Do you know much about the philosophy of the hypnotic trance? That was the relation between us--hypnotist and subject. She had been under another man before my time, suffered from tic of the fifth nerve, had had most of her teeth drawn before I saw her, and an attempt had been made to wrench out the nerve on the left side by external scission.
--This text refers to an alternate
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edition.
The Purple Cloud
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Review
"Fantastic, weird, macabre . . . It is imaginative, fascinating, convincing, as some dreadful nightmare. . . . A remarkable piece of work, . . . head and shoulders above the average tale of fantastic adventure." -- The New York Times Book Review
"Students of early science fiction will welcome the University of Nebraska's Press series Bison Frontiers of the Imagination. This imprint has so far brought back into print sixteen texts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including works by authors ranging from the well-known Jack London to the more obscure Mary E. Bradley Lane and J.D. Beresford. The publishers should certainly be congratulated in bringing The Purple Cloud by M. P. Shiel back to public attention once more. They have chosen to reprint the authors' own final expanded version . . . The 1929 version is vintage Shiel; the lush prose complements the epic theme and the grandiose and insane posturings of the pyromaniac protagonist.
"Students of early science fiction will welcome the University of Nebraska's Press series Bison Frontiers of the Imagination. This imprint has so far brought back into print sixteen texts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including works by authors ranging from the well-known Jack London to the more obscure Mary E. Bradley Lane and J.D. Beresford. The publishers should certainly be congratulated in bringing The Purple Cloud by M. P. Shiel back to public attention once more. They have chosen to reprint the authors' own final expanded version . . . The 1929 version is vintage Shiel; the lush prose complements the epic theme and the grandiose and insane posturings of the pyromaniac protagonist.
Shiel was the most eloquent of the immediate successors to H. G. Wells, and even fans of The Last Man by Mary Shelley might admit that Shiel's account of the journeyings of the last man through a dead world is one of the most impressive treatments of this theme." -- TLS, December 29, 2000 --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
About the Author
M. P. Shiel's (1865–1947) long, distinguished writing career included such works as Prince Zaleski, The Lord of the Sea and The Yellow Peril. John Clute is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia (winner of the Hugo Award) and coeditor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (winner of the Hugo and Locus Awards).
--This text refers to an alternate
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First Sentence
In May of this year the writer received as noteworthy a packet of papers as it has been his lot to examine-from a friend, Dr. Arthur Lister Browne, M A., F R C P.-consisting of four notebooks, crowded with those giddy shapes of "shorthand," whose ensemble resembles startled swarms hovering on the wing-scribbled in pencil, and without vowels: so that their deciphering has been no holiday. Read the first page
Front Cover | Table of Contents | Excerpt
In May of this year the writer received as noteworthy a packet of papers as it has been his lot to examine-from a friend, Dr. Arthur Lister Browne, M A., F R C P.-consisting of four notebooks, crowded with those giddy shapes of "shorthand," whose ensemble resembles startled swarms hovering on the wing-scribbled in pencil, and without vowels: so that their deciphering has been no holiday. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
By Martin Ellis
Format:Hardcover
make this book really worth reading. I find the descriptions of an empty world chilling, the familiarity with some of the places(in England) making the story at once believable yet terribly strange to me. Shiel is a romantic, bringing the story to an optimistic end for our poor protagonist (hasn't the poor guy suffered enough...!), even though it seems like Leda gets the short end of the stick once more(Victorian women were made of stern stuff!).In the end it is Shiel's rich and unusual descriptive style that really made this book stand out for me and I look on it as something original, captivating and totally refreshing compared to the lame language used in a lot of modern fiction.
By "jugadora"
Format:Paperback
This is the typical English disaster story in its earliest stages. Think John Wyndham, John Christopher, J.G.Ballard -- maybe the average English sf writer is a total loner and what he's really writing is wish-fulfillment!.... This book does have a quality all its own, vaguely reminiscent of William Hope Hodgson and I enjoy the old-fashioned textures. If you're at all interested in the origins of the genre, this would reward you on that score alone.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.0 out of 5 stars
19 reviews
38 of 40 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Fantastic Fossil!
