In 1887, the secret of immortality is discovered and administered to the Gerd Essenwien, the 12-year-old son of the discoverer. It becomes apparent that it also stops aging as well, trapping him in a boy’s body. Shortly after this event, a serum is discovered to stop all bacteriological disease, a universal vaccine. Both are adopted widely and having children falls out of fashion. People still die of accidents and heart disease and cancer, so the population of the Earth begins to dwindle. When humanity panics over the looming end of the human race, they find that the youngest women are still over two hundred years old and infertile.
Gerd Essenwein is eventually the last man on Earth, keeping in touch via shortwave with the last woman on Earth, a Japanese woman with the apparent age of 16. She travels by bicycle to Europe so they can meet (it takes her eleven years.) When he shows her that he cannot perform sexually, she returns to Japan and disappears from shortwave contact a few years later. Aliens arrive and ask Gerd to come with them when they find he is the last man on Earth. Gerd refuses and they leave.
ISFDB bibliography
Showing posts with label Damon Knight. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Damon Knight. Show all posts
10/9/06
Bibliography: Brians, Paul
Brians, Paul. Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895-1984.
Shaggy God
"An important subcategory of the post-holocaust love story is the Adam and Eve formula, in which the two survivors of a holocaust must mate to ensure the continuation of the human race. The genre is a large one, including many stories not depicting a nuclear war, and was well established long before the atomic era. One of the best known early examples is Alfred Noyes's 1940 novel No Other Man, mercilessly satirized in Ronald Duncan's 1952 atomic test catastrophe novel The Last Adam (London: Dobson). Satiric treatment of the formula also figures in Damon Knight's "Not With a Bang" (1950; note the punning title), which is little more than a joke criticizing female prudishness. At the end of the story the last man stands paralyzed and dying in a men's room while the last woman waits outside, too proper to enter and see what is taking him so long."
The Last MAN on Earth
"Another way in which atomic warfare is connected with sexuality is in its effect on reproduction. In The Man with Only One Head (1955), Densil Barr depicts universal sterilization from cobalt-bomb-induced radiation as creating a frenzy of illicit copulation (one would suppose no contraception was available in 1955); adultery is consequently made a capital crime, despite the fact that 43 percent of the married population is indulging. Barr satirizes the values of his time by stating that men would rather see the human race die out than have their wives impregnated by the one man left fertile on Earth."
Shaggy God
"An important subcategory of the post-holocaust love story is the Adam and Eve formula, in which the two survivors of a holocaust must mate to ensure the continuation of the human race. The genre is a large one, including many stories not depicting a nuclear war, and was well established long before the atomic era. One of the best known early examples is Alfred Noyes's 1940 novel No Other Man, mercilessly satirized in Ronald Duncan's 1952 atomic test catastrophe novel The Last Adam (London: Dobson). Satiric treatment of the formula also figures in Damon Knight's "Not With a Bang" (1950; note the punning title), which is little more than a joke criticizing female prudishness. At the end of the story the last man stands paralyzed and dying in a men's room while the last woman waits outside, too proper to enter and see what is taking him so long."
The Last MAN on Earth
"Another way in which atomic warfare is connected with sexuality is in its effect on reproduction. In The Man with Only One Head (1955), Densil Barr depicts universal sterilization from cobalt-bomb-induced radiation as creating a frenzy of illicit copulation (one would suppose no contraception was available in 1955); adultery is consequently made a capital crime, despite the fact that 43 percent of the married population is indulging. Barr satirizes the values of his time by stating that men would rather see the human race die out than have their wives impregnated by the one man left fertile on Earth."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
