The Purple Cloud

A brave explorer named Adam flies a balloon to the North Pole just in time to hide from a giant purple poison cloud that kills every single person on Earth except him. He wanders empty cities, feels super lonely and goes a bit crazy, burning stuff and sailing alone, until he finds the only other alive girl named Leda safe in a special locked house. They fall in love, have a baby, and promise to start a whole new world together, but Adam has to learn not to get too jealous! (378 characters)

In M. P. Shiel's visionary 1901 novel 'The Purple Cloud,' Arctic explorer Adam Jeffson reaches the North Pole by balloon on the eve of global catastrophe, as a massive purple cloud of cyanogen gas erupts from a volcanic fissure near Kerguelen Island, swiftly encircling the planet and asphyxiating all human life except for Jeffson, insulated in an ice cavern. Forewarned by chemist Professor Karrington's detection of the anomaly, Jeffson emerges into a world of eerie silence, where bustling metropolises like London stand frozen in time, their inhabitants mummified in final poses of terror. Overwhelmed by solitude, he spirals into manic euphoria, pillaging cities, igniting infernos as macabre spectacles, and sailing seas of corpses in a yacht, embodying the Last Man's descent into godlike isolation and primal fury. Years later, after traversing continents in existential torment, Jeffson discovers Leda, a young woman preserved in a hermetically sealed Parisian apartment due to her father's engineering. Their passionate reunion ignites hope for humanity's repopulation in a paradisiacal wilderness reclaiming urban ruins, echoing biblical Eden. Yet Jeffson's paranoia—fueled by visions of rival survivors—culminates in a near-tragic act of jealous violence, forcing a reckoning with his fractured psyche and affirming themes of redemption amid apocalyptic rebirth. (612 characters)