James Elroy Flecker 43 min read

A charismatic figure proclaims the end of humanity: the Mutual Extermination Club, the abolition of children, the deliberate close of the whole human story, the last generation, by its own choice.

James Elroy Flecker's 1908 novella is a bleak, satirical dystopian and post-apocalyptic vision. Sharp, mordant, of its era. Read it for a striking pessimistic parable by the poet Flecker, a future movement that persuades humanity to end itself, in a dark meditation on despair and the will to extinction.

In its time

Published in 1908, during the 1900s, the scientific romance.

Reading it

43 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).