Earth Abides

“No one was sure in what part of the world it had originated; aided by airplane travel, it had sprung up almost simultaneously in every center of civilization, outrunning all attempts at quarantine.”

When Ish comes out of isolation and finds the nearby towns deserted, he reads a newspaper article—only a week old—detailing the fast-moving plague that has killed most of the human race. The virus is spread quickly by modern means of travel, an eerily prescient detail given how quickly and efficiently Covid-19 traveled around the world. Stewart’s narrative imagines the intersection of disease and air travel, a technology that is both a boon to humanity and a death sentence.

“There was no particular reason, he realized, why he should sit in his own car rather than some other.”

With the human race nearly extinct, old laws and traditions fall by the wayside (although Ish feels the need to respect them anyway). He confronts, not for the first time, the requirements of long-established and ingrained rituals—laws, property rights, safety measures—and their utter meaninglessness in these circumstances. Earth Abides poses a philosophical question: Are traditions an important element of social cohesion or merely arbitrary rules to be tossed aside when no longer needed?

“After he had paused just a moment at the red lights, he drove on through them, even though feeling a slight sense of wrongdoing as he did so.”

Driving through a deserted town, Ish runs several red lights. Despite being in no danger of a collision, he still hesitates to violate traffic laws. The sense of law and order, of holding chaos at bay by respecting laws that have no practical meaning anymore, is so internalized that his conscience nags at him just as if the streets were choked with traffic.