Earth Abides
by George R. Stewart
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Book Reviews of Earth Abides
Book Review: A New Season for Earth and Man
Summary: 5 Stars
I think I first read this book when I was about fourteen, and it made a powerful impression on me then, so much so that I could still remember almost the entire story some forty years later. But, given that youthful impressions are sometimes not all that accurate, I decided to re-read this and see if it is really as good as my memory said. It is.
The scenario is simple: what would happen if a new virus suddenly wipes out almost everyone? And this is no ordinary disease, as the fatality rate is incredibly high, leaving (at most) perhaps one person in 100,000 alive. With this as a starting point, Stewart looks at his new world though the eyes of Isherwood Williams, who is something of a loner, intellectual in outlook, an observer, rather than a doer. This outlook stands him in good stead in the immediate aftermath of the great die-off, as it gives him a reason to live, to observe just how the Earth will react to the sudden removal of that pesky, environment-changing species called man. And reaction there is: ants, rats, dogs, cattle, cats, wheat, corn - each has its fortunes drastically impacted. Many of these changes are detailed in some interstitial material that is told from an omniscient viewpoint, very reminiscent of the similar technique Steinbeck used in The Grapes of Wrath, and perhaps these sections are just as powerful as Steinbeck's, though they don't have quite the great prose-poetry that Steinbeck had. By detailing these changes in this manner, Stewart makes his scenario both highly believable and very immediate.
But Stewart's main focus is what happens to the very few people that are left. Ish eventually finds some other survivors, most especially the lady who will become his wife, Em, and here we find some buried social commentary that probably made this book quite controversial when it was first published in 1949, as Em is not white, a point made very subtly and never directly stated, as one of the clear messages here is that race, looked at from the standpoint of long-term survivability, is of absolutely no consequence.
Another point of departure for this work from the standard disaster scenario is that there is no world-saving hero; mankind cannot get back on its feet in short order and re-establish civilization, and that the great majority of survivors would necessarily live off the leavings of the old civilization, for the simple reason that it is far easier to open a can of tomatoes than grow your own. That this same attitude of doing the minimum to survive would carry over into other aspects of post-disaster living, so that there would be little or no effort to teach children how to read or fix some of civilization's infrastructure as it slowly fails, such as electrical power or water supplies, is perhaps a debatable point, but Stewart's depiction makes this very logical and believable. Right alongside of this portrayed attitude is what do people do when there no longer is any `law': what is right and wrong and how do people cope with actions by some that threaten the survivability of the Tribe? The answer Stewart shows to this problem may disturb some people, but it strikes at the heart of the whole concept of `for the good of the many' and what personal moral responsibility is.
Some have commented that this book is `dated', and there is some of this, as tube radios and phonograph turntables show just where technology was at the time of publication, but any serious reader will quickly realize that the specifics of the technology are immaterial to the thrust of this work. And perhaps somewhat ironically, there is one item detailed here that is as current as tomorrow's headlines, when Ish pulls down a book from the University shelves which details imminent climate change (keep in mind when this written!) and decides that this, too, is irrelevant to his current needs - the climate will be whatever it is, and mankind will just have to live with it.
The last section of this book paints a very powerful picture of just how gods, legends, and social mores become ingrained in a society. Perhaps it's not the prettiest picture of where mankind is headed or how well he'll deal with problems, but it is remarkably plausible and will produce strong feelings of melancholy, despair, and (perhaps) subdued pride.
A remarkable work which avoids just about all the pitfalls of typical post-apocalyptic works, and has a great deal to say about just what makes man man and what is truly relevant to the daily business of living.
---Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
Book Review: The End of Ish as I Knew Me
Summary: 2 Stars
This 1948 novel is one of the earliest explorations of the theme of a doomsday plague. Our hero, named Ish, is a young college student who returns from the mountains to find out that an airborne virus has wiped out over 99.99 percent of the population in remarkably tidy fashion, leaving behind only a handful of survivors.
It is hard to rate a book like this. On the one hand, it is well written, and, despite a few implausible suppositions, manages to explores a number of interesting ideas and insights.
