Featured on PDR in the collection Omega: The Last Days of the World (1894)

A great green comet made of lethal carbon monoxide is hurtling towards the Earth. Cue apocalyptic panic. So far so Hollywood disaster movie. But the similarity between Camille Flammarion's novel Omega (1894) and the film Armageddon (1998) — in which Bruce Willis destroys himself to destroy a comet before it destroys the Earth — ends at comets. The one in Omega misses the Earth by itself, albeit by a narrow, spectacular margin. It’s only then that the narrative heart of the novel begins to pump in earnest. Suddenly we shoot forward to the 100th century AD, when evolution has refined the human senses and supplied two new ones, an electric and a psychic, “by which communication at a distance is possible”. Several more million years…