Description: One writer, Mary Shelley, inaugurated two of the three paradigms through which human beings imagine, with panic or pleasure, the end of their species. Complementing her visions of a world-encompassing natural plague (The Last Man, 1826) and man-made technological self-eradication (Frankenstein, 1818), the third - and oldest - paradigm of how to depict humankind's demise is the religious notion of Apocalypse, God's Day of Reckoning.
