Earth Abides

Unpopular opinion, but I really didn’t like this book. Ish is an absolutely insufferable protagonist and I couldn’t connect with him or any of the other members of The Tribe. Every time I thought something interesting was actually going to happen, it doesn’t or it’s skipped over. Ish’s self-importance and how he looks down on everyone around him drove me insane.

I was THRILLED when a glimmer of conflict came but that was also quickly washed away. The final section was the most interesting to me, but it couldn’t salvage the majority of the trudge through the most boring post apocalyptic story I have ever encountered. And I LOVE the post apocalyptic genre. From The Postman to The Stand, Mad Max to the Fallout franchise, I love it all.

I hated how Ish would think, “Gee, I should really do something about (insert x problem here),” and then proceed to NOT do anything about it. I’d rather read a book about Jack or the black family Ish contemplated turning into slaves than about the narcissist “god”.

The only good thing to come out of this book was that it apparently inspired Stephen King to write one of my all time favorite books ever, The Stand.

“They will commit me to the earth, [...] Yet I also commit them to the earth. There is nothing else by which men live. Men go and come, but earth abides.”

For the last five or six years I have been making my way through the things that inspired Neil Druckmann when writing The Last of Us series of games. Some I had already seen/read such as The Count of Monte Cristo (not apocalyptic but thematically relevant) or the 2006 film Children of Men. Some I had heard of and have since read (ie. The Road) and others I hadn't heard of before. Earth Abides, a 1949 novel by George R. Stewart, was amongst the latter.

The novel follows Isherwood “Ish” Williams (the tlou fan in me was already pleased) an ecologist who emerges from working on his graduate thesis in isolation to discover civilisation has collapsed after much of humanity has succumbed to a plague. What follows is an exploration of an earth without humans; not only what it looks like across Ish's life as the survivors cope, but also how without the influence of civilisation the remaining plants, animal and nature are free to adapt and flourish.

Ish travels coast to coast, California to New York City and back, eventually building a community of survivors and struggles reconciling ideas of the old world with the new. What things that were once so important remain so? What does it mean for Ish to be, in the end, the Last American?

Needless to say, I loved this book. Haunting, evocative, but despite it all containing a ribbon of optimism, it's one I'll look forward to reading again in the future.

“...if they looked down upon the earth that night, what did they see? Then we must say that they saw no change. Though smoke from stacks and chimneys and campfires no longer rose to dim the atmosphere, yet still smoke rose from volcanos and from forest-fires. Seen even from the moon, the planet that night must have shown only with its accustomed splendor—no brighter, no dimmer.”