Earth Abides (1949) by George R. Stewart

Book Review

Earth Abides (1949)

by George R. Stewart

   I recently read an article about American author George R. Stewart (1895-1980), a Berkeley CA based writer who wrote widely across genre, with a good deal of popular success but little lasting critical impact.  Today he is remembered for two books: Storm, which is about, well.. a storm, and is credited with being the inspiration for naming hurricanes after people to tell them apart.  Storm just got a New York Review of Books reprint in August of this year.   His other famous book is this one, Earth Abides, which is widely credited as being the direct or indirect inspiration for a generation of post-World War II post-apocalyptical fiction.

    Earth Abides is at times hilariously out of date, like all books of science fiction it is much a reflection of the actual times of the author than any work of imagination on his or her part.  For example, the main character continues to smoke tobacco cigarettes from "before the fall" for decades after the collapse (caused by an unidentified virus, with minimal societal disruption), while his after the fall community in Berkeley California never mentions marijuana. 

    Stewart's apocalypses is a relentlessly PG affair, with none of the horrors that contemporary readers associate with the genre.  The single act of violence in the book is the murder/execution of a diseased drifter with ill-intentions at the hands of the community.  The infrastructure of pre-collapse, specifically, running water, continues to operate for decades after the fall.  

 Isherwood Williams, the protagonist, is an intermittently interesting guy prone to paroxyms of guilt over his failure to lead his burgeoning community past a semi-parasitic existence of hunting the abundant free roaming cattle and eating out of still-good cans of food.  I mean, you would think these people would be able to get a vegetable garden going.   There are horses available, but they choose to rely on dogs for their limited travel needs.  They are a profoundly unambitious bunch by the standards of the genre and their world is basically a paradise.   It's all very mid 20th century.