Earth Abides

“They will commit me to the earth, [...] Yet I also commit them to the earth. There is nothing else by which men live. Men go and come, but earth abides.”

For the last five or six years I have been making my way through the things that inspired Neil Druckmann when writing The Last of Us series of games. Some I had already seen/read such as The Count of Monte Cristo (not apocalyptic but thematically relevant) or the 2006 film Children of Men. Some I had heard of and have since read (ie. The Road) and others I hadn't heard of before. Earth Abides, a 1949 novel by George R. Stewart, was amongst the latter.

The novel follows Isherwood “Ish” Williams (the tlou fan in me was already pleased) an ecologist who emerges from working on his graduate thesis in isolation to discover civilisation has collapsed after much of humanity has succumbed to a plague. What follows is an exploration of an earth without humans; not only what it looks like across Ish's life as the survivors cope, but also how without the influence of civilisation the remaining plants, animal and nature are free to adapt and flourish.

Ish travels coast to coast, California to New York City and back, eventually building a community of survivors and struggles reconciling ideas of the old world with the new. What things that were once so important remain so? What does it mean for Ish to be, in the end, the Last American?

Needless to say, I loved this book. Haunting, evocative, but despite it all containing a ribbon of optimism, it's one I'll look forward to reading again in the future.

“...if they looked down upon the earth that night, what did they see? Then we must say that they saw no change. Though smoke from stacks and chimneys and campfires no longer rose to dim the atmosphere, yet still smoke rose from volcanos and from forest-fires. Seen even from the moon, the planet that night must have shown only with its accustomed splendor—no brighter, no dimmer.”