Earth Abides (1949)

by George R. Stewart

George R. Stewart was a prolific author and academic who took one crack at science fiction. What, exactly, do you get when a highly competent writer with upright pre-counterculture American morals and a strong sense of civic responsibility contemplates mortality in the age of The Bomb? Earth Abides.

It’s not personal mortality on his mind, no; nothing as mundane as that. Rather: civilizational mortality, which Stewart makes a convincing case for accepting just as one must accept personal mortality.

Earth Abides can be read as a philosophical counterpoint to Daniel Defoe’s 1719 classic Robinson Crusoe. In Crusoe, one man pares back the wilderness and carves an orderly estate out of an uninhabited island. Its central theme might be stated: where there’s a will, there’s a way, and man’s civilizing instinct is as innate as his love for God.

Stewart demonstrates that it’s not that simple. Necessity drives invention, or inversely, abundance erodes industriousness. If Crusoe had been marooned with more supplies, would he have had the same tolerance for toil in the field? If he had had a companion to converse with, would he have turned so fervently to the scripture? If there was no prospect of a return to England, would he have fought so arduously to set up an English manor on an isolated island in the Caribbean?

To take part in civilization one must accept change as a constant. Would the response of a civilized man not then be to acknowledge when circumstances have changed? The written word, water distribution systems, mass agriculture, metallurgy, electricity — these things are adaptations to the conditions of scarcity brought about simply by there being too many of us crammed too closely together. If most of those people were to vanish, so might man’s “innate” affinity for structure and order.

Sociological takes aside, Earth Abides is primarily a book of observation. Creeping rust, crumbling pavement, fauna fluctuation, native species dominating exotics. Observation is where Stewart really shines as a writer and his observations of a depopulated America are timeless.

In the decades since its publication in 1949, civilizational mortality has become a trite topic, to the extent that its genre label, “post-apocalyptic,” has accumulated connotations that do this novel a great disservice. Earth Abides is one of the better pieces of speculative fiction I’ve read, soundly succeeding in its ambition and its execution.