But there is a big problem: Our hero, Ish, is completely wicked -- an amoral, self-worshiping, arrogant, elitist monster; and the author seems to be on his side. I understand that books of this type tend to be misanthropic fantasies, and even understand the appeal. But I cannot stomach Ish.
Ish is not particularly upset by the tragedy, since he never had much use for his fellow man. Still, his first reaction is to contemplate suicide. He can think of no reason to live. How this differs from his outlook before the tragedy is unclear, but he apparently bemoans the loss of superior human specimens who are mirror images of himself -- detached, scientific, rational, and essentially amoral. He ultimately rejects suicide, only because he decides it might be scientifically interesting to observe the continuing downfall of humanity. That he might try HELPING his fellow survivors never occurs to him.
It immediately occurs to him that there must be other survivors, but just as quickly concludes that the shock of the tragedy will soon destroy most of them as well, because of their difficulty adapting. He calls this theory "secondary kill". On his first day of searching, he finds no less than 5 survivors, but immediately writes them off as not worth saving, according to his quasi-darwinian "secondary kill" theory. He then drives entirely from the west coast to the east coast and back, without ever finding a single human being who he thinks deserves life. No matter how many survivors he finds, he persists in regarding himself as the last surviving human. Only Ish counts. (Again, how this differs from his outlook before the tragedy is unclear).
He then returns to his California home and sits around eating out of cans and reading books. While reading the New Testament, he ponders the fact that Judeo-Christian morals are obsolete, since he has no neighbors to love. My jaw dropped. What about all those traumatized survivors he abandoned to die according to his detached and rational "secondary kill" theory?
But then he starts reading the Song of Solomon, and realizes he wants a woman. Almost immediately, a beautiful woman, a fellow elitist, drops out of the blue and into his bed. Soon a handful of survivors, who Ish persists on regarding as inferior beings, gather around them and form a sort of a tribe. This is one of the more implausible aspects of the novel. Ish a leader? He may have all of Hitler's faults, but he has none of his virtues.
Happily for Ish, all of the other characters (except for one man whom Ish murders) have personalities even less forceful than his own. He arranges to marry off all the tribe's children, including his own daughters, at the far-too-young and not-entirely-willing age of 13, without a peep of protest from his own wife or anyone else. (Incidentally, this is a terrible scheme if you want to preserve a high level of culture, which Ish claims is his goal). Nor does anyone protest his scheme to murder a newcomer for the crime of having a venereal disease. The only person he has any regard for is one of his many sons, who he thinks of as a mirror image of himself. But then tragedy strikes, dashing Ish's hopes for the preservation of Ish-manity.
Very early on, Ish remarks, almost out of the blue, that he does not want to become a god. This is such a strange thought that I think he doth protest too much. In any event, it is virtually all he achieves. For instance, his efforts as schoolmaster, though failing to teach, succeed in instilling superstitious reverence for himself in his pupils.
Book Review: "Men go and come, but earth abides."
Summary: 4 Stars
A few days ago I listened to a lecture by renown geneticist Francisco Ayala. He discussed a simple experiment demonstrating Darwin's concept of natural selection. If you take a test tube holding 10 cc of the bacterium E. coli, it will hold approximately 20 billion organisms. Adding a drop of a modern antibiotic like gentamicin into the tube will result in the survival of some 200 cells (out of the original 20,000,000,000). However, since those cells are now gentamicin resistant, in only a few days the tube will again hold 20 billion (now gentamicin resistant) E. coli cells. The only E. coli cells that made additional copies of themselves were the ones with the mutation for gentamicin resistance. Evolution has occurred.
What happens when the human race is hit with a viral "antibiotic"? What happens when a population of 6 billion humans is suddenly, within a week, turned into a population of 600, scattered across the planet?
One thing is for sure... the population won't rebound in a few days.
College student Ish Williams is one of the survivors. Although he thinks it is because he suffered a rattlesnake bite during the plague, unless all the other survivors also had a similar snakebite (even in places rattlesnakes don't exist), he probably already possessed whatever mutation that made him plague resistant.
