6 October 2008
George R. Stewart – Earth Abides
Posted by Dirk under: books .
I love post-apocalyptic fiction. One of my favorite books when I was younger was Swiss Family Robinson, which isn’t exactly post-apoc, but it has that flavor of a small group of people surviving off the remains of a society that is gone.
I’ve read most of the classic post-apoc books, most of them several times, but this is my first read of Earth Abides.
It was written in 1949 and it shows it’s age in how the protagonist views other people he meets.
I liked the first part of the book a lot more than the latter part. In the first part the survivor of a disease that has wiped out pretty much every human drives across America, from San Francisco to New York, and then back again.
When he gets back to California he moves back into the house he lived in with his parents, finds a female survivor and starts procreating. They eventually meet up with a few other survivors and soon have a small tribe going.
I don’t really care for this part of the book. I don’t really agree with the way the new generation of humans almost immediately fall to primitiveness and don’t learn to read or write. That seems unrealistic to me. I couldn’t get into that.
The end of the book sort of depressed me too. I don’t know that I’ll ever reread this one.