It is one which allows the author to develop rich themes that in Survivors' three year story arc can only remain the stuff of speculation. While the story focuses, in the main, on the travails of a single experimental settlement, the novel's reach across both space (the vast distances of Middle America) and time (the passage of some six decades and more) offers the reader a compelling vista of post-Death life. This is a novel of huge ambition.įor the most part, this story of a ragtag community's struggle to survive in a world laid waste is as credible and sharply evoked as it is insightful and perceptive. First published in the USA in 1949, Earth Abides is a tale of civilization's fall that is epic in both conception and execution. What distinguishes Earth Abides from both Survivors and other post-apocalyptic novels (including Alas Babylon) is the scale and the scope of its narrative. Both US and UK paperback editions are currently in print. GEORGE R STEWART, Earth Abides: Ballentine Books, USA, 1983, £4.29, ISBN 1-3 and, Millenium Books, UK, 1999, £6.99 ISBN 1-3. But this at least we have done, and when we shall no longer do it, then we shall no longer be men.By Rich Cross Last updated on 10 November 2020, 22:06:36 A book review first published on the Survivors Homepage website Then we go about our life as before, and soon we forget, like the beasts. Or else we give him to the bright and hot cleanliness of fire.

Then, if the black birds come streaming from far to pluck at him, that too is right, for they are the creatures of the air.

Or else we lay him to rest among the tree-branches, and give him to the air. So he shall return to the earth, whence all things came. No, but rather we lay him where the ground is hollowed out a little and there cover him with leaves and branches. We do not cast him into the river carelessly for the stream to float him away. And we do not take him by the legs carelessly, and drag him into the forest for the foxes and woodrats to gnaw on. So, when the comrade lies there, we do not let him lie where he died.

Now we stand upright, and now also we think of the dead. Once it was not so, and when one of us died, he lay where he lay by the cave-mouth and we ran in and out there, not standing quite upright as we ran. “In this also we are men, that we think of the dead.

Earth abides book