EPTThis blog is for the discussion of post apocalyptic books and movies. Feel free to list any books or movies that you enjoyed or are looking forward to. Lets shed some light on this under appreciated genre.
To start it off, I have chosen to share with you a book you may not have heard of.
![[image loading]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3f/Earth_Abides_1949_small.jpg)
"Men come and go, but earth abides" Ecclesiastes 1:4
Written in 1949, this book still holds up well. It is also one of the earliest post apocalyptic books written. The story centers around an educated man named Ish. He is temporarily living in the mountains in California when he is bitten by a rattlesnake. He comes down with a fever and recuperates after a some time. He leaves his mountain cabin and returns to his town. What he discovers is a world that may never be the same.
+ Show Spoiler [Light spoilers] +
A plague has wiped out 99.9% of the population. The story follows Ish as he tries to rebuild society.
Earth Abides has some interesting themes. Ish is biology major, so he looks at the situation scientifically. He talks about examples of biological controls on animal population, and applies it to his situation.
Another theme is the reversion of technology. With the great plague, a great loss of information occurred. There is no one left to operate all these machines or power electricity.
Wikipedia - Earth Abides
Overall a great post apocalyptic book that I really enjoyed. I'll leave you with a quote from the Boston Globe.
This is a book, mind you, that I'd place not only among the greatest science fiction but among our very best novels. Each time I read it, I'm profoundly affected, affected in a way only the greatest art — Ulysses, Matisse or Beethoven symphonies, say — affects me. Epic in sweep, centering on the person of Isherwood Williams, Earth Abides proves a kind of antihistory, relating the story of humankind backwards, from ever-more-abstract civilization to stone-age primitivism. Everything passes — everything. Writers' reputations. The ripe experience of a book in which we find ourselves immersed. Star systems, worlds, states, individual lives. Humankind. Few of us get to read our own eulogies, but here is mankind's. Making Earth Abides a novel for which words like elegiac and transcendent come easily to mind, a novel bearing, in critic Adam-Troy Castro's words, "a great dark beauty."
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