Dying Earth (genre)

Dominant themes include world-weariness, innocence, idealism, entropy, heat death of the universe, exhaustion or depletion of many or all resources, and the hope of renewal.

Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's Le Dernier Homme (1805) narrates the tale of Omegarus, the Last Man on Earth.

Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826) details a future in which humanity is slowly but inexorably wiped from the face of the planet by an unstoppable outbreak of the Great Plague, killing almost everyone but the protagonist, immune to the disease's effects.

The last few millions of the human race are gathered together in a gigantic metal pyramid, the Last Redoubt, under siege from unknown forces and Powers outside in the dark.

[2] A work by the early French science fiction author J.-H. Rosny aîné, La Mort de la Terre (1910), deals with the last, scattered generation of an evolved humankind on an exhausted, desert Earth and their encounter with a new type of mineral-metallic life.

In some ways it reads like the inversion of his earlier Les Xipéhuz (1887), in which early humans encounter and battle an utterly alien and incomprehensible form of life.