A ridiculously verbose book review
Nov. 28th, 2007 06:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragojustineSuccessful days in the "write a little bit every day" post-Thanksgiving-sloth resolution: 3
Earth Abides, George R. Stewart
This book is stunning. It is brilliant and... I am having trouble processing it, to be honest. And when I have trouble processing what I read, I tend to write too much.
This is an absolute classic of the SF post-apocalypse genre, usually mentioned in the same breath with "On the Beach" or "Riddley Walker" (and, given that I think Riddley Walker is one of the greatest works of genius in all of SF, is saying something) and this edition comes with an intro full of effusive praise by Connie Willis.
I went into this in full-on "don't be fooled by the hype" mode, but this book just stunned me. Our apocalypse is biological- a sudden plague of incredible lethality. It is not biowarfare, it is not man-made, it is simply one of those things that happens to dense populations of any animal.
Our narrator is Ish, a geography graduate student away on a research trip in the mountains who survives by sheer luck and re-enters a world that has been devoid of humans for days at least. His first reaction is observation- a meticulous catalog of the ways that the world changes with the sudden disappearance of humanity. He takes a road trip, from San Francisco to New York and back again, and wrestles with issues of loneliness and the difference between being simply an introverted person in a safe world and a genuinely alone person in a world with no safety net. He meets other survivors and eventually forms a community with some of them, and then the book goes into fast-forward mode to cover the next... oh, say 60 years? of the growing community until his death.
There are weaknesses. For one thing, the author utterly handwaves the question of "where did the bodies go?" For another, the book is strikingly dated. The revelation that our hero's love interest is of some sort of mixed-race background probably, at the time, read as a subtle and adeptly handled statement about the utter irrelevance of race. Now, her fear about that revelation reads as just a bit bizarre. Other characters are similarly dated in their attitudes, and the level of technology is not much above 1950 so the reader finds himself speculating endlessly on how the story would now play out differently. But those weaknesses are small.
The really interesting thing about this book seems to be called a weakness by many reviewers, and that is that Ish is a fundamentally unlikeable and frustrating hero, as are the people he forms his community with. SF has certain tropes, especially for a hero who presents himself as intelligent and intellectual. We want Ish to be the scientist-hero, to preserve humanity's greatest achievements and shape the new civilization that emerges.
He doesn't.
Instead he sits in relentless and frustrating passivity. He thinks nonstop about how much more intelligent he is than the others who survived (and he undoubtedly is), but he does not manage to preserve even rudimentary agriculture for the next generation, let alone medicine and philosophy and the basics of science. He rants constantly about how the community ought to be taking action, creating and preserving and organizing instead of simply scavenging, but he himself goes on opening cans from grocery stores for 40 years and barely even tries to plant a vegetable. His relentless passivity is utterly infuriating. The rest of the community, despite hearing him tell them constantly that they need to take action and not be left helpless, can't seem to bother with anything. Even when their running water finally fails, it takes relentless nagging to even manage to dig a well.
We know how this story should go- we know that Ish should be carefully building a library, cultivating and passing on basic skills of agriculture and animal husbandry and medicine and blacksmithing and carpentry. We want a story of triumph, of the preservation of some recognizable form of human achievement, a diary of works accomplished and lessons learned. Instead, we see Ish not even manage to teach his children to read.
And the basic thesis is this- A tiny and randomly chosen sample of humanity (say, a few thousand in the entire area of the United States) survive. They will be of average intelligence and average skill and average adaptability. By sheer random chance, there will probably be no driven geniuses or great leaders who survive. How well would they really do? Especially people who have lived urban lives.
And a related thesis- how fast would it all vanish? Ish feels utterly disconnected from his own children- but then again, those children believe "Americans" are semi-mythical beings. They can't read, and don't see the point. They have never seen more then 40 people in their lives. They have trouble distinguishing the natural and the man-made. They have no concept of money, a store, or a job. Equally no conception of politics, law, or a nation. How could he possibly feel any kinship with them? So many of those stories of our hero-scientist-preserver do not address the very real issue of just how different the world of the next generation is. Expecting them to share any fundamental values, or to understand or even care about the things our hero is trying so hard to preserve, is unrealistic.
