The story starts out with Ish hiking somewhere in the mountains in the Bay Area when he’s bitten by a rattlesnake. He grows ill, floating in and out of consciousness, eventually developing a measles-like illness. After a few weeks, Ish makes a good recovery, heads down the hill only to discover that most people in the Bay Area — along with everyone else in the world — have died from an illness similar to the one he contracted.

A little over 60 years after it was originally published, George Stewart’s Earth Abides still holds its own despite using plot devices that may seem a little clichéd in today’s zombie-hunting litscape. Like so many stories part of this genre, Earth Abides uses the disaster to artfully comment on the prevailing issues of the time. In this case it was racial tension during Jim Crow. Stewart subtly weaves his observations about racial inequality into the story by contrasting the old way of doing things with the new situation faced by Ish and the disparate group of survivors. Ish, a white man, meets and eventually marries Emma, an African American woman — a taboo that matters much less when the only surviving people are faced with extinction.

All of that said, Earth Abides isn’t perfect. Ish is a hipster in grad school. He’s studying ecology and considers himself an observer of mankind. In this new world, he sees himself as an intellectual leader. He constantly makes mental lists about why he’s better equipped than those he meets along the way for the new rules of the new world in which he lives. Ish spends most of his life agonizing over how he alone can rebuild the great civilization that once was America since, in his opinion, not one person in his tiny community has the intellectual capacity to fry an egg. Throughout the novel, Emma is a source of strength and courage to everyone in the community — Ish included. Yet her relationship with Ish is marked by his silent condescending thoughts about her inability to offer ideas for how to improve things or make progress in their new society. The level of navel gazing and condescension Ish engaged in made me hope a mountain lion would eat him.

Although there is a traditional third-person narrator telling the story, Stewart also relies on swaths of quoted passages from literature to illustrate Ish’s state of mind, hopes, and grief over the fading idea of America as a symbol of greatness in the world. At first, these passages add depth to Ish’s feelings of isolation since it appears he’s the only sober, unbroken man in Berkeley the moment he discovers everyone he knows is dead. But toward the end of the novel, it feels like Stewart uses the passages as a crutch to explain Ish’s feelings of growing old in a world so utterly different than the one he had imagined or expected for himself. These italicized passages mar the last quarter of the novel, and more often than not are a few pages long.

I didn’t love the book, but I’d recommend it. It’s considered a science fiction classic with an International Fantasy Award under its belt. Earth Abides is just one of those novels constantly listed as a classic in the post-apocalyptic literature genre. It’s worth a read if you have time, but if there’s something more pressing, Earth Abides is not the stop everything you’re doing and devour this book right now kind of story.

Rating: Two Sharktopuses and half a Gatoroid.

All good qualities. The writer, Cynthia Kraak, has a pretty good story on her hands, but there are a few problems: its use of current events and the not-so-subtle political overtones.

Current Events

Kraak uses a lot of dates and mentions too many real events to let the reader know this vision of the future is not so far off. The problem is being told specifically that the disaster happens in 2015. It’s distracting and pulls the reader out of the story. As I was reading, I kept thinking, “This is too close to 2011. How does the entire planet blow itself up four years from now?” Even if I had read the novel in 2009, when it was published, I would have felt the same way.

The dates and references to events and people who are part of our current political landscape don’t add to the story about the rise of the Minnesota revolution. They actually take away from what is otherwise a pretty solid story about survival in the face of nuclear destruction and total upheaval. When it comes to using dates in this kind of near-future story, the writer is usually better off forgetting the dates and sticking to plot and character development. Another solution is coming up with an entirely new dating system a la Star Trek. But at that point you’re not writing about the world we live in now. Also, you run the risk of being cheesy, not campy — if that’s even what you’re going for.

Politics

The liberal political overtones are another problem with the story. It’s the same complaint I have about this genre’s conservative counterpart. In this instance, the reader gets big doses of “Did we not learn anything after giving up so many of our civil liberties during the Bush administration?” It’s just as bad and manipulative as the conservative post-apocalyptic sci fi author’s cry, “Have we not learned anything since 9/11?”

Yes. Yes. I know the stories in this genre are usually metaphors describing the current state of things and human nature, but you don’t need to be so obvious about it. Subtlety goes a long way, and repeating the same “have we not learned” mantra doesn’t help you tell your story. It’s a distraction.

But again, these are just little imperfections. The story was solid and the writing was all right. The main character could have used a little more development and the reference to a nuclear was was a little dated, but the story about how Minnesotans reacted in this time of crisis was pretty ok. I say, try it out.

