Earth Abides asks a question I’m sure many ACX readers have asked themselves: I have Asperger’s. Shouldn’t I be president?
Naturally, it’s post-apocalyptic science fiction.
On the surface, Earth Abides is the story of a plague survivor watching civilization rot and rust away from the California hills. It is also a long letter from a 50-something autistic man to his 20-something younger self, patiently teaching him how to live. This framing was lost on me when I first read it at 16, as I was too busy being the addressee.
We follow Isherwood Williams (“Ish”), an anthropology graduate student at Berkeley. While conducting fieldwork in the Sierra Nevada, Ish almost succumbs to a kind of super-measles. When he recovers, he finds that everyone else has seemingly vanished. Eventually Ish discovers the same disease has killed nearly everyone, impossible to contain in the age of modern[1] travel. He calls it The Great Disaster.
Ish returns to his parents’ house in Berkeley, dismayed but unsurprised to find it empty. He contemplates ending his life, wondering what the point of any of this is, before landing on a motivation to continue: as a scientist, he’s driven by curiosity to see how this bizarre experiment turns out.
Our author, George R. Stewart, is curious about that too. Between passages of third-person limited narration, we're treated to omniscient ponderings about the future of the landscape, the animals, and humankind. The alternate narrator knows that the desert roads will last thousands of years, that certain domesticated species can return to the wild while others will perish, and that while dogs will miss Man, his true mourners will be the three species of human lice so specialized as to be incapable of infesting any other victim. The contrast between these two types of passages helps elevate the main narrative’s stakes. We're not just reading about a few survivors but about the end of one age and the beginning of another, with these people as our incidental window into it.
The omniscient passages make more sense in light of Stewart’s other work. Two of his most recent novels were Storm and Fire, in which the main characters are effectively the natural disasters themselves. It’s only natural that Stewart, in what is widely considered his greatest work, would up the ante and write a book where the main character is human civilization, or perhaps even the Earth itself. The title comes from Stewart's translation of Ecclesiastes 1:4: "Men go and come, but earth abides." Ecclesiastes, a fatalistic meditation on the limits of wisdom and the passing of generations, was an apt book for him to reach for.
Ish drives across the country and back, intrigued by the geography but finding no one he wants to join up with. He has better luck in Berkeley, meeting Em, a practical woman who serves as a font of courage throughout the novel and possesses a steady acceptance that Ish sorely lacks. Ish is afraid to have children without hospitals or midwives, but Em reminds him that the alternative to taking risks is not life but a slow death.
Other survivors join them: Ezra, a gregarious man who pairs surprisingly well with Ish’s social awkwardness; George, a useful handyman; a few less memorable adults. Ezra has two wives[2]. They begin popping out babies and, for lack of any better word, start calling themselves The Tribe, with Ish as their unlikely leader.
The narrative glides through The Tribe’s early years. Ish has grand dreams of rebuilding civilization, but the people he’s been left to build it with are not pliant. He struggles to teach the children even to read, much less math or science, and the other adults are no help to him. The setting works against him, too. Running water lasts for many years, canned food from grocery stores remains plentiful and edible (if not palatable), and hunting is easy with resurgent wildlife and endless cartridges. Life is easy and leisure is plentiful; there is no need to read when nothing needs to be researched, and multiplication is about as useful to them as Chinese history.
Ish grows into middle age. In the absence of organized religion, without much of an education and with no scientific spark within them, The Tribe is superstitious. In the children’s minds the Americans are like the Nephilim, powerful old creatures who created the houses, the roads, the bridges, perhaps even the mountains and the sun and the stars. Ish himself, who can read and write and knows much more about the world than even the other adults, is something like a demigod, or an American reduced to inhabiting a human form.
Ish’s hope for the future is Joey, his and Em’s son, the only child who takes to schooling. He reads fluently and asks Ish the kinds of questions he has given up on hearing from the others. These conversations are Ish’s window into the life The Great Disaster took from him, and Ish pins all his hopes of reviving civilization on Joey.
Generations go and come, but autism spectrum disorder remains
Ever since I first read it, Earth Abides has been my favorite novel. I’m a bit aspie myself, and share Ish’s difficulties in relating to other people; I’ve still never found another book whose protagonist feels so much like me. I related to him straightforwardly, wondering with him where this all would lead, nodding along as he pointed out other people’s flaws, despairing alongside him at the possibility of arithmetic, history, and even written language being lost to time.
Stewart was born in 1895, not 1995, so he couldn’t get an autism diagnosis, but I count him as one of us all the same. I have no idea how he became an English professor, but his classes must have been fascinating. His nonfiction includes a highly regarded microhistory of Pickett’s Charge, two books about individual highways, and four books about names. We’ve already discussed Storm and Fire; another two of his novels have as their main characters a PhD oral exam and a large rock. It’s almost disorienting how easily Stewart brings you along on these adventures, how un-notable his nonhuman characters are. On the other hand, the interpersonal interactions are a bit underwritten — they give the impression of an author who was not at home with other people.
Ish is absolutely an author self-insert; if their shared disposition doesn’t make that clear, the biographical details leave no doubt. Stewart was also at Berkeley, and he and Ish both dabble in history, geography, and anthropology. After a leisurely cross-country drive, Ish settles into his own childhood home in the Berkeley hills, a lightly fictionalized version of the home where Stewart lived while writing the novel.
But Ish is not the kind of self-insert that gives the term a bad name. The book is no incel revenge fantasy or other wish fulfillment. Young Ish is terrified at the thought of going dancing, but he gains no harem or kingdom in the new world. His solitary nature is briefly an asset after The Great Disaster, but it returns to being a liability after he settles down. The Tribe is large, happy, and healthy without paying much heed to Ish, and there’s no pattern of them benefiting when they do follow his lead, nor suffering when they don’t.