And a thesis that interests me in particular- how much does civilization shape people? I read many reviewers infuriated at how stupid the later generations of humans were. And yet... Isn't that the basic mechanism of the Flynn effect? Not that humanity is breeding itself smarter, but rather that society itself makes its inhabitants smarter. The more complex and demanding the social surroundings, the more the brain is forced to adapt and accommodate those complexities. Large and multileveled social hierarchies, technology, fast-paced surroundings- these things change the brains of those who live within them. We can argue about KINDS of intelligence, about how complex civilization may improve our plasticity and creativity and skills with symbols and patterns but not fundamental intelligence, sure- but someone born and raised in a paleolithic-style scavenger-band of 30 people is going to think in some fundamentally different ways. Ish's great-grandchildren can create music and art and oral traditions, they can use scavenged and crudely modified tools, they can navigate their landscape and track and kill prey- but Ish's ideas about logic and the scientific method and political legitimacy and humanity's legacy make no sense to them, and literacy has completely died out (as has numeracy beyond "you, myself, another, many").
That is infuriating. But is it so wrong?
In the end, there was no conceivable way for Ish to save the American society he loved so much. A society of 40 people simple cannot sustain the complexity of one of millions- even if Ish had been a better person, it simply would not be possible. Even as the physical remnants of humanity prove more enduring than Ish expected, the web of concepts that held it all together is far more fragile. It isn't the physical infrastructure that sustains what we think of as human civilization, it is largely the mental, and a simple discontinuity in transmission means that is gone forever. It's a fascinating thesis for the book, and it's argued well.
This is stunning, and tragic. The whole book is a requiem for society- to the density and specialization and interconnectedness that makes it possible to live the way we do. Ish doesn't appreciate it until he realizes that he can never preserve it. By the end he is too old and senile to feel his own frustration and heartbreak, but we more than feel it for him. Because society shaped Ish, he is only a hollow and desperate shadow after it has all gone- and that is exactly what we would be too.
When we mourn, we are really mourning the loss of a piece of ourselves. This book makes you feel the loss of every institution and concept that shaped your own mind, and you mourn it. Even as Ish's descendants move into the future, happy and confident and well-adjusted, you mourn- because you, like Ish, are of The Old Ones, and can never follow them into their new world.
It's a hell of an accomplishment.
Earth Abides, George R. Stewart
This book is stunning. It is brilliant and... I am having trouble processing it, to be honest. And when I have trouble processing what I read, I tend to write too much.
This is an absolute classic of the SF post-apocalypse genre, usually mentioned in the same breath with "On the Beach" or "Riddley Walker" (and, given that I think Riddley Walker is one of the greatest works of genius in all of SF, is saying something) and this edition comes with an intro full of effusive praise by Connie Willis.
I went into this in full-on "don't be fooled by the hype" mode, but this book just stunned me. Our apocalypse is biological- a sudden plague of incredible lethality. It is not biowarfare, it is not man-made, it is simply one of those things that happens to dense populations of any animal.
Our narrator is Ish, a geography graduate student away on a research trip in the mountains who survives by sheer luck and re-enters a world that has been devoid of humans for days at least. His first reaction is observation- a meticulous catalog of the ways that the world changes with the sudden disappearance of humanity. He takes a road trip, from San Francisco to New York and back again, and wrestles with issues of loneliness and the difference between being simply an introverted person in a safe world and a genuinely alone person in a world with no safety net. He meets other survivors and eventually forms a community with some of them, and then the book goes into fast-forward mode to cover the next... oh, say 60 years? of the growing community until his death.
There are weaknesses. For one thing, the author utterly handwaves the question of "where did the bodies go?" For another, the book is strikingly dated. The revelation that our hero's love interest is of some sort of mixed-race background probably, at the time, read as a subtle and adeptly handled statement about the utter irrelevance of race. Now, her fear about that revelation reads as just a bit bizarre. Other characters are similarly dated in their attitudes, and the level of technology is not much above 1950 so the reader finds himself speculating endlessly on how the story would now play out differently. But those weaknesses are small.
The really interesting thing about this book seems to be called a weakness by many reviewers, and that is that Ish is a fundamentally unlikeable and frustrating hero, as are the people he forms his community with. SF has certain tropes, especially for a hero who presents himself as intelligent and intellectual. We want Ish to be the scientist-hero, to preserve humanity's greatest achievements and shape the new civilization that emerges.
