Harlan Ellison 14 min read

He is the last man on Earth, all right, but is he still a man? Two years after the blast, Seligman still glows with a steady off-green aura, a freak alone in the wreckage.

Harlan Ellison's 1956 story, an early work by the future master, is a haunting post-apocalyptic tale of radiation, loneliness, and what survives. Sharp, melancholy golden-age SF. Read it for early Ellison, a moody meditation on the last man and whether he is still human at all.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

14 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Wilimczyk