Along with a general introduction there is a brief introduction by the compiler before each story.
Contents:
[1920]. H.P. Lovecraft [2010] -- Nyarlathotep / Lord Byron [1816] -- The Last Man / Anonymous [1826] -- The Comet / S. Austin, Jr. [1839] -- The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion / Edgar Allan Poe [1839] -- Earth's Holocaust / Nathaniel Hawthorne [1844] -- Into the Sun / Robert Duncan Milne [1882] -- Plucked from the Burning / Robert Duncan Milne [1882] -- For the Ahkoond / Ambrose Bierce -- The Crack of Doom / Robert Cromie [1895] -- The Star / H.G. Wells [1897] -- The Thames Valley Catastrophe / Grant Allen [1897] -- A Corner in Lightning / George Griffith [1898] -- Within an Ace of the End of the World / Robert Barr [1900] -- The Last Days of Earth / George C. Wallis [1901] -- The End of the World / Simon Newcomb [1903] -- Finis / Frank Lillie Pollock [1906] -- The Scarlet Plague / Jack London [1912] -- The Last Sunset / Edwin A. Start [1907] -- The Machine Stops / E.M. Forster [1909] -- The Poison Belt / Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [1913] -- Nyarlathotep / H.P. Lovecraft [1920].
Summary:
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.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.