A Quiet Earth

Isherwood Williams, a graduate student, is bitten by a rattlesnake while on a camping trip in a remote Californian wilderness. After a lengthy convalescence, he emerges from seclusion to discover that in the meantime a virus has all but exterminated the human race. Only a handful of people are still alive in the entirety of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and the survival and future destiny of the human race will depend on their efforts. So begins George R Stewart’s Earth Abides, first published in 1949, and you might be forgiven for thinking that you could write the rest of it for yourself.

Perhaps so, but at the heart of the novel is something odd and almost paradoxical. There have been many, many stories written around this theme since the end of the Second World War – indeed, the post-apocalyptic narrative has become something of a mainstay of science fiction and horror. Earth Abides is by no means the first such story, but it is surely a colossus of the genre. Never mind Ish Williams’ role as the progenitor of a new human race, from him also spring Bill Masen, John Custance, Robert Neville, Abby Grant, Greg Preston, and the protagonists of so many stories partly or largely inspired by this one. He contains multitudes.

But then again, this is also a very different kind of story to all of those others. At its most excitable, post-apocalyptic fiction can devolve to little more than formerly mild-mannered citizens discovering their inner barbarian and learning how to skirmish in the ruins of the old civilisation, while even the more thoughtful examples of the form take a fairly optimistic view of the prospects of some form of civilisation making a fairly speedy comeback.

Earth Abides is a quieter story with a different perspective. Ish is not instantly infused with a sudden desire to resurrect society and get things back to how they were: he quickly realises that this will be impossible, given the scale of the devastation. Given that the psychological trauma seems to have driven most of the survivors insane, one way or another, he decides that humanity has little chance of survival and contemplates suicide: but in the end opts to continue to live, simply out of curiosity about how the world will progress in the sudden absence of man.

And throughout the book Stewart inserts little asides, describing just that: the slow encroachment of forest and field into the cities, the lot of the domesticated animals now left unattended, the fate of the crops and flowers once cultivated by man. Writing in the late 1940s, he has no doubt as to the resilience of nature or just how little impact, really, the human race has had on the natural world. Set against the vastness of deep time, the sovereignty of man is just a brief and curious interlude. There is a profound and rather wonderful calmness in Stewart’s presentation of this – he finds not much cause for sorrow or anger in man’s demise.

But set against this is Ish’s abandonment of his detachment and re-engagement with the human race. He meets a woman, Em, and together with a small group of others they do set about ensuring the survival of the human race, founding a settlement and raising many children. Ish’s private ambition is to ensure the return of technological civilisation as soon as possible, and he protects books as the greatest treasure left to the survivors by the old civilisation. But is he capable of inspiring the other survivors to share his vision?

This is where Earth Abides diverges sharply from most other stories in this genre. I’m going to compare it to the BBC series Survivors (1975-7), partly because it’s one I’m very familiar with, but also because Survivors is very clearly inspired by this novel (the episode Law and Order contains one scene taken virtually whole cloth from Stewart’s novel, for instance).

The most major difference, of course, is that Survivors occurs over a handful of years following the plague, while Earth Abides covers decades – it’s somewhat discombobulating to think that, if the book’s opening is set around the time it was written, its final, ‘distant future’ segment could well have been meant to occur around now, early in the 21st century. But you can’t do a TV show with that kind of scope – at least no-one’s attempted it yet – so you can kind of forgive the BBC for telescoping events somewhat.

But Survivors is tonally different also. Terry Nation’s characters energetically embrace their do-it-yourself, back to the land philosophy, within a handful of episodes – presumably because Nation himself was apparently a great advocate of people being more practically-minded. Stewart’s survivors, quite believably, see no reason to abandon the comforts of civilisation and the rich pickings left behind, and the piecemeal collapse of the old systems of power, lighting, and water (over what seem to me like an improbably long period) are major events in their lives. Only Ish sees the need to build anew rather than simply scavenge, and he lacks the charisma he needs to persuade the others of this.

The final series of Survivors concludes, symbolically, with the electric lights coming back on only three or so years after the annihilation of well over 99% of the UK’s population. Earth Abides accepts that this is wildly optimistic – as the book concludes, Ish’s tribe of descendants are well on the way to being little more than hunter-gatherers, deeply superstitious, their highest technological achievement being the pounding of coins into arrowheads, with no grasp of the calendar, no literacy, and losing what Ish is able to recognise as English.

Yet this does not seem in any way a dismal or overly bleak conclusion – it is surely the lot of every very old person to not recognise the world that the younger generations have made. I have read and watched many stories of this kind, and I do find them to be amongst the saddest and most poignant in all of fiction – perhaps because, when we contemplate the death of civilisation, we must inevitably contemplate our own, and in the crumbling of the ruins of our world lies the implicit truth of how insignificant it really is. All of this is here, elaborated quite simply and elegantly by Stewart’s beautiful prose. But, as mentioned, there is also a wonderful serenity and sense of acceptance, a deep humanism, but also a profound love of nature.

There are no zombies, no killer plants, no gun-toting packs of petrol-hungry raiders in Earth Abides – there is, in truth, very little in the way of action in it at all. And yet this very quiet book is, in a strange way, the ur-text of the modern post-apocalyptic story, the one that encompasses all the others, and perhaps surpasses them too. This is a great, great book, full of intelligence and wisdom and sadness and compassion. It will surely be with us as long as civilisation endures, although I’m sure its author would have been the first to suggest that this is, in the wider view of things, perhaps less impressive than it first sounds. But then the wider view is the whole point of Earth Abides.