famous criminal, and June, a prodigy and the brilliant soldier hired to capture him, discover that they have a common enemy.