Earth Abides by George Stewart

read by Jonathan Davis (introduction written & read by Connie Willis)

Earth Abides was my first post-apocalyptic science fiction novel. Way back in the 8th grade, my English teacher, Mr. Felker, assigned it to the class. (We also read Flowers for Algernon that year, and the room was decorated with black-and-white photos of Marilyn Monroe. Go figure.) The book made such an impression that that post-apocalyptic became one of my handful of favorite sub-genres of science fiction, which I'd already developed a taste for, and I’ve never stopped reading it. To this day, if I leave my house at some ungodly hour and the streets are deserted, I think to myself, “It’s like Earth Abides out here.”

First published in 1949 (and the winner of the first International Fantasy Award in 1951), this novel is very much a product of its time. There’s all the breathtakingly casual racism, sexism, and jingoism that you’d expect (though to give him credit, I think Stewart, a UC Berkeley professor, really was trying quite earnestly to be open-minded and open-hearted). What’s wonderful about it to me, though, is that it’s also very much a product of its place. And its place is the San Francisco Bay Area—specifically, Berkeley. More specifically, the Berkeley hills.

This, more than anything, helped me put myself in the shoes of the protagonist, Ish. When he comes home from a solitary camping trip (where he’d been working on his graduate thesis in geography), he’s coming home to his parents’ house on a fictional street within walking distance of Indian Rock Park. He uses both the university library on the UC Berkeley campus and the main public library downtown. As time passes, he makes his way through numerous familiar landscapes and neighborhoods, going so far as to describe billboards that were still recognizable to a local reader more than 30 years after the book was written. 

Ish goes on to mark the passage of days and years by watching where, along the horizon dominated by San Francisco to the south and Mount Tamalpais to the north, the sun sets—much as I used to do when I lived in a house with a western view in the Berkeley hills. (Though, unlike Ish, I had the help of up-to-date calendars and society generally.) He chisels the number of each passing year onto the face of one of the enormous rocks at Indian Rock Park, describing recognizable things there like the bowl-shaped depressions where the area's original inhabitants used to grind acorns and a cave-like area formed by two rocks leaning together. 

Ish—short for Isherwood Williams, though also, without doubt, meant to call to mind Ishi, the last of the Yahi people who himself walked down out of the hills into what we think of as modern civilization and lived out his in Berkeley, where he worked as a janitor when he wasn’t being studied by anthropologists—Ish is a familiar type in a university town. Like many academics, he lives very much inside his own head. He thinks of himself more as an observer of than a participant in life. He credits this tendency of his as the major factor that helps him, having survived a pandemic that has killed off all but a handful of humans on Earth, to keep himself together.

He does go into a sort of shock, of course, after his civilization dies. It’s not possible to survive something that has killed off 99% or more of your species without enduring major emotional trauma. But he doesn’t descend into drink or any of the other excesses now freely available to him; he doesn’t commit suicide, either quickly or slowly; and he doesn’t build a false life for himself, pretending nothing has changed. He observes; he accepts; and slowly, over decades, he becomes the nucleus of a group of more or less stable folks who start a new society in the rubble of the old.

Of course he’s not perfect. Far from it, even in his own terms. For one thing—and I couldn’t get over this as I was reading—he’s strangely passive about certain things. For example, he’s very aware, as an educated person, of the importance of literacy—and yet he doesn’t read stories to his own children or encourage his neighbors to do it when the time comes; he just grouses about the fact that none of the kids are learning to read. He does eventually start a school of sorts, but by the time the community’s children arrive there they are big kids with no background or interest in literacy. Those who aren’t already too old for school and don’t already have kids of their own, that is. 

And instead of thinking this through and encouraging parents and grandparents to start reading to the littlest ones at home, he throws his hands up and decides the new society he’s creating is just going to have to be too illiterate to use the treasure troves of knowledge that are available to them.

There are other examples—that’s just the main one that stands out in my librarian's mind. And yet. As Stewart points out himself, via Ish’s internal maunderings, those who are left after the great disaster and its secondary kill aren’t necessarily going to be the brightest or best of humanity. They’re a random sampling, in the universe of this book, of those whose immune systems were able to fight off the virus, and whose mental habits were conducive to getting on with life afterward. They were all hardy in their various ways, yes, but really had no other traits in common, good or bad. They were just regular people, doing their best in a world gone horribly wrong.

And that is another great thing about this book. It’s not about scientists, or tough guys, or utopians. It’s about a cross-section of folks, and about the world they live in. It’s about the ants and the rats and the housecats and the dogs. It’s about the pavement and the grocery stores and the electric and water grids. It’s about our world, as it might have been if things had gone wrong in just that way. And it’s fascinating, even now.