sh, a grad student staying in an isolated wilderness cabin, falls ill from a rattlesnake bite. He recovers only to find nearby towns depopulated in the aftermath of a virulent plague which has wiped out almost all of humanity. A few scattered people remain, here and there, but not enough to preserve mankind's institutions; even the major cities have only a handful, scavenging food and other supplies from grocery stores. In Manhattan, for instance, he finds one upper-class couple living in a high-rise apartment building and recognizes at once that they'll be incapable of surviving their first winter.
Ish thinks things will be better when he gets together with an older woman named Em and starts a family, gathering other survivors into a community. But it's still too small and too loosely organized a group to reconstruct a lost civilization. As much as he lectures them about digging wells, rebuilding the machinery of modern life, teaching the children about how life used to be and preserving the ideals of the lost land once known as America, it remains a lost cause.
His people can get what they want by scavenging. The children see his lessons about the world that used to be as myths about a place with no relevance to their daily lives. The knowledge that he needs, and the motivation that he needs, are beyond him. He can only spend his life watching, with increased resignation, as the world around him reverts to a stone age.
An intense end-of-the-world story
Post-holocaust stories are staples of both science fiction and fantasy, but many novels based on the theme use the end of the world we know just to set the stage for a fresh conflict. Stephen King's The Stand, Robert R. McCammon's Swan Song, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer, the Red Shadows novels by Yvonne Navarro, even the hugely popular Left Behind books, all begin with world-wracking cataclysms, then stage follow-up battles between the forces of order and chaos. The implication, in many of these books, is that civilization of a sort will eventually rebuild itself, once their protagonists are finally free to act upon their good intentions.
Earth Abides takes a more organic view. Once its plague kills off the vast majority of humanity, leaving only a few scattered survivors to stumble across each other on a playing field the size of a continent, the game is essentially over. There will be no rediscovery of great technologies. There will be no bold charismatic leader capable of leading those remaining to a new golden age. There will be no grand scheming villains either—only the inevitable decay that comes when the population falls below the number of people required to keep a civilization going. The protagonist, Ish, wants to honor the world he came from. But he's the only one who wants it, and he wants it only enough to talk about it. The tribe he builds around himself comes to see him as a eccentric irrelevancy, constantly spouting off about a world in which nobody believes. By story's end, the community he founded has become a band of superstitious hunter-gatherers, as primitive as the Cro-Magnon.
George Stewart captures all this in a crisp, elegant prose, which he frequently interrupts with powerful, italicized little sections that describe, step by step, how quickly the depopulated world takes back the marks left by man. He covers the fate of domesticated animals, the decay of empty cities, the return of wilderness to areas previously tamed. Some of this is seen by Ish, some not, but none of it is preventable by the man's empty idealism. The erasure of man's influence is an inexorable process, with a momentum that can't be stopped by Ish's impassioned words. And Stewart's ability to find not only transcendence but also a great dark beauty in what would otherwise be a story devoid of hope for something better is the reason this novel remains in print while so many other works of its era have departed as surely as the civilization its hapless protagonist mourns.
