The novel is nearly completely focused on Ish the transition to the new world, and the progress and struggles of the group that gathers around him are presented through his eyes. Stewart follows this set of conditions to its not surprising conclusion as the generations of the community become farther separated from the old world knowledge.

The easy access the survivors have to so much of the output of the old world, and the lack of visible benefit they perceive in developing new skills, means there is little motivation to learn. Ish often finds his powerful desire to prevent mankind from losing its centuries of accumulated scientific and philosophical progress frustrated by the lack of the larger social structures that in the pre-plague world had naturally ensured the transfer of knowledge to future generations, and thereby provided the basis for further development.

And of how someone such as his main character Ish, trained in the sciences and the importance of knowledge, might fare in a community of a few random souls who have varying abilities, capabilities and motivations. Most of the survivors, in shock over all they have lost and in being suddenly deeply alone in a nearly empty world, focus only on their daily existence.Īt its heart the novel represents Stewart's vision of how this tiny group of strangers might come together and make a new life out of the ruins of all they have lost. But on the other hand, with just a few random people left, most technical experience and knowledge has been lost to the plague. This tiny group has all around them the almost limitless left-overs of what they come to call the 'old world' this includes both the useful, such as canned foods and tools, and the apparently useless, such as coins and jewelry. Over the months that follow a small handful of survivors gather around him and establish a tiny community in the empty remains of what was once a metropolitan area with several hundred thousand inhabitants. Finding the country nearly empty of people, and encountering no one with whom he is interested in joining up, he eventually returns to his family home in Oakland. Naturally a bit of a loner, with a tendency to hang back and observe the passing scene, he shakes off his initial shock by deciding to travel across country and, falling back on his experience as a researcher, to observe and understand the new reality. Published in 1949 and set in the immediate future, the novel tells the story of a young biologist, Isherwood 'Ish' Williams, who comes down out of the California mountains after a two week research trip and discovers that most of the population has been wiped out by a deadly plague. With this epigraph, George Stewart opens his novel of post-apocalyptic America.

Earth abides george stewart