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. Through in-depth philosophical and theological contextualisation of the German, French and British literary settings of the apocalyptic tradition around 1800, this book chronicles the transition from theism and deism to atheism and the 'Death of God' on which, Weninger contends, Shelley's novels - and hence modern science fiction in general - are premised.