From about 1800 on, Western writers started to use the biblical story of the Garden of Eden to think about the end of the world and the extinction of the human species. This new type of postapocalyptic fiction presents the lone survivors of a catastrophic event that has devastated the human population as second Adams and Eves. Examples of such science-fictional reworkings of the Eden story include Jean-Baptiste François Xavier Cousin de Grainville’s The Last Man (1805), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The New Adam and Eve” (1843), M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901), W. E. B. Du Bois’ “The Comet” (1920) and Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1920). In this paper, I want to show how the Eden myth provides authors of last man and woman fiction with a blueprint to develop a small-scale type of storytelling that focuses on individualized and naïve rather than socialized and cynical encounter with the world. Last Adams and Eves resemble their biblical namesakes in being proto-social subjects that operate beyond the norms and rules of largescale human society. Authors of last man and woman fiction use the narrative device of the arbitrary destruction of complex human society anthropologically, to rethink and reinvent the human outside the polis walls. Catastrophism paradoxically serves a positive, even idealistic function in these stories, I argue, by temporarily establishing a spot-lit space in the narrative foreground in which characters experience genuine inter-personal and ecological intimacy, hope and love.