Asked for reactions to the novel they usually say something like “It haunts me,” or “I couldn’t stop reading it.” What keeps Earth Abides sales so high, and readers’ reaction so strong? Stewart’s Earth Abides has a staying power equaled by few other books. Ranked as high as number eight on the Amazon sales list for twentieth century U.S. Ish’s Hammer: Ecology and Symbolic Religion in Earth Abides

But what was Stewart trying to do when he wrote the book? Let’s consider.

There’s a great deal more to be said, and Wikipedia (for example) says it at length visit them for full synopsis. Making Earth Abides a novel for which words like elegiac and transcendent come easily to mind, a novel bearing, in critic Adam-Troy Castro’s words, “a great dark beauty.” Few of us get to read our own eulogies, but here is mankind’s. Star systems, worlds, states, individual lives. The ripe experience of a book in which we find ourselves immersed. Epic in sweep, centering on the person of Isherwood Williams, Earth Abides proves a kind of antihistory, relating the story of humankind backwards, from ever-more-abstract civilization to stone-age primitivism. Each time I read it, I’m profoundly affected, affected in a way only the greatest art - Ulysses, Matisse or Beethoven symphonies, say - affects me. This is a book, mind you, that I’d place not only among the greatest science fiction but among our very best novels. The book earned much praise from James Sallis, writing in the BOSTON GLOBE: In November 1950, it was adapted for the CBS radio program Escape as a two-part drama starring John Dehner. It was included in Locus Magazine’s list of best All Time Science Fiction in 19, and was a nominee to be entered into the Prometheus Hall Of Fame.

Along the way they are forced to make tough decisions and choose what kind of civilization they will rebuild.Įarth Abides won the inaugural International Fantasy Award in 1951. The survivors live off the remains of the old world, while learning to adapt to the new. Beginning in the United States in the 1940s, it deals with Isherwood “Ish” Williams, Emma, and the community they founded. It tells the story of the fall of civilization from deadly disease and its rebirth. Stewart: Earth Abides, His Most Famous NovelĪgain from Wikipedia, regarding Earth Abides:Įarth Abides is a 1949 post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by American writer George R.

Earth abides book