Earth Abides
by George R. Stewart
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Book Reviews of Earth Abides
Book Review: This one will carry on....
Summary: 5 Stars
"Between the plan and the fulfillment lies always the hazard. Between the plan and the fulfillment stands always the frail barrier of a human life" - George R. Stewart
Isherwood "Ish" Williams is one of the last people on Earth! How will he survive, how can he go on?
"Earth Abides" is a book that I have owned for quite awhile & a book that I have always planned to read next, but never did. Finally I read the book and I was not only thoroughly impressed, I was in awe of George R. Stewart's ideas about how it would all end and how we could possibly go on.
I'm amazed at the amount of the poor reviews for this book, I think most people are expecting more I Am Legend type material. This book is not that at all, there is some violence, not alot, there are no zombies, only people & animals. Many reviewers state that Ish should have done this, he shouldn't have done that, forgetting that this masterpiece was written in 1949. The book is so far ahead of it's time, it's baffling to me how George R. Stewart came up with some of these things. Would it be much different it this novel was written today, well obviously yes.
Stewart's theory of how each animal will thrive before it's numbers level off really made me think. The everyday things that you never give a second thought, Stewart brings them to the front and makes you think, what do we do now, how do we get past this?
If you like to read post-apocalyptic novels, if you've read The Road and enjoyed it, read "Earth Abides"
This is the road that no man finishes traveling. Men come and go, but Earth abides!
Enjoy~
Book Review: A super-classic! First of its kind!
Summary: 5 Stars
George Stewart's super-classic is my favorite SciFi sub-genre--the demise of man by one means or another. Stewart uses a pandemic virus which is a bit cliche--oops, wait a minute, he did it first! Everyone _else_ is the cliche. His writing is dark and literary, brought to life by his protagonist, Isherwood Williams', gloomy, introspective personality. Stewart does not develop the science behind the virus, but given that he wrote the story in 1947, I suppose he can be forgiven. On the other hand, H.G. Wells and Jules Verne forcast many technological wonders in their stories, so maybe Stewart could have gone out on a creative limb just a wee bit more than he did. Nevertheless, the real gem of the story is Stewart's portrayal of the demise of mankind--not the virus that reduced his population to a handful--but the demise of his culture, his literature, his creative energy. It seems we humans are what we are because with great numbers of people scarfing up every last spot of ground and every last resource, each individual has to be ever on his toes just to turn a buck. Take away the people, say, overnight, and the detritus of their civilization becomes easy pickings for the surviving few. No need to grow anything to eat--just open up a can. When they ran out of cans, it was almost as easy to hunt for dim-witted, slow-footed domestic cattle, now living in the wild. But the real casualty was culture. Several generations after Ish, people no longer spoke Ish's English, at least not so he could understand it. Culture too appears to be a product of crowds. Stewart set the bar for this SciFi sub-genre. There have been many since 1949, including my own example listed below, but he has yet to be equalled.
--Ejner Fulsang, author of "A Destiny of Fools", [...] 2007
Book Review: EARTH ABIDES by George R. Stewart
Summary: 4 Stars
Earth Abides is a 1949 science fiction novel by George R. Stewart. When a plague all but wipes out the human race, a young introverted intellectual decides to observe the way the world responds to the sudden removal of humans, and, later, works to reconstruct certain aspects of civilization while battling to keep education alive.
This is a thoughtful book: one of Stewart's primary themes here is a philosophical take on civilization: its pros and cons, what is gained and lost through starting over, and whether parts or the whole are worth rebuilding. Stewart, with the world's last scholar as his main character, does a wonderful job with this.
But while Earth Abides is all about ideas, Stewart mostly punts on the moral and theological ramifications, as his characters move on quickly when these themes present challenges. In a world where people can't help but focus on death, that's a missed opportunity.
In addition to the book's philosophical emphasis, Stewart's post-apocalyptic world is generally free of unrest and violence. While this allows Stewart to focus on his themes of rebuilding, his characters are rarely in much peril, and there's never much suspense. Yet as Stewart charts the life of his protagonist through the years and decades, the reader becomes invested in and attached to the character, passive and powerless though he may be, and this is why the novel is compelling, and why the reader will not mind the book's many philosophical detours.
On the whole, Earth Abides is an intelligent, poignant and melancholy novel, and one of the finer and more influential works in the genre. Bonus points for an interracial relationship during a hostile era.
Book Review: A classic
Summary: 4 Stars
A young man recovers, from what seems to be snake bite, to find humankind has basically been decimated from a strange disease. That's the way Mr. Stewart's work begins. And where does it go from there? Well, the protagonist procedes to explore the remains of the U.S. Eventually he settles down and begins a new life, in the new world that Earth has become.
Even though this book might be classified as a sci-fi piece, it is a little less and more than that:
- Earth Abides does not deeply explore the "sci" in sci-fi. There are not many explanations for the disease that destroys civilization. And there are not too many explanations either for what comes next in the book.
- On the other hand, Earth Abides does a great job in exploring the psychological effects on the survivors of the demise of civilization. Moreover, Mr Stewart stretched his work through time to show us the way the first generations of the world (the survivors' sons, daughters and grandkids) would behave. This is really nice.
I enjoyed this book. It really did not make a big difference on me the fact that it was written some 50 years ago (frankly, I'm not really sure if the outcome would have been different if this disease attacked us now).
I recommend this book to anyone interested in exploring the possibilities and consequences of a decimation of humankind by disease (not impossible considering the bird flu). Regular sci-fi readers might enjoy it, too.
Don't read this if you want a hard-core sci-fi book, if it being 50 years old is an issue for you (no Internet and cable TV here...), or if you don't want to share the protagonist's loneliness.
Enjoy!
Book Review: 368 pages of rambling
Summary: 2 Stars
Disappointed. I'm slowly learning to pay more attention to Amazon's negative reviews to get a more calculating grasp of a book's contents.
Apparently civilization goes out with a very orderly, civilized whimper. As the police and military forces crumble along with everything else in a matter of months, civil order magically maintains itself with little looting. Perhaps a feasible conclusion to reach, but much more fleshing out was needed to explain the psychosocial motives for such an end to 99%+ of the human race.
The author makes no effort to create a story arc--this is a poorly written fictional ethnography, not a novel. The plot mirrors the personality of the plodding, coldly methodical protagonist.
Most of the other characters are two-dimensional and cliched, following personality and behavioral stereotypes you'd expect from a 1949 bog standard. While this is feasible /to a certain extent/, the author proceeds with no introspection about it, as though the Leave It to Beaver cast was instantaneously transplanted into a world without people.
On the positive side, the author makes distinct efforts to present the ecological side effects of humanity's disappearance. But this saving grace grows old, too, as the novel plods through the decades following the apocalypse.
Now that I think of it, I believe that's exactly what the author intended, realism be damned. He imagined a band of primitive hunter-gatherers in the withered skeleton of an American city, and worked backward to see how it would fall into place. Too bad verisimilitude was the first casualty, normally a hallmark of the genre.