Category: Characters

This book caught my eye when I mistook it for the source of The Quiet Earth. (It’s plain from the jacket blurb that they’re not the same story at all.) It’s one of those books whose title I’d heard a number of times, enough to be at least aware that it was a post-apocalypse story, but surprisingly had never read.

My opinion is…mixed.

The story starts with the protagonist, Ish Williams, receiving a rattlesnake bite that happens to save his life. When he recovers and returns from his remote cabin, he discovers that nearly every human on Earth has died from “super measles”, an contagion of unknown origin and extreme lethality. The book then follows Ish through the next 50 years, focusing on three different periods, as he finds other survivors and builds a…er…tribe. 

And “tribe” is a big, big part of the problem.

On first reading, the story was entertaining and interesting. Stewart thought through a number of details well, such as the lingering of hydropower, the rapid failure of the roads, and the rewilding (or extinction) of domesticated plants and animals. There are a number of really good emotionally-charged scenes (dealing with Charlie, the Joey scene, and much of “The Last American”, for example).

It takes a little while to get used to his writing style, which I guess you could call “post-war experimental” (it was first published in 1949). The dialogue is sterile in some places, academic in others, rarely naturalistic. The ongoing effects of the near-disappearance of Man are described by italicized narrative dumps, whose perspective isn’t consistent (much of the time these read like excerpts from a far-future historical overview of the Great Disaster, but sometimes like a narration of ongoing events, and at other times like conventional omniscient perspective). It quickly takes on that “period” feel of other books from that era, e.g. Alas, Babylon (1959), and you just go with it.

It was compelling enough to read straight through over the course of a weekend. But the more I’ve thought of it over the past week, the more problems I’ve found with it.

• The repeated malthusian elements, which seem common to the point of obsession with SF authors from the end of WWII through perhaps the mid-1980s. Okay, we get it. There are a lot of humans. Fine. But it gets really tiresome when (like global warming, which took its place as favored hobby-horse) it has to be repeatedly, compulsively, reflexively inserted into every story.
• The nihilism. There is a thread throughout that, hey, you know, maybe it’s a good thing, after all, that human civilization is nearly dead. Maybe it’s overrated, and even a mistake, and we should let it die. Which they do, albeit passively.
• The passivity – the characters’ unwillingness or lack of motivation to do anything active to preserve civilization for the following generations. This is demonstrated intentionally through the running “joke” about getting a gas-powered refrigerator working, the single, desultory instance after two decades of scouting for other long-term survivors, and the lack of interest in restoring electricity or repairing the water supply. Ish himself comments repeatedly on how he feels himself to be an observer, which appears to restrain him from taking meaningful action when necessary.
  The most significant instance is Ish’s petulant and impotent complaints about lack of support from the other parents regarding teaching their kids to read. The abundance of long-shelf-life food is blamed (nobody has to work to eat, so the kids are allowed to play all the time, there’s no sense of urgency in learning or preserving knowledge, etc.), but this abundance could have had exactly the opposite outcome had Ish put any effort at all into actually being a leader: having no need to hunt, forage, or farm, the kids had all the time in the world to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to restart human civilization. But he didn’t plan for that when the kids were still infants, and he didn’t put his foot down when the parents didn’t support him, in spite of being the obvious and unquestioned leader of the Tribe.
  When he discovered that his failure to push their education had resulted in a growing superstitiousness among the children, Ish could have harnessed it to ensure a longer-term recovery of civilization by creating a “priesthood” to serve (and preserve) the university library. But nah. Better to let the kids continue goofing off and remain illiterate and innumerate, and complain  impotently about it, than to try.
  After Joey meets his blatantly telegraphed doom (you didn’t see that coming fifty pages away?), Ish performs one last act of teaching: showing the kids how to make a bow and arrow – as a toy. After that, he gives in and gives up, and does nothing more to rekindle civilization, letting the Tribe degenerate into a primitive, superstitious, and ignorant band of savages.

Ish is a pathetic coward. Kinda ruins the book.

The only other apocalypse fiction where I’ve encountered this “giving up on civilization” element is the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. But there, a clear reason for doing so – the cycle of growth and collapse – had been established from the beginning (“All of this has happened before; all of this will happen again.”). The active choice at the end of the series to abandon technological civilization and merge with the early homo sapiens of our Earth is portrayed as a measure to break this cycle. The characters accept its necessity yet are hopeful that something better might emerge in time – they’re not passive in the moment and ambivalent about whether regains civilization or even survives as a species.