Most stories of a post-catastrophe planet Earth posit a nuclear holocaust from which the survivors emerge to stumble across a ravaged, irradiated landscape. By contrast, George R. Stewart's novel, his only venture into science fiction, takes place in the aftermath of a mysterious plague which has all but destroyed humanity. His hero, Isherwood Williams, returns from a journey into the wilderness to find that he has the continent almost to himself. Nearly everyone else is dead and it is only after a long period of solitary roaming through the devastated towns and cities of America that he finds a female survivor whom he wishes to marry. Stewart's novel charts, with great simplicity and conviction, the generations that grow up around Ish. As the years pass, the memories of the pre-plague world fade and the extended family members live more and more like America's original indigenous population. In choosing the name 'Ish' for his protagonist, Stewart was deliberately echoing the accounts of Ishi, sole survivor of a tribe of a Native Americans whom anthropologists encountered in California in the years immediately before the First World War. Just as Ishi was witness to the disappearance of the world of his forefathers, so too does Isherwood Williams see the civilization he remembers drift into legend or oblivion. His grandchildren and great-grandchildren revere him but the pre-plague world he knew has gone.

George R. Stewart was a polymath and academic whose interests ranged from the history of American place names to meteorology and natural history. He wrote a number of novels, of which Earth Abides is the best-known and the only one that can be plausibly described as SF. In its profound and prescient concerns for ecology and the environment and in its memorable vision of a world in which 'men go and come, but Earth abides', the book more than deserves the classic status it now has.

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