From his home in the San Francisco Bay region, he drives across country, looking for survivors while seeing first hand the beginnings of civilization's decay. As for survivors, they are rare indeed. But some people, like Ish, did survive.
Back in the San Francisco Bay area, Ish and a few companions begin to rebuild civilization. But when the survivors don't include an engineer, a physician, a teacher, a scientist, or even a farmer, our "survival knowledge" is limited indeed.
Author George Stewart wrote this book in 1949, so a number of the technological issues are quite dated. Nevertheless, survival isn't easy. Ish and others have to deal with exploding populations of wild cattle, and rats, and dogs. They have to find something besides canned food. They have to ensure water is still available. And they have to teach the children, so they don't forget.
"Yes, [Ish] reluctantly concluded, this matter of the children's beliefs was extremely serious. In the Old Times [pre-plague] the beliefs held by the children of any family or small group of families might be momentous enough, but still those children on growing up would come into contact with other beliefs and make adjustments. Besides, there had been a great, even overwhelming, mass of tradition - the tradition of Christianity, or of Western civilization, or of Indo-European folkways, or of Anglo-American culture. Call it what you wished, it was still so tremendous that you might say it was omnipotent, for good or bad absorbing the individual.
But now their little community had lost much of the tradition. Part of it had been lost because no seven survivors... could preserve and transmit all of it. Part had been lost because for so long a time there had been no big children to pass on the tradition to the small ones. The oldest of the younger generation had been taught games by their parents, not by older comrades. The community should therefore be plastic to an unprecedented degree. This was an opportunity, but also a responsibility - and a danger.
...Now, more certainly even than before, he knew that he had the opportunity to be the founder of a religion for a whole people. What he told the children in school, they would probably believe. He could insure their memory of it by mere insistence and iteration. He could tell them that the Lord God created the earth in six days, and found it good. They would believe. He could tell them a local Indian legend that the world was the work of Old Man Coyote. They would believe" (p. 222-223).
Sobering, and interesting. Stewart ends by writing, "Men go and come, but earth abides" (p. 345).
Book Review: Ish Is Actually Adept
Summary: 4 Stars
George R. Stewart's main character isn't as helpless as a quick glance at the first page reviews may imply. He is a character that is able to do significant hands-on tasks such as auto mechanics, hunting, lead a small surviving group of humanity, and teach and school children. He is just not an expert in these fields, which isn't too surprising for a random person, but in many cases his knowledge and aptitude turned out quite useful. It's just that when one is dealing with what could be the last of humanity, a lot is needed for the human race to go on. Written in 1949, Stewart's Earth Abides makes one reminiscent of that time and of what was available then. Stewart takes some time to describe what happens to the other mammals, although I'm not sure if the prey vs. predator equilibrium was a new idea at that time since he does elaborate on it quite a bit. His visions of primitive and/or overly religious societies in humanity's backslide in certain areas will be quite well known to those that follow more modern writings and films of `the end of the world' genre.
The setting takes place in three time eras, one right after the disease that wipes out most of humanity, one 22 years later, and the last at over 42 years later-probably 50+ years. The first takes place more or less in the time the book was published, 1949. The other one has to realize would then be taking place in what would then be 1971. Now Stewart makes the 22 years go by fairly quickly, but thinking about what happened in the real world between 1949 and 1971, the James Dean era, the hippy movement, Vietnam War, the start of the oil crunch, makes one realize a lot can happen in 22 years as opposed to what Stewart writes. What Stewart seems more to be writing about, isn't the end of the world, but the laziness of man, which eventually becomes a downfall for some and something that needs to be overcome. Now I don't know if he was writing about something he saw in his workplace or in the armed forces if he was in WWII, but he does take it to an extreme. Sure some people may just be tired of an 8 hour workday, when there's so many aspects of life out there, but it's hard to believe one would maintain an utterly lazy lifestyle for 22 years, when there wasn't any need to worry about food for the short term, or how one's retirement plans were going, and instead, without these shackles on one's mind in terms of worrying about the future, not feel free or have interest about how to rebuild society. There are some groups of people in the real world that if you get two of them together, they'll come up with three visions for the future as opposed to almost no visions by the characters of the novel.