Click here to listen to our podcast and to view related links.

Tune in July 28th for part two of our social networking podcast, where we discuss blogging and how to effectively use Google documents as a collaborative tool.

Normally, I shy away from poetry, but, alas, Darkness is on The List. So here goes, and I should also disclose that I got my historical information from Wikipedia.

Synopsis: The poem details the observations of a man whose world is covered in darkness by some fiery cataclysmic event. Byron writes:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went -and came, and brought no day…

There’s a lot more after that, but the setup is incredibly important because it lays the foundation for what life was like in Geneva, the city where Byron is said to have gotten the inspiration for this poem, according to Wikipedia.

Historical Context: On the surface, the poem does resemble a last man on Earth story. However, according to Wikipedia, Byron wrote “Darkness” in July 1816, which is referred to as the Year Without a Summer. During that summer, “severe summer climate abnormalities destroyed crops in Northern Europe, the Northeastern United States and eastern Canada. Average global temperatures decreased about 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F), enough to cause significant agricultural problems around the globe,” according to the entry in Wikipedia.

These crazy weather patterns, scholars think, were caused “by a combination of a historic low in solar activity with a volcanic winter event; the latter caused by a succession of major volcanic eruptions capped off by the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815, the largest known eruption in over 1,600 years,” the post elaborates.

What’s more, if Wikipedia is to be believed, other pretty important things happened because of Mount Tambora’s erruption: Mary Shelley wrote ”Frankenstein” and  John William Polidori’s wrote “The Vampyre.” The colder weather also led to poor crop yields, which led to a scarcity of oats for horses, spurring the invention of alternative, horseless transportation. Back then, it was known as the velocipede. Today, we know the contraptions under the name, bicycle. And then we have Joseph Smith. Without that volcano, the Book of Mormon and founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints might have never happened.

So here you have it, folks: Darkness.

Is there a god?

I don’t want to spoil the end, so I’ll stop plot the discussion here.

What I love about the story is that the reader is intentionally left to fill in the blanks. You’d have to given Answer’s word count.

Every good news story has a nut graf. The nut graf tells you why the story is important — why you are reading it. BBC’s television show, “Survivors,” has a nut graf. I know. I know. “Survivors” isn’t a newspaper story, but in the first episode there is one scene that tells you why you are watching the show. You’re watching because you want to see people come to grips with the fact that their cell phones won’t save them. After all, you can’t eat 3G network for breakfast.

The story is set after a pandemic flu wipes out 90 percent of the human population and centers on a group of people who have survived the outbreak, either by being naturally immune or by getting sick and recovering. Even though the show has a pretty typical cast of characters for this type of story (people who only see the good in others, a felon, morally ambiguous people, some kind of super secret spy agent guy who isn’t revealing anything, and an angelic child who has still kept his innocence despite all the death around him), the show is just flat out good with themes of new beginnings and how choices affect outcomes. More to come as I get more familiar with the show.

Genius. The story grasped me immediately, and then Carlson telegraphed every plot twist after the first 90 pages. Sad.

I’m going to power through to the end of the book this weekend since I’ve made the commitment to read the stories on The List, but I may or may not update this post depending on how spectacular the ending is. Right now, I just feel disappointed. I foresee no update, but we’ll see.

UPDATE: (July 2, 2010) When I said I’d power through the book over the weekend, I really meant the week and only at the pace of a couple of pages at a time.

So let’s get into it.

One thing that really bugs me about the book is how the narrator is too omniscient, and it gets to the point where you just don’t know if it’s a character’s subconscious mind that is playing narrator or some observant being who isn’t exactly detached from the situation.

Carlson also does a great job of telling you about what’s unfolding, but he doesn’t really show it. I was also disappointed that we never got back to how badly messed up you can get by becoming a cannibal. As I mentioned earlier, the novel starts off with, “They ate Jorgensen first,” and ends with one of the central characters just kind of feeling bad that he resorted to eating people as a way to survive.

Anyway, this book was a major bust for me. On to the next story now.

io9.com has a regular series, Blogging the Hugos,” where writer Josh Wimmer reviews Hugo Award-winning books in chronological order, beginning with the first award in 1953 for The Demolished Man. Fortunately, the regular column in biweekly, and only began in October 2009.

So far, Wimmer has reviewed 17 books. Here’s the link to the list of books he’s read. I’m so glad there’s a bit of criss cross between this list and the other lists I’m slowly working my way through.