 1976 edition (UK) | |
| Author | William C. Heine |
|---|---|
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction |
| Publisher | Pocket Book of Canada Robert Hale (UK) |
Publication date | 1974 |
| Media type | Print (paperback) |
| Pages | 253 |
| ISBN | 978-0-7701-0087-2 |
The Last Canadian is a 1974 science fiction novel [1] by William C. Heine about the adventures of Eugene Arnprior after North America is devastated by a plague. The U.S. release of the novel was titled Death Wind.
A 1970s Cold War apocalyptic story where Eugene Arnprior, an engineer living in Montreal, who after learning of a fast spreading airborne virus, moves his wife and two sons to an isolated cabin in Northern Quebec. [2]
Though the 1998 movie The Patriot is credited as an adaptation of William C. Heine's novel The Last Canadian, it shares virtually no similarities with the novel except the idea of a deadly virus. No character names, events, or even locations appear in both the book and the film. [3]
Eugene Arnprior had just received in the mail a notice of his Canadian citizenship when the plague struck. Therefore, he considered himself The Last Canadian.
James Graham Ballard was an English novelist, short story writer, satirist, and essayist known for provocative works of fiction which explored the relations between human psychology, technology, sex, and mass media. He first became associated with the New Wave of science fiction for post-apocalyptic novels such as The Drowned World (1962), but later courted controversy for works such as the experimental short story collection The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which included the 1968 story "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan", and the novel Crash (1973), a story about a renegade group of car crash fetishists.
Science fiction is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, extraterrestrial life, sentient artificial intelligence, cybernetics, certain forms of immortality, and the singularity. It has been called the "literature of ideas", and it often explores the potential consequences of scientific, social, and technological innovations.
William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982), and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel Neuromancer (1984). These early works of Gibson's have been credited with "renovating" science fiction literature in the 1980s.
Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of non-fiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, and two graphic novels, and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television.
Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction is a subgenre of science fiction, science fantasy, dystopia or horror in which the Earth's civilization is collapsing or has collapsed. The apocalypse event may be climatic, such as runaway climate change; astronomical, such as an impact event; destructive, such as nuclear holocaust or resource depletion; medical, such as a pandemic, whether natural or human-caused; end time, such as the Last Judgment, Second Coming or Ragnarök; or more imaginative, such as a zombie apocalypse, cybernetic revolt, technological singularity, dysgenics or alien invasion.
The Day of the Triffids is a 1951 post-apocalyptic novel by the English science fiction author John Wyndham. After most people in the world are blinded by an apparent meteor shower, an aggressive species of plant starts killing people. Although Wyndham had already published other novels using other pen name combinations drawn from his real name, this was the first novel published as "John Wyndham".
Thomas Coraghessan Boyle, also known as T. C. Boyle and T. Coraghessan Boyle, is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published sixteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1948.
Arnprior is a town in Renfrew County, in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario, Canada. It is located 65 km (40 mi) west of Downtown Ottawa, at the confluence of the Madawaska River and the Ottawa River in the Ottawa Valley. Arnprior has experienced significant growth in populations with the widening of the 417 Provincial Highway to four lanes. The town experienced an increase in population by 8.4% from 2011 to 2016, at which time its population was 8,795. The town is a namesake of Arnprior, Scotland, and is known for lumber, hydro power generation, aerospace, farming and its proximity to the National Capital Region.
Strange and exotic weapons are a recurring feature in science fiction. In some cases, weapons first introduced in science fiction have been made a reality; other science-fiction weapons remain purely fictional, and are often beyond the realms of known physical possibility.
The Patriot is a 1998 American action thriller film directed by Dean Semler. Starring Steven Seagal, the film is loosely based on the novel The Last Canadian by William C. Heine. Seagal's first direct-to-video film, it features him as a local doctor and former immunologist who races against time to find a cure for an active viral outbreak, the origins of which trace back to a militia leader who injected himself with a deadly virus.
Leon Eugene Stover was an anthropologist, a Sinologist, and a science fiction fan, who wrote both fiction and nonfiction. He was a scholar of the works of H. G. Wells and Robert A. Heinlein and an occasional collaborator with Harry Harrison.
The Scarlet Plague is a post-apocalyptic fiction novel written by Jack London and originally published in London Magazine in 1912. The book was noted in 2020 as having been very similar to the COVID-19 pandemic, especially given London wrote it at a time when the world was not as quickly connected by travel as it is today.
William C. Heine (1919–1991) was a Canadian writer, best known for The Last Canadian, a science fiction novel filmed as The Patriot starring Steven Seagal. Heine was also editor-in-chief of the London Free Press, London, Ontario, Canada. He established the William C. Heine Fellowship for International Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario.
Ellen Gable is an American author of Catholic fiction.
Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist, designer, and visual artist. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized the terms Generation X and McJob. He has published thirteen novels, two collections of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. He is a columnist for the Financial Times and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux journal, Dis, and Vice. His art exhibits include Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything which was exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam's Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and the Villa Stuck.
Inferno is a 2013 mystery thriller novel by American author Dan Brown and the fourth book in his Robert Langdon series, following Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol. The book was published on May 14, 2013, ten years after publication of The Da Vinci Code (2003), by Doubleday. It was number one on the New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover fiction and Combined Print & E-book fiction for the first eleven weeks of its release, and also remained on the list of E-book fiction for the first seventeen weeks of its release. A film adaptation was released in the United States on October 28, 2016.
Biological warfare (BW)—also known as bacteriological warfare, or germ warfare—has had a presence in popular culture for over 100 years. Public interest in it became intense during the Cold War, especially the 1960s and '70s, and continues unabated. This article comprises a list of popular culture works referencing BW or bioterrorism, but not those pertaining to natural, or unintentional, epidemics.
Aspects of genetics including mutation, hybridisation, cloning, genetic engineering, and eugenics have appeared in fiction since the 19th century.
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