The Drought of Time: A Woman’s Plague in Ballard’s The Drought

In Ballard's The Drought, Ransom is faced with two options: submit to femininity or become a shadow. He apparently makes the right decision for the future of humanity.  There are, evidently, worse fates than becoming nothing.  A man might become womanly. What Ballard has done is found a way to avert  what we gender theorists would call the real apocalypse.

The Last Man: Shelley’s Prolonged Apocalypse

What struck me about Mary Shelley's The Last Man was that unlike other apocalyptic protagonists, these heroes seem to learn nothing through their jaunt with the plague, and they have had about 300% more time to figure it out than others.