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What the hell, I'll drop in on this as I'm able. A few notes: the Gollancz series is great on the whole but deeply idiosyncratic, and also very confused in terms of timeline. So, the list you're drawing from is not actually ordered by original publication (note also the hardcovers below them), but by the last publication date. So Earth Abides was 12th in the Masterworks series, but it's first on the Gollancz site because they haven't republished it since 1999. (And they might not even have bothered if it wasn't the book's 50th anniversary.) That said, Earth Abides makes for an intriguing if deeply odd place to start a book series. It's aged very well, and it stands at the head of a long series of books imagining the aftermath of an ecological (rather than nuclear) apocalypse. Though there is a protagonist and a whole mythic structure that builds up around him, the main character really is, as the title implies, the Earth itself—the idea that the planet could get along perfectly fine, and probably even better, without humanity is pretty bracing by 1949 standards. But Stewart's earlier books were even more so: the main "characters" in them were fire and weather; for him, any sort of human drama was already an artistic compromise. In the original series order, Earth Abides came immediately after Cordwainer Smith's Rediscovery of Man cycle and Stapledon's Last and First Men, both of which span hundreds of thousands of years. Stewart's book effectively extrapolates all that time from one man's life, watching civilization crumble and be rebuilt on an entirely different basis. It's an impressive accomplishment.
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Jul 19, 2015 06:56
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 04:13 |
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