The Purple Cloud

Adam Jeffson, the narrator of The Purple Cloud, is recruited to join a polar expedition after the suspicious death of another crewmate. Jeffson and the rest of crew of the Boreal are hoping to claim a multimillion dollar prize for the first expedition to reach the North Pole. During the long voyage, Jeffson discovers an ominous purple cloud which transforms his Arctic adventure. Upon his return, he struggles to survive, especially psychologically, in an apocalyptically different world. This ebook edition is based on the 1901 novelization, which is an expanded version of the 1901 serialization and preferred by scholars over a later 1929 edition that made changes to the language. It's Shiel's best known work, and one of the earliest examples of the "last man" apocalyptic science fiction novel. A haunting, hallucinatory vision of the end of the world, The Purple Cloud pioneered the last-man narrative that would echo through science fiction for the next century. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)