Although operating within the realm of the speculative science fiction sub-genre commonly referred to as “the last man” story, The Purple Cloud is only partly deserving of being categorized according to the restrictions of genre. The novel belongs every bit as much to the genre of philosophical fiction or even to religious allegory as it does science fiction. What is essentially going on here is a modern allegorical updating of some of the greatest apocalyptic hits of the Old Testament with a special focus on the Book of Job within the guise of a pulp literary genre which really had not even existed when it was written.
Which is not to suggest that The Purple Cloud traces a line which follows every plot point of one of the Bible’s most horrifying stories. Few protagonists in literature can honestly compare with Job as a figure of unrelenting suffering and certainly Adam Jeffson does not belong to the tiny majority of those who might. While allegorical in theme far more than structure, the very name of the last man on earth in this apocalyptic story is highly suggestive. Adam situates this new original man directly as a descendant of the former inhabitant of Garden of Eden, obviously. The last name is intended to be interpreted symbolically as Son of Jehovah. The last man on earth becomes the first man on earth and in the process he must undergo a series of trials and tribulations that test his sanity and his devotion to the god of light. An addition theological layer is provided by virtue of Adam Jeffson becoming the last man on earth as the result of a global disaster wiping out humanity in retribution for his eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil which in this version literally takes the form of the North Pole. Jeffson takes on the challenge to become the man to reach the North Pole in order to claim an enormous inheritance and he is only able to do this because his fiancé kills the person who was originally scheduled to make the attempt. That this person was his fiancé’s own cousin alludes to another slaying of one family member by another: Cain and Abel. Early on a fire and brimstone preachers warns that attempting to make it to the Pole is tampering in God’s domain and there will be consequences to face and hell to pay.
That Jeffson is the only one left to pay that hell only serves to inflame the gnawing guilt over being responsible for the devastation in the first place and doing it with blood on his hands to boot. While not exactly subject to the horrifying misery which God subjected Job to as part of a divine wager with Satan, Adam is most definitely Job-like in the fact that his misery also makes of him a plaything of the forces of darkness and light. The theology of The Purple Cloud gets a little muddled as he faces a dualistic universe alone in which the governing powers come to be known as the White and the Black.
It would neither fair nor—given space considerations—possible to give away too much information about how Adam Jeffson overcomes the forces of the Black to embrace the forces of the White and transform from the last man on earth to yet another first man on earth, but just this quite bare covering of the high spots of the narrative should be more than enough to indicate that while The Purple Cloud certainly deserves its ranking by many as the first great science fiction novel of the 20th century, such a classification is almost ridiculously limiting. What M.P. Shield created with his novel is more than enough to allow it to be called the first great philosophical novel of the 20th century as well as the first great apocalyptic novel of the century.
