Earth Abides

George R Stewart

1949

Isherwood Williams was a person who enjoyed his own company so when the world came to an end he was up in the Californian Mountains on a geological survey.

At first he thought his illness was solely due to the snake that had bitten him as he was exploring but it was touch and go for a while as he lay in his shack hoping for someone to pass and help him in his delirium. However, those who do pass saw his condition and rushed on their way.

He finally recovered and feels that it's probably time to rejoin civilisation once again. As he left the Mountains, he was startled to find no traffic on the roads for it's the height of the fishing season when there should have been hundreds of people in the hills.

But its not until he reached the nearest town that he began to make sense of the deserted settlements he had passed through. An abbreviated newspaper told of a massive plague that has swept throughout the world sparing few of those it touched. Still in a state of denial, Ish returned to the Bay area of Northern California. When he saw the San Francisco area still all lit up he initially thought that the stories of massive plague and the silent radios were a weird dream. But when he travelled down into the city he found that the city is indeed a ghost town, all the lights had been left on and there was no one left to switch them off.

The full reality of the situation did not really strike him though, until he returned to his family home to find it neat and tidy, but deserted.

For a while he succumbed to despair but eventually his ability to be apart from the rest of humanity enabled him to recover and find a new purpose in life. He would spend the rest of his life, he reckoned, charting the way that nature takes over the works of Man so he loaded up his car and starts driving across America to examine the state of the world. He found before leaving the Bay Area that the wipe out had not been total - there were quite a few survivors left but all bore their own scars from the way that Humanity had ceased to be lord of all it surveyed.

Despite a collapse of the infrastructure that was already far enough along to make the interstates difficult, Ish makes it to a New York that was as deserted as San Francisco, and the few survivors even less capable of looking after themselves. After a couple of rather enjoyable weeks of gambling and drinking with a couple of these survivors Ish felt that it's probably time for him to return to his home territory.

Not yet a year since the catastrophe, the roads are even worse going back than they were going and when he tried to get into San Francisco he is confronted with a whole series of fires ringing the bay.

Successfully re-installed in his own home he settled down to rusticate barely noticing even as the final vestiges of the electricity grid fail, leaving him to read his books in the glow of oil lamps. However, this new darkness lead him to the home of Emma who had come through the catastrophe relatively untouched and they fall for each other in a big way.

It is at this moment that Ish determined to rebuild the old civilisation and their little tribe grows fast for a while, both by birth and by other members of the old civilisation joining up.

Can Ish make his dream of a reborn civilisation come true, or will there be something that stops him from realising his dream? As the children grow up and he struggles to teach them the basics of reading and writing his dream seems less and less likely.

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This is a brilliant book that manages to deal with the rebirth of a society in a realistic fashion. Not leaping from the depth of barbarianism to a fully technic civilisation in a score of years, but seeing the likelihood of a new form of civilisation coming to pass. This is a book that is rather closer to the human level than I have found usual in this sort of story.

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This is part of the Science Fiction Masterworks series.

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