A century-and-more ago, while some people pondered the pinnacle that civilization had attained, others worried how it would come crashing down. Many of the era’s best writers gave shape to those fears in wildly speculative stories that envisioned unthinkable fates and spectacular dooms for our planet and its people.

The End of the World collects twenty-one classic stories and poems from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which the Earth’s end times erupt in fire, frost, flood, famine—and worse. Dramatic, tragic, exhilarating, and transcendent, the provocative stories in this volume offer thrilling accounts of global catastrophes, natural disasters, science run amok, and shocking cataclysms as only the most imaginative writers could conceive.

Stories include:

• Darkness by Lord Byron
• For the Akhoond by Ambrose Bierce
• The Star by H.G. Wells
• The Last Days of Earth by George C. Wallis
• Finis by Frank Lillie Pollock
• The Scarlet Plague by Jack London
• The Poison Belt by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle