Shiel's lasting literary reputation is largely based on Notebook III of the series which was serialised in "The Royal Magazine" in abridged form before book publication that autumn as "The Purple Cloud" (1901). "The Purple Cloud" is an important text of early British science fiction, a dystopian, post-apocalytic novel that tells the tale of Adam Jeffson, who, returning alone from an expedition to the North Pole, discovers that a worldwide catastrophe has left him as the last man alive. Demonstrative of the speculative, philosophical impulse that pervades Shiel's work, "The Purple Cloud" engages with Victorian developments in the sciences of geology and biology, tending to home in on their dark sides of geological cataclysm and racial decline in keeping with what has been termed the "fin-de-siècle" 'apocalyptic imaginary', while ultimately putting forward a positive if unorthodox view of catastrophe.