Aug 16 1999
By Marian Powell
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
I call The Purple Cloud a fantastic fossil because that's what it is. That is not a criticism. I gave it 5 stars. It's simply that the fact it was written in 1911 shows -- both good and bad. Some of the science is off the wall, but I assume accurate for the day. The novel has a fantastic, hypnotic beginning set in the arctic. Like the jungle of Tarzan (written, I think, about the same time), this arctic landscape never existed, but it's a fantastic place of torment for the hero. Why is this book worth reading? The writing is hyptnotic. They don't write like that anymore. Dense, lush with an incredible poetic language, we follow the hero's solitary wanderings across an empty earth. This is a story of the last man on earth. This is a fossil, an archetype for all the later stories about the last man left alive on earth. A purple cloud came by and killed all while the hero was racing to the North Pole. What carries you along is the hero's interior as he undergoes one slow painful change within himself after another as he searches for another survivor, Does he find anyone? That's for the reader to learn. When you see the movies The Omega Man, The Quiet Earth, The Night of the Comet(this is a comedy) and all the other last man on earth movies, this was the great granddaddy of them all.
25 of 27 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Every Loner's Fantasy
Dec 8 1999
By Greg Hughes
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
A cloud of gas that smells like peach blossom kills nearly every everyone in the world. Adam Jeffson is the only man left. He spends years looking for other people, wandering through the remains of civilization.
One of the benefits of being the last man on Earth is that you would have the freedom to do whatever you want. The planet would be literally yours. Adam takes advantage of this. He becomes more and more eccentric, travelling around the world, burning cities to the ground. He wants to wipe out all trace of humanity, to make it look as if the human race had never existed. This could be put down to a symptom of Adam's growing madness - a madness caused by enforced solitude.
The premise is a good one. "The Purple Cloud" sounds like an HG Wells novel in style. The language is a bit flowery, but I didn't mind that. (The book was published in the early 1900's after all.) When you read this book you travel around the world with Adam and find the same thing - emptyness, stillness, silence. How would you cope?
In 1959 a film called "The World, the Flesh and the Devil" was released. It was supposedley based on "The Purple Cloud", but it had nothing to do with MP Shiel's story.
21 of 29 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
A post-apocalyptic tale from the early 1900s
Mar 3 2002
By Kim Boykin
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
No one has yet succeeded in reaching the North Pole, and a new British expedition is mounted. As our protagonist, Adam, returns from the arctic, all the humans and many of the animals he encounters are dead. Adam travels all over the world, looking for other living people and, understandably, going kind of bonkers.
I wanted to like this book more. Early in the book, Adam finds himself in many morally challenging situations, but he has these voices in his head that more or less compel him to act in certain ways, so the reader is prevented from really entering into any moral struggles with him. I liked the writing, but each place Adam goes is essentially like the rest--everyone's dead--and I kept waiting for something interesting to happen. Near the end, something finally did, but then I mostly wanted to slap Adam around for being so dense.
Maybe I'm just jaded from reading too many post-apocalyptic stories and that's why I'm not more enthusiastic about this book. If you're new to this sort of story, you might find this book to be a powerful exploration of loneliness and the meaning of human society and human life. A similar but much better post-apocalyptic novel is Cormac McCarthy's "The Road."
I wanted to like this book more. Early in the book, Adam finds himself in many morally challenging situations, but he has these voices in his head that more or less compel him to act in certain ways, so the reader is prevented from really entering into any moral struggles with him. I liked the writing, but each place Adam goes is essentially like the rest--everyone's dead--and I kept waiting for something interesting to happen. Near the end, something finally did, but then I mostly wanted to slap Adam around for being so dense.
Maybe I'm just jaded from reading too many post-apocalyptic stories and that's why I'm not more enthusiastic about this book. If you're new to this sort of story, you might find this book to be a powerful exploration of loneliness and the meaning of human society and human life. A similar but much better post-apocalyptic novel is Cormac McCarthy's "The Road."
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