This Element explores the 'Gothic sympathy' as it appears in a collection of 'Last Man' novels. It does this by dramatizing complicated relationships between a lone liberal-humanist subject and other-than-human or posthuman subjects that will persist beyond humanity's extinction.

1. Gothic sympathy and the last man; 2. Shelley's infectious despair; 3. Wells's vicious sympathy; 4. Matheson's dialectic of posthuman sympathy; References.