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In cleaning house and trying to organize our DVD collection, my wife ran across an audio book, which I think must have been given to me by a friend a long time ago, but which I've never gotten around to listening to. It is titled "Earth Abides" by George R. Stewart.

The description on the back of the box says:

An instant classic upon its original publication in 1949 and winner of the first International Fantasy Award, "Earth Abides" ranks with "On the Beach" and "Riddley Walker" as one of our most provocative and finely wrought post-apocalyptic works of literature. Its impact is still fresh, its lessons timeless.

When a plague of unprecedented virulence sweeps the globe, the human race is all but wiped out. In the aftermath, as the great machine of civilization slowly, inexorably, breaks down, only a few shattered survivors remain to struggle against the slide into barbarism. . .or extinction.

This is the story of one such survivor, Isherwood "Ish" Williams, an intellectual loner who embraces the grim duty of bearing witness to what may be humanity's final days. But then he finds Em, a wise and courageous woman who coaxes his stunned heart back to life and teaches him to hope again. Together, they will face unimaginable challenges as they sow the seeds of the a new beginning.

(It goes without saying that, if the author could imagine the challenges, they are not "unimaginable". )

Has anyone heard of, listened to, or read this novel, and if so, is it a waste of my time or not? I haven't listened to an audio book in 20 years or more, and generally either read the Kindle or dead tree versions of books.

Interested to know your opinions. Otherwise, particularly if it's not particularly any good, I'll just put it on eBay or something.

I've read this book quite a few times over the years, It's right up there with "On the Beach" and "Alas, Babylon" , when it comes to post apocalyptic science fiction. It won assorted awards and got great reviews when it was published. I think it's a good read and a significant contribution to the SF genre. Will you like it? That depends....how do you feel about science fiction? It's definitely science fiction, according to my favorite definition, that is, a story that asks "What If", and then explores an idea.

RSX11 wrote:I've read this book quite a few times over the years, It's right up there with "On the Beach" and "Alas, Babylon" , when it comes to post apocalyptic science fiction. It won assorted awards and got great reviews when it was published. I think it's a good read and a significant contribution to the SF genre. Will you like it? That depends....how do you feel about science fiction? It's definitely science fiction, according to my favorite definition, that is, a story that asks "What If", and then explores an idea.

Cool, thanks for the review. I have read and enjoyed SF in the past, although I haven't read any recently. I have also read (much more recently) several examples of both the post-apocalyptic genre, as well as the dystopic-future genre. Examples of the former would include titles like "Lights Out", and "One Second After", and examples of the latter would include items like Matthew Bracken's "Enemies" trilogy and "Castigo Cay". So generally speaking, I enjoy that type of stuff, but I haven't read "On the Beach" since high school or college, and I don't remember finding it that enjoyable because, in the end, all of humanity dies. It was heavily freighted with an anti-nuclear message which was a common theme of the day, as mankind lived in the first years of the nuclear age at the time, and intercontinental atomic warfare between the superpowers was a serious threat preoccupying the minds of many people. It was the age of building backyard bomb-shelters, and so on. "On the Beach" was a very somber and pessimistic book, and more of a dread warning than entertainment. So was the movie, for that matter. Even "Doctor Strangelove: or How I Learned to Love the Bomb" was more entertaining than that - while still carrying essentially the same anti-nuclear warning. BTW, that book has a beginning and end which is not found in the related movie.

I am more interested in the kind of novel which assumes that there will be survivors, even if in small numbers, and which take the reader through the survival process, both in terms of skills and materials, but also in terms of social interactions which promote survival. I find them both entertaining and instructive. Even when the author had no particular spiritual bent in writing their book, I tend to view things through the lens (and filters) of my particular spiritual inclinations, which include an end of times description which has little or no bearing on any of these books. In my world, God will either protect me from harm, or he won't. If it is his will to call me home, nothing within human power can keep me alive. If it is in his will to NOT call me home, nothing can kill me. So if I am alive, then I can survive until it is in God's will for me not to survive, and he will provide me various means of survival. In that light, even though entertained, I also read this kind of fiction genre as instructive, and mentally squirrel the ideas away as possibilities to consider if faced with those kinds of scenarios.

Maybe I'll give it a try.

I just finished Wool, by Hugh Howey (very odd name for a post-apocalyptic thriller, but the reference is made clear a couple of dozen pages in). I'd never heard of him, and the book (actually started out as short story and was expanded into a five-section novel, with two more novels after it to round-out the trilogy) came recommended when I was having a discussion with a friend and got on my soapbox opining the degradation of the novel in the current era of self-publishing.

Howey started (I believe; I'd have to fact-check) with one short story being picked up by a small press, then opted to go wholly the self-pub route via Amazon. He was held by my friend as an example of gems out there in self-pub landscape. I was skeptical.

Turns out it was an engaging read, and I'll probably continue with the second book in the trilogy, Shift. Wool came out as a novel in 2012, so I'm late to the party. Film rights were sold to 21st Century Fox with Ridley Scott to direct, and the amazingly prolific Howey signed with Simon & Schuster for U.S. and Canadian brick-and-mortar distribution, and Random House Century for UK distribution.

Not the Great American Novel by any stretch--there are some holes in concept, execution, and language--but highly readable and original, nonetheless. If you use Kindle Unlimited, it's available for a free loan, as are the other two books in the series. TAM, from your description of your post-apocalyptic preferences, it might be worth a look.

From the cover blurb: "This is the story of mankind clawing for survival, of mankind on the edge. The world outside has grown unkind, the view of it limited, talk of it forbidden. But there are always those who hope, who dream. These are the dangerous people, the residents who infect others with their optimism. Their punishment is simple. They are given the very thing they profess to want: They are allowed outside."

Another aside... Back in the day when I used to do a lot of back-and-forth driving between Houston and Austin, I listened to a lot of audio books. Made the miles go faster than anything else. Hearing an author like Malcolm Gladwell read his own non-fiction was great.

The downside came with fiction. First, I was always careful to avoid abridged versions of books. Even if you're going to read it to me, I don't want the Reader's Digest Cliff Notes. Second, it was not only the author's language that then steered the fictive world, but the ability and presence of the voice actor. I remember one Dean Koontz book that was absolutely destroyed by the reader; I couldn't get into the story because I couldn't get past the reader's strange inflections, New York accent, and attempts to read female characters a ridiculous forced-octave higher. :-/

So I'm with ya: I tend to avoid fiction audio books altogether. And for years now, if I'm going to listen on a drive, I've stayed with nonfiction. If you decide to listen to Earth Abides, I hope the narrator isn't a distraction.

Skippr, thanks for the suggestion. My problem with audio books is that I use don't drive that much anymore, unless I'm on a rad trip. My 2015 4Runner, which I bought in mid-March of that year, has less than 15,000 miles on it, 18 months later, and that includes a 3 week 3400 mile trip to California and back. There's just no real opportunity to listen to such a thing most of the time. And at home, I'd typically rather read (or watch) than listen. Just ask my wife.

But if this story is as good as RSX11 says it is, maybe I'll give it a try.

I listen to audio books (at this point the count has to be in the thousands) downloaded from the library as I go about mowing, house cleaning, laundry, chain sawing fire wood, rebuilding my back yard target...audio books are a real treat.

Libraries provide them without cost or yeah someone, probably me, pays for them, but they have the insidious 'no immediate cost' cache about them that makes them even very appealing.

I'll try to say this without spoiling the book. Unlike On The Beach, humanity does survive but there is not much of a survivor (prepper?) mentality. I have reread it a few times, and I think it is one of the best of it's era, but the viewpoint is definitely different from most of today's post-apocalyptic stories.