He doesn't.
Instead he sits in relentless and frustrating passivity. He thinks nonstop about how much more intelligent he is than the others who survived (and he undoubtedly is), but he does not manage to preserve even rudimentary agriculture for the next generation, let alone medicine and philosophy and the basics of science. He rants constantly about how the community ought to be taking action, creating and preserving and organizing instead of simply scavenging, but he himself goes on opening cans from grocery stores for 40 years and barely even tries to plant a vegetable. His relentless passivity is utterly infuriating. The rest of the community, despite hearing him tell them constantly that they need to take action and not be left helpless, can't seem to bother with anything. Even when their running water finally fails, it takes relentless nagging to even manage to dig a well.
We know how this story should go- we know that Ish should be carefully building a library, cultivating and passing on basic skills of agriculture and animal husbandry and medicine and blacksmithing and carpentry. We want a story of triumph, of the preservation of some recognizable form of human achievement, a diary of works accomplished and lessons learned. Instead, we see Ish not even manage to teach his children to read.
And the basic thesis is this- A tiny and randomly chosen sample of humanity (say, a few thousand in the entire area of the United States) survive. They will be of average intelligence and average skill and average adaptability. By sheer random chance, there will probably be no driven geniuses or great leaders who survive. How well would they really do? Especially people who have lived urban lives.
And a related thesis- how fast would it all vanish? Ish feels utterly disconnected from his own children- but then again, those children believe "Americans" are semi-mythical beings. They can't read, and don't see the point. They have never seen more then 40 people in their lives. They have trouble distinguishing the natural and the man-made. They have no concept of money, a store, or a job. Equally no conception of politics, law, or a nation. How could he possibly feel any kinship with them? So many of those stories of our hero-scientist-preserver do not address the very real issue of just how different the world of the next generation is. Expecting them to share any fundamental values, or to understand or even care about the things our hero is trying so hard to preserve, is unrealistic.
And a thesis that interests me in particular- how much does civilization shape people? I read many reviewers infuriated at how stupid the later generations of humans were. And yet... Isn't that the basic mechanism of the Flynn effect? Not that humanity is breeding itself smarter, but rather that society itself makes its inhabitants smarter. The more complex and demanding the social surroundings, the more the brain is forced to adapt and accommodate those complexities. Large and multileveled social hierarchies, technology, fast-paced surroundings- these things change the brains of those who live within them. We can argue about KINDS of intelligence, about how complex civilization may improve our plasticity and creativity and skills with symbols and patterns but not fundamental intelligence, sure- but someone born and raised in a paleolithic-style scavenger-band of 30 people is going to think in some fundamentally different ways. Ish's great-grandchildren can create music and art and oral traditions, they can use scavenged and crudely modified tools, they can navigate their landscape and track and kill prey- but Ish's ideas about logic and the scientific method and political legitimacy and humanity's legacy make no sense to them, and literacy has completely died out (as has numeracy beyond "you, myself, another, many").
That is infuriating. But is it so wrong?
In the end, there was no conceivable way for Ish to save the American society he loved so much. A society of 40 people simple cannot sustain the complexity of one of millions- even if Ish had been a better person, it simply would not be possible. Even as the physical remnants of humanity prove more enduring than Ish expected, the web of concepts that held it all together is far more fragile. It isn't the physical infrastructure that sustains what we think of as human civilization, it is largely the mental, and a simple discontinuity in transmission means that is gone forever. It's a fascinating thesis for the book, and it's argued well.
This is stunning, and tragic. The whole book is a requiem for society- to the density and specialization and interconnectedness that makes it possible to live the way we do. Ish doesn't appreciate it until he realizes that he can never preserve it. By the end he is too old and senile to feel his own frustration and heartbreak, but we more than feel it for him. Because society shaped Ish, he is only a hollow and desperate shadow after it has all gone- and that is exactly what we would be too.
When we mourn, we are really mourning the loss of a piece of ourselves. This book makes you feel the loss of every institution and concept that shaped your own mind, and you mourn it. Even as Ish's descendants move into the future, happy and confident and well-adjusted, you mourn- because you, like Ish, are of The Old Ones, and can never follow them into their new world.
It's a hell of an accomplishment.
