Earth Abides, written by George R. Stewart and published in 1949, imagines a world where a disease takes almost everyone, and leaves just handful of random survivors. I wanted to read this one because it was mentioned in my scifi course, and I’d already been drawn to the post-apocalyptic emptiness of  John Christopher’s Empty World and the solo survival scenes in  Elizabeth Moon’s Remnant Population.

Earth Abides works more as a very male and slightly dated thought experiment than as a novel with a plot and characters.  This worked for me on some levels, because the whole thought experiment of existing in a world without people is genuinely fascinating.

There are basically three acts in this book, a meandering opening when young Ish meditates on the newly empty world, a speedy 2 decades of repopulating, and then a meandering closing when old Ish meditates on the future of the empty world.

In the beginning,  Isherwood Williams — Ish — is doing research alone in a rural cabin when the plague hits, and he comes into town to find it completely empty. When Ish first finds himself alone, he keeps his sanity by considering his  academic curiosity about the plague and humanity’s fate. He faces the post-apocalypse with the knowledge that as a reader, he will never be bored or alone, and as a reader, he has a wide understanding. I liked this opening a lot, since this is how I dealt with the pandemic and how I would probably handle post-apocalyptic survival. (Although, unlike Ish and his friends, I’d probably survive the apocalypse while complaining the whole time.)

In Luke Brown’s review of Earth Abides over on SFFWorld, Brown calls this “a strangely sanitised version of the apocalypse.” Author Stewart skips over any causes of the plague, and since Ish was in his mountain cabin at this time, there aren’t any gross depictions of illness or death. There’s a tantalizing hint when 2 of the survivors have both survived snakebite before surviving the plague, but it’s never explained. Since I can’t bear any gore in fiction, I liked this very clean and almost bloodless disaster story, but I was so curious about the plague and how that all occurs, and it’s just never explained.  This is also another way Earth Abides feels more like a thought experiment, and readers just have to accept the premise that 99.9% of the population died and just a couple people survived, in order to follow the story.

Ish first  decides to go for a drive all around the country, to see how other parts of the country are faring, and he meets a couple other survivors. In the beginning of the book, we’re told he had academic curiosity, but almost immediately, we see him less curious about the other survivors and more judgmental about how they cope with the apocalypse. A couple living in empty NYC invites him to dinner, and he’s dismissive of city life. Neither one drives, and they’ve settled into a luxurious apartment, and fill their days with books, records, and games.  Ish quickly notes that they’re just pretending to be married, as if that’s a particularly meaningful distinction in an empty world. He’s sure they won’t be able to survive the winter, either.

Ish doesn’t just know better than city people, he also knows better than country people. He meets a rural Black trio, who seem to be handling the things decently by starting a farm, and he looks down on them, too, for harvesting the cotton fields when they don’t have the rest of the cotton processing system. This is what I mean by a better thought experiment than a novel. It’s interesting to think about ways different survivors might react and cope, but it became a bit annoying to follow a protagonist who always knows better than everyone else.

Even when Ish sets up a tribe with other survivors, he still knows better than everyone. The tribe members have some charming holdovers from the past were charming, like a handyman who works out Labor Day in a world without calendars, so he can take the day off, and a housewife who maintains her post-apocalyptic parlor style, but these aren’t charming or human to Ish. He find these actions ridiculous. I wasn’t sure if Ish or the author was mocking working people, but it seemed a bit depressing for Ish to look down on everyone else, especially when there were only a handful of other humans left.

Later, The Tribe needs to repopulate, which means socially accepting that Ezra will have 2 wives. In the second generation, though, there are more men than women, so it’s time to find another tribe for mating. No one even considers a woman with 2 simultaneous husbands. This idea came up in The Day of the Triffids, too, where the women are directly told to accept polygamy to repopulate the earth, or leave the colony and go out on their own. These views seem like a very male fantasy to me — In the harsh future, our hero must impregnate more women! Gotta do it for humanity! It’s just logical, none of those lady-emotions about marriage and love! But I think if we’re meant to be in a harsh, post-apocalyptic world, being purely practical about repopulation and not caring about love or attraction,  then all genders having children with as many partners as possible would lead to the most genetic diversity and better chances for humanity’s survival. Just being logical here.

