Earth Abides by George R Stewart
When Isherwood Williams, a geology student, descends from trip to the mountains, he finds that the majority of the human race has been wiped out by a disease. Making his way first from desolate San Francisco to the west coast and then back, he eventually finds a woman who has survived and they set up home and start a family, to be joined by a group of other survivors who do the same thing, thus starting a small community.
As time passes, the needs of such a community mean that much of the knowledge of 'civilisation' is abandoned and 'new' knowledge is found. Even Ish, the accepted leader of the group, and the one intellectual, comes to realise that, if they are not to sink back into a completely primitive state, then he has to rethink his ideas of what is important.
Written in 1949, as the world readjusted to the Cold War and the threat of a nuclear holocaust, Stewart's tale is an interesting one. Current attempts to describe it as an "ecological fable" (Amazon.co.uk) are nonsensical efforts to give the story an additional modern meaning, beyond simply being a post-holocaust tale - there's nothing in the book to suggest that the author has any great message, and certainly not an environmental one, beyond attempting to chart what would happen to various non-human species of animal once man was all but gone (which is really rather interesting). There is no sense that the destruction of so much of humanity could have been avoided - not least because Stewart leaves the question of what caused the disease up in the air. It could have been simply the weight of numbers of humans (as happens later to various other species, including rats); it could have been a government accident with biological weapons (see Stephen King's The Stand).
The story is interesting enough to maintain attention, but the characters, with the exception of Ish, are very much broad sweeps of the writer's brush. But for me, the biggest problem was the language. As the book progresses, it becomes bogged down in reverential tones that suggest a sort of pseudo-religiosity - this also comes up in Stewart's limited character development, with the use of Em (Ish's partner) as some sort of Earth mother and, indeed, in the suggestion that Ish himself becomes a sort of god figure. While the anthropological question of how societies develop gods would have been interesting, here it's just twee and actually distracts from an exploration of how humans might deal with suddenly being with society, without law and so forth.
It's not a bad story, but it's hard to see why it's hailed as a masterpiece in some quarters - and even why it features in an imprint called 'SF Masterworks'.
When Isherwood Williams, a geology student, descends from trip to the mountains, he finds that the majority of the human race has been wiped out by a disease. Making his way first from desolate San Francisco to the west coast and then back, he eventually finds a woman who has survived and they set up home and start a family, to be joined by a group of other survivors who do the same thing, thus starting a small community.
As time passes, the needs of such a community mean that much of the knowledge of 'civilisation' is abandoned and 'new' knowledge is found. Even Ish, the accepted leader of the group, and the one intellectual, comes to realise that, if they are not to sink back into a completely primitive state, then he has to rethink his ideas of what is important.
Written in 1949, as the world readjusted to the Cold War and the threat of a nuclear holocaust, Stewart's tale is an interesting one. Current attempts to describe it as an "ecological fable" (Amazon.co.uk) are nonsensical efforts to give the story an additional modern meaning, beyond simply being a post-holocaust tale - there's nothing in the book to suggest that the author has any great message, and certainly not an environmental one, beyond attempting to chart what would happen to various non-human species of animal once man was all but gone (which is really rather interesting). There is no sense that the destruction of so much of humanity could have been avoided - not least because Stewart leaves the question of what caused the disease up in the air. It could have been simply the weight of numbers of humans (as happens later to various other species, including rats); it could have been a government accident with biological weapons (see Stephen King's The Stand).
The story is interesting enough to maintain attention, but the characters, with the exception of Ish, are very much broad sweeps of the writer's brush. But for me, the biggest problem was the language. As the book progresses, it becomes bogged down in reverential tones that suggest a sort of pseudo-religiosity - this also comes up in Stewart's limited character development, with the use of Em (Ish's partner) as some sort of Earth mother and, indeed, in the suggestion that Ish himself becomes a sort of god figure. While the anthropological question of how societies develop gods would have been interesting, here it's just twee and actually distracts from an exploration of how humans might deal with suddenly being with society, without law and so forth.
It's not a bad story, but it's hard to see why it's hailed as a masterpiece in some quarters - and even why it features in an imprint called 'SF Masterworks'.
