Stewart, identified a mutated virus as the not-unlikely agent of the end of the world as we know it.įor obvious reasons, I was recently drawn back to Earth Abides (the title is from Ecclesiastes I,4- “men come and go, but earth abides”), and I didn’t get far, stopped in my tracks by the epigram to Part 1: Long before The Andromeda Strain, the eerily prescient Earth Abides, published in 1949 by a seasoned popular novelist named George R.

Two of them, Nevil Shute’s famous On the Beach and Pat Frank’s less well known Alas, Babylon, adopted the unsurprising premise that nuclear war was the most lethal threat to mankind and depicted, with very different styles and emphases, the personal and social implications of the end of civilization.īut the third, which predated the others and is, to me, the best of the three, imagined a global pandemic of unknown origin that wipes out almost all human life, leaving the rest of the natural world and all the physical artifacts of civilization intact. Right now you could probably divide book lovers into two groups: those who are reading books that provide escape from the troubling reality we’re living through, and those who are reading books that have already imagined and explored versions of that reality and thereby offer a form of psychological vaccination against our worst fears.Ī year ago, when the world was normal, I surveyed here three novels published last mid-century that have become classics of disaster fiction.

Earth abides novel