The survivors live on canned goods for ages, which also seemed weird.  Ish and his Tribe give up on gardening pretty quickly when animals chomp their veggies. I thought highlighted just how quickly Ish gives up, even when he’s trying to get his tribe to work towards sustainable resources, and even as he’s getting frustrated because the others give up and accept their new life. After my own experiences with supply disruptions in the pandemic, I expected the survivors to run out of, say, aspirin or dish soap pretty quickly.  Ok, fine, I might also have been hoping for some post-apocalyptic, Ruth Goodman Wartime Farm crafting stories.

Overall, I found their endless supplies a bit hard to accept. At one point, the grandkids of the original survivors are burning packs of TP in a bonfire, which seemed ridiculous. Partly because the pandemic shortages really highlighted to me how quickly this is used up, and partly because, well, there are a few things I wouldn’t want to ever risk running out of in a wasteland…

There’s one scene when the water stops running in their house and Ish is resentful that this is his responsibility. The water stops working at breakfast, which is cooked and served and cleaned up by his wife. For every meal, she’s not just sourcing and cooking, she’s boiling the water and washing the dishes after, and then washing the cloths that washed the dishes. I went back and forth wondering if dishes and laundry were invisible to Ish or to the author, and I still haven’t made up my mind which man has no idea that housework exists.

There’s a very male perspective, but it’s not an entirely male-focused book. We have women and girls in this world, and they do things besides look pretty. The female characters aren’t particularly bright, interesting or well-developed, but then again, neither are the non-Ish male characters.

Some of the very extreme events in the plot add to the thought-experiment feeling. The novels asks if capital punishment is acceptable, but it doesn’t feel like a story asking a thought-provoking question or delivering a moral message, it feels like an OTT debate prompt. The straw-man here is an new arrival who’s planning to take advantage of a mentally challenged girl who’s being protected by the Tribe, he’s armed and threatening, and he states directly that The Tribe has no authority stop him from doing what he wants with this girl. And he’s also bringing diseases into their safe world.

Another thought experiment thread is Ish’s questions about the future of humanity.  In Luke Brown’s review of Earth Abides over on SFFWorld, Brown notes “Ish is becoming increasingly concerned about the degradation of human civilisation as represented in The Tribe’s unambitious willingness to scratch out a day-to-day survival, with no long-term goals in mind, such as cultural preservation, technological development or exploration of the wider world.”

Once again, we have Ish knowing better and looking down on everyone. It was personally annoying because in the beginning of the novel, Ish says he values being a reader, but then his actions don’t line up with that. He looked down on the couple in NYC for only reading and playing games, and he’s somehow not able to encourage reading or express the value of reading to the rest of the Tribe.

Reviewer K.A. Ashcomb notes that this novel “makes children boorish, stupid, and uninterested in the world around them and education. He gets this so wrong. Children are the most curious creatures.” I agree, I thought it was odd that the kids of the Tribe didn’t have much curiosity and interest. I could see the next generation not wanting to be fiction readers. Would they enjoy endless narratives about an entirely different world?  But even if stories didn’t appeal, they might read something useful about foraging, crafts or basic medicine. Or maybe someone besides Ish could have made a suggestion about literacy and planning for the future.

I’m glad I read Earth Abides overall, even though it was more (slightly dated) thoughts and exposition about possible apocalypse survival than a scifi pageturner.

 

Ashcomb, K.A. “Book Review: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart.” Ashcombka.Com, 25 Dec. 2024, ashcombka.com/2024/12/25/book-review-earth-abides-by-george-r-stewart/.

Brown, Luke. “Earth Abides by George R. Stewart – Sffworld.” SFFWorld, 15 Oct. 2015, www.sffworld.com/2015/10/earth-abides-by-george-r-stewart/.