Ish isn’t a Mary Sue either. He survives the plague through dumb luck, not any special virtue. He has unusual talents — he can tell the time of year by where the sun sets in relation to the Golden Gate Bridge — but they’re curiosities as often as they are useful. He knows plenty about ecology and geography, and is educated and intelligent, but doesn’t think to retrieve important crop seeds from other parts of the country while the roads are still driveable. What seeds he does plant he has little luck growing and keeping safe from scavengers.
As I've grown older I've put distance between myself and the 16-year-old version of me who identified with Ish so readily. I can see Ish's flaws and missteps more easily, some of them mirroring my own. They force me to think of what lessons I've learned, what pieces of advice I wish I could give my past self. I think Earth Abides is Stewart performing the same exercise on himself.
A recurring theme is vestigial behavior, characters holding themselves back by clinging to fragments of the old world that no longer make sense in the new one. Stewart even makes a nod to this in the text, having Ish cite, as one of his qualifications for survival, that he has already lost his appendix. Ish meets a woman who has looted a jewelry store for beautiful, useless gems that now adorn her fingers. On his cross-country drive he encounters some former sharecroppers who happily exchange a dozen eggs for one of his dollar bills. Ish has no difficulty at all remarking on these people’s flaws, and it’s good that he can; he needs to find other survivors who can serve as assets to him in the new world, and it would do no one any good to be pollyannaish about them.
Yet as the novel goes on he keeps finding fault, often more cruelly than usefully, and occasionally he’s even wrong. The truth is that Ish is arrogant, and is happy to seize on excuses to put other people down. This is a pattern I eventually came to recognize in myself, and I wish I’d seen it sooner.
Ish has the same flaw he loves to diagnose in others, though he remains in denial about it for most of the novel: his obsession with capital-c Civilization. It’s an admirable concern, but he pursues it incoherently and in a way that is doomed to fail. Many small or even medium-sized victories are well within his grasp. Some piece of the power grid goes out long before the children are born and no one ever gives electricity much thought again. Artificial lighting, refrigeration, ice cream — these could all help inspire the rest of the survivors to learn science or engineering, to explore possible energy sources, perhaps even to gather the necessary expertise to keep a shadow of the old grid running. Ish wants the children to read but gives them no material to want to read — no picture books or novels or recipes are ever mentioned. He realizes the futility of trying to justify math to them and just hopes that they’ll be enamored of the beauty of numbers and shapes. But the other adults do not treasure knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and the children mostly take after them.
It’s never even made clear what Ish imagines “save civilization” to mean: it’s not as though there are enough people alive to support trade or journalism or museums. Uncharitably, Ish has never given up his pre-Disaster ambition of being a university professor, and “university professor” is not a role that can exist outside of civilization. He still clings to hope for his intellectual project, for there is still Joey; if he cannot complete his work in his own lifetime, perhaps Joey will.
Ish has not bent even a little bit, so in the last half of Earth Abides the narrative sets out to break him with overwhelming force. His fears about The Tribe’s passivity and lack of curiosity begin to be realized. Running water fails after 20 years — somewhere a pipe has burst and the nearby reservoir has drained without anyone noticing. The Tribe can do well enough fetching water from creeks and streams, so the rest of them shrug and move on. Ish tries to impart his sense of urgency to them, but the moment gets away from him. They decide the cure for passivity is for two of the younger boys to go on an expedition around the former United States, and they bring back an outsider named Charlie.
Charlie is dangerous and predatory. He sets his eyes on Evie, an intellectually disabled girl the Tribe has long cared for. On top of the consent issues, they’re unsure if Evie’s condition is genetic, and they learn Charlie has venereal diseases; any children they might have could be liabilities on both counts. Charlie won’t back down; they fear he will return vengeful from exile, and imprisonment is unrealistic. The other adults accept what they are — a small band facing a threat — and are ready to do what they must. Ish arrives there more slowly, unsettled by the consequences. He wanted to rebuild Civilization, with its infrastructure and scholarship and industry, but the necessity of Justice reveals to him what he has actually built: the State.
Charlie is gone, but his ghost still haunts them. He had carried typhoid fever, and The Tribe suffers an outbreak. Many children die, including Joey. But for Em's steadiness, grief would break them. Ish disbands the school. Joey’s death leaves no room for denial: the project of restoring civilization is over.
Ish finally accepts that his preoccupation with civilization was a flaw, not a dream. He will no longer seek to preserve it, and were he to try, there is no one left to carry it on. Even if Joey had lived, Ish admits, he too would have failed.
At long last, Ish gives up on teaching, on directing, and absorbs some of Em’s poise. He meets the children as they are. He carves himself a bow and an arrow to play with. The others see him and are excited; they ask to try his bow and then go off to make their own. Bows become a staple of the children’s play. With one act, he has ensured his grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be able to hunt and defend themselves long after the bullets are spent and the gunpowder has degraded.
The world keeps spinning, indifferent to Ish’s failure. He grows old. The other Americans die. Ish becomes an oracle to The Tribe even as his mind grows cloudy. He has given up trying to change them; it is too late for him to do much, and he accepts them for what they are, for good or ill. He has begun, at last, to abide. He hands off leadership and dies, but The Tribe abides. The earth abides.
What I imagine Stewart was telling himself, or what I wish I could tell myself, is this. The skills you possess are not more important for the fact that you possess them. The things you have trouble understanding are not less important for being opaque to you. You are intelligent, yes, but that is only one virtue among many, and it is not a one-way ticket to a good life. You may do great work, or your life may only be ordinary, and either way the earth will abide.