Pros: Thoughtful, detailed portrait of one possible future.
Cons: Constantly downbeat tone eventually becomes tiring.
The Bottom Line: This SF classic doesn't hold up too well against modern competition. Its yearning, slow-moving style, while still worth reading, seems dated. 3.5 stars.
tomgray's Full Review: George R. Stewart - Earth Abides
Wordlessly, he activated the computer and prepared to set down his thoughts on Earth Abides. The laptop's pale rectangular screen glowed dully as he searched for the words, the right words, the words that would truly convey the nature of this thoughtful, poetic, yet disappointing novel.
Although it now lay in the distant past, he remembered a time before he had begun writing reviews. Reviews in those days had been written by experts--people who had attended college and spent years studying literature and the history of literature and criticism. Some of them had been supercilious and sneering, had rubbed readers' noses in the readers' own ignorance, had pretended to a kind of artistic perception that was beyond that of the common man. But others, he knew, had been honest and intelligent and had worked hard at their craft, helping to educate the masses and introducing them to worlds beyond their imaginings.
Then Epinions.com had come, sweeping utterly away the dusty, imposing edifice of literary criticism almost overnight. Before anyone quite knew what had happened or how, the masses were set free, some said--left naked, others thought--to face the challenge of deciphering literature armed only with their own personal reactions and those of others like them. Now anyone could do the sneering or the guiding, hold himself or herself out as an expert, and who could say otherwise? Only a faint, almost imperceptible, gossamer Web of Trust seemed to offer some direction in the midst of the swirling, clueless chaos that had resulted.
Still silent, he regarded the blank screen before him. But the words did not come. and etc.
The preceding is a tiny sample of the style of Earth Abides, an SF classic by George R. Stewart that was originally published in 1949, attracting enough readership and word-of-mouth over the years that, for example, it was included this year on my daughter's recommended summer reading list as she prepared to enter 10th grade.
I've been struck by its style because I recently finished rereading Clifford D. Simak's Why Call Them Back from Heaven? (1967), another classic that is written in a very similar fashion--a fashion that now seems seriously dated.
Earth Abides is the story of Isherwood (Ish) Williams, one of the few humans left alive on Earth after a raging epidemic has nearly obliterated the species. Striking the same theme as many popular writers of today (and even a few films, such as 1999's Outbreak starring Dustin Hoffman), Stewart notes that population explosions and crashes occur on a regular basis among other species in nature and asserts that it is only a matter of time before humanity--now swollen to epic proportions around the globe--suffers the same fate:
Consider the case of Captain Maclear's rat. This interesting rodent inhabited Christmas Island, a small bit of tropical verdure some two hundred miles south of Java . . . A naturalist observed the rats as populating the island "in swarms," feeding upon fruit and young shoots . . . Yet such was the luxuriance of the tropical growth that the rats had not attained such numbers as to provide competition among members of the species. The individual rats were extremely well nourished, and even unduly fat. In 1903 some new disease sprang up. Because of their crowding, and also probably because of the softened condition of the individuals, the rats proved universally susceptible, and soon were dying by thousands. In spite of great numbers, in spite of an abundant supply of food, in spite of a very rapid breeding rate, the species is extinct.
Many novels have dealt with contagion and the struggle to contain it (Connie Willis's superb Doomsday Book,* an award-winning SF depiction of the Black Plague, is an outstanding example), but few with the aftermath, and it's easy to see why.
Ish Williams finds himself wandering in a world that is almost deserted, searching for companionship and continually overwhelmed by the magnitude of what has been lost. Here and there, a few individuals have survived, as happens with any plague, and eventually they coalesce into small communities or tribes, living off the leavings of industrial civilization. And the years pass, and with them comes a slow forgetting and a sinking into what one assumes will soon become savagery or worse:
Even though cattle were left, though there was much food, what would happen when the ammunition for the rifles was exhausted? When the matches were gone? In fact, one might not even have to wait until the ammunition was exhausted. Powder deteriorated with time. Three or four generations, and all who were left might be merely some groveling primitives who had lost civilization and yet, on the other hand, had not learned all those thousand basic skills which enabled savages to live with some degree of stability and comfort!
Species wax and wane, Stewart says, but Earth abides. Probably not the best book to read if you are feeling depressed.
The nature of Earth Abides is preordained by the fact that it begins immediately after the holocaust. For the most part, it's not a novel of tension or adventure, although there is some of both when Ish encounters the first other survivors. Instead, it is a 317-page rumination, on the consequences to other species (especially the domesticated ones) of humanity's disappearance, on the changed appearance of the world, on the passing of civilized society, and on the harshness and indifference of Nature:
As with the dogs and cats, so also with the grasses and flowers which man had long nourished. . . . Foot by foot the wild cucumbers quickly sent their vines across lawn and flowerbed and terrace. As once, when the armies of the empire were shattered and the strong barbarians poured in upon the soft provincials, so now the fierce weeds pressed in to destroy the pampered nurslings of man.
It's a classic and quite well-written, but slow-moving and repetitive by today's standards. I find it hard to imagine it being written now, or finding much of an audience if it were.
(Parenthetic note to you teachers out there preparing reading lists: Wake up!! There are writers working today in SF--Willis, Kim Stanley Robinson, Patricia Anthony, Orson Scott Card, David Brin, Stephen Leigh, Ursula K. LeGuin, and more--most of whose output surpasses anything written before around 1970.)
Writing: 8
Characterization: 9
Big Issues/Ideas: 8
Recommended reading: Besides Stewart, two other old-time masters of this style of writing (thoughtful, poetic, slow-moving, melancholy) are Simak and Edgar Pangborn. They've both written some excellent stuff--I can recommend, in particular, Simak's Way Station (an immortal man manages a transportation depot on present-day Earth for an interstellar civilization) and Pangborn's A Mirror for Observers (humanity is observed by an advanced race of Martians, but threatened when one of the Martians decides he despises humans and plots to destroy them). Both Simak and Pangborn have a number of books available on the used market (and one or two still in print), and they offer an interesting diversion from modern SF.
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