Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2012 April 25 • Wednesday

This was first published in 1949 and follows one character's life after a virus kills almost every human being on the planet. The pace is calm and steady and the writing admirably low key. It casts a spell, so smoothly that you might go from thinking you don't really care about what happens to being unwilling to put the book down.

The hero, Ish, starts out with the modest goal of being only an observer to how the natural world will change without people around to influence it. Eventually he meets another survivor, a woman named Em, and then the book becomes something closer to anthropology or sociology as individuals become families, families become a social unit and a social unit becomes something like a state.

Ish feels like it's his duty to restart the civilization he remembers and this part of the narrative generates much of the suspense.

Connie Willis's introduction is very helpful, not least for pointing out that Ish is doubtlessly supposed to remind readers both of Ishmael and also of a real-life Ish who had an experience very similar to the Ish of Earth Abides. She mentions other books with similar ideas but not, curiously enough, M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud, which has more of a connection with Earth Abides than does, say the work of John Wyndham. (And I would guess that Richard Matheson's I Am Legend is influenced by Stewart's novel.)

What's the first line? Well, there are two.