The book is also a bit too ideal. Maybe it really was like this in 1949, but the world as I've seen it would have the character's in marital disputes, the usual utterances of "you suck," some saying to get rid of old man Ish, let's move our group, this in no good, that is no good, and so on. However, what makes this novel different from, say the usual post-nuclear-war book, isn't just healthy young men surviving, but a random group of people surviving that somehow have immunity to the disease (although one could say those that have built an immunity by being bitten by a snake represents a certain group of people and that would skew the randomness that Stewart tried to set up in the survivors), so his vision of the type of characters that survive may have some credibility.
Overall it was a fun book to read. Stewart has a flowing, easygoing style that makes you want to keep reading to see how things turn out. It does get a little slow around the 200 page mark, so, as in other books, you just have to plow through it to get to the end. I'd recommend this book. It's one of the better post-apocalyptic novels that came out in the 40's and 50's, and is a compelling read.
Book Review: Men go and men come, but earth abides
Summary: 5 Stars
Isherwood (Ish) Williams has recently finished grad school and is camping in California when he is bitten by a rattlesnake. At first the injury seems minor, but he rapidly descends into a delirium-filled illness. After several weeks, he gradually regains his senses wondering how a simple snake bite could have affected him so strongly. He heads back into town and find everyone gone. It seems a bit odd at first, but Ish thinks to himself that perhaps it is Sunday (he has lost track of time). He eventually comes across a newspaper that describes a devastating plague that has swept across the country, and he becomes aware of the full magnitude of the catastrophe that has struck the United States and the World. What follows is one of the best stories about post-apocalyptic survival ever written.
This book is divided into three sections, the first two taking the lion's share of the space. In the first section, Ish discovers the plague, realizes he is one of the few survivors, and decides to take a cross country trek to see who and what else has survived. In the second section, set 22 years after the first, Ish has settled down with a small number of other survivors who start families in the SF bay area. We see the first and second generations of children born after the plague who have no concept or awareness of what we would term modern civilization (and all that implies for better or worse). We follow the slow decay of the remnants of the earlier civilization, and the construction of a new way of life. In the final section, Ish is an old, dying man reflecting on his life and all that has happened. In between each of the three major sections are brief vignettes that cover the major events of the the chapters that are set decades apart.
This is largely an introspective tale about Ish's thoughts and emotions as his world crumbles around him and is rebuilt and transformed. If you're looking for a story about a lone survivor battling mutant zombies or some such thing, you'll be disappointed. In the first section, Ish is just trying to make sense of what happened and figure out what he wants to do. In the second, he tries to teach the children of his small community something about what life was like prior to the plague and maintain some continuity with the past. One of the children ask him what an American was, and Ish finds that it isn't so easy to explain. In the third section, Ish is the only pre-plague survivor left in the community, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren now unrecognizeably changed to cope with their new environment. There is some action in this story, but not much. One of the best aspects of this story (and this genre in general) is that the author explores what would happen to all the trappings of modern life if the machinery just stopped. In some ways, the changes would be immediate and profound, in others, changes would take more time.
The bottom line is that this sad, introspective tale woven around some Biblical themes is an all-time classic in my view and definitely recommended. There are some outdated (or just plain different) ideas and ways of thinking in this book (Stewart wrote it in the late '40s I believe), but don't let that stop you from reading the book. Stewart conveys a message and asks some questions that are relevant to people and human nature whatever epoch they happened to be born in. People will be reading this 100 years from now. I read this book (along with Alas Babylon) many years ago as a teen and decided to re-read the pair again. There are many powerful images from this book that I still remember now decades later. My view now has changed a bit as I can understand Stewart's central message better, but no matter what you think about this genre in general, this is a timeless story that you'll never forget.