An observer with a curious intellect

March 13, 2024 3:52 PM

"The people who live in any generation do much, he realized, either to create or to solve the problems for the people who come in the generations later." Earth Abides, perennial MeFi favorite (DuckDuckGo search ), is slated to begin production in April.

The 1949 novel has influenced post-apocalyptic fiction, particularly the “last person on Earth” genre, already been adapted (YouTube link) for the 1950 CBS radio drama series Escape, and was optioned long ago—according to author George R. Stewart’s oral history. Stewart, a University of California Berkeley English professor, is also known for innovative environmental novels such as Storm, Fire, and Sheep Rock that made the environment the protagonists, and publicly authoring (alongside many anonymous faculty) The Year of the Oath during the 1949-50 fight for academic freedom at Berkeley. Apparently a documentary is also in-progress, according to Stewart biographer Donald Scott, whose blog has posted updates about both projects, including a post that notes adaptation challenges faced earlier by Fire.

posted by Conceptual Nomad (15 comments total)

(The title of this post comes from page 182 of Stewart's oral history linked above, about Earth Abides' protagonist Ish. I think it applies to Stewart himself as well...)
posted by Conceptual Nomad at 3:55 PM on March 13

I bought Earth Abides years ago because I wanted a post-apocalyptic fiction book, but, to me, the setting is only ancillary to the ideas. I can only hope this adaptation doesn't attempt to act too much like Fallout or Last of Us; if so, it might be something great.
posted by miguelcervantes at 4:23 PM on March 13

Earth Abides goes light on the teleology and eschatology, and heavy on the ecology and anthropology, so it's not quite post-apocalyptic.

If you haven't read it yet, do. The movie won't do it justice, as movies seldom improve on the novel.
posted by ocschwar at 4:48 PM on March 13 [2 favorites]

I'm wondering how the tv show will do That Thing about Emma which was a pretty big deal back when the book was written, but is now considerably less of an issue. Do they keep it as is and just make it "not a thing" or do they change it to still make it "a thing" for modern audiences?
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 5:15 PM on March 13

I read Earth Abides over 45 years ago, very affecting, and yes ocschwar very ecological, with a lot of musings in durability and infrastructure. It sat on my shelf alongside A Canticle for Leibowitz.
posted by unearthed at 5:57 PM on March 13 [3 favorites]

Earth Abides is a favourite, partly because its fairly slow and low on conflict, covering the lifetime of the protagonist commencing in the 1950s.

How this will translate to a modern television drama, particularly when North American popular culture views the end of the world in terms of an everyone for themselves/everyone is a gun-toting enemy scenario, will be challenging.
posted by jjderooy at 6:32 PM on March 13

Great book. I feel like there’s this gentleness and wise sadness to the novel that is so uncommon to “a man at the limits” stories, then and now. (Though I like those other books too.)

Great post! :-)
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 6:41 PM on March 13 [2 favorites]

Hmm, I tried to reread Earth Abides last year, and put it down at about the 30% mark. It felt really... ungenerous. And pretty sexist. Well, dated, anyway. I remember really liking it when I was a kid, but that was over 40 years ago and the world has changed.

I'm interested in what they will do with the movie.
posted by suelac at 6:57 PM on March 13 [2 favorites]

Yeah, it was interesting when i read it back in the 80s, but even then felt a bit dated, I remember an encounter with black farm workers on the cross-country trip that made me cringe a bit.
posted by tavella at 8:12 PM on March 13 [2 favorites]

Spoilers for 70-year-old book, but I still remember the wave of melancholy that swept over me as a young nerd reading this for the first time when I realized that it wasn’t going to end with the hero safely preserving the ability to read Shakespeare etc. forever, as a cozy catastrophe should.
posted by No-sword at 10:37 PM on March 13 [1 favorite]

What’s wild about this is that there are so many, for example, unadapted Le Guin books. There’s just so many books where the protagonist isn’t a lone male who survives by his will to power. There’s so many books that don’t fit into tidy survivalist fantasies. But, as noted above, television is not a great medium for any subtly, so get prepared for Earth Abides: Kickpuncher Requiem
posted by The River Ivel at 6:53 AM on March 14 [1 favorite]

suelac: “ It felt really... ungenerous. And pretty sexist. ”

I read the book for the first time in 2022. I enjoyed it, but the sexism, racism, and especially the Engineer's Disease ableism made me feel some type of way.

After finishing it, I had the thought that the Ish's expressed beliefs represented the white male reality of 1949… [Spoiler]

but in the last pages of the story, it is revealed that his worldview was a fantasy all along. That tempered my dislike for both book and author.

posted by ob1quixote at 8:01 AM on March 14 [2 favorites]

While I would also prefer a new Le Guin adaption over this, "a lone male who survives by his will to power" isn't really a great description of Earth Abides, which is more marked by the failure of the protagonist's ambitions.
posted by tavella at 8:11 AM on March 14 [1 favorite]

a lone male who survives by his will to power" isn't really a great description of Earth Abides,

similarly a lone male who survives by his will to power isn't a great description of Breaking Bad and yet we all know how poorly that lesson was learned
posted by paimapi at 8:47 AM on March 14

Maybe they’ll skip all the mournful elegaic stuff and go straight to “Earth Abides, Great-Grandchildren: HAMMER WARS”
posted by No-sword at 4:55 PM on March 15 [1 favorite]