This author-meets-critics book symposium engages with Eileen M. Hunt’s concluding book in her trilogy on Mary Shelley and political philosophy, The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination (2024). It brings together some of the leading scholars of apocalyptic political thought (Nomi Lazar, Alison McQueen, Ben Jones) alongside philosophers and political theorists (David Gunkel, Samuel Piccolo, Eileen Hunt) concerned with the question of the ethical relationship between human artifice and the plagues, real and metaphorical, that beset humanity and (...) the world at large. (shrink)

During the bicentennial year of Frankenstein in 2018, I began writing a series of responses to Mary Shelley’s other great work of ‘political science fiction’: the first major modern postapocalyptic...