Strange Horizons Discussion Forum: Apocalypse Then: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, reviewed by Marian Powell

I read Earth Abides sometime in the '70s when I was in college. I had never heard of it before an would never have given it a second look but someone gave it to me for my birthday. I went ahead and read it anyway and I was impressed. It's so different from the usual end-of-the-world story. They would never make a movie from it, certainly not without adding a lot of extra and unnecessary crash and flash. They did, however, take the title of one of the chapters and make it into the title of a nuclear war survival adventure movie in the '50s--Panic in the Year Zero. I'm going to have to dig around and find the book and read it again because I loved its plausability, something sorely lacking in so much of the genre, particularly as I compare it to something else I read recently, Dies the Fire by SM Stirling. Not that DtF is such a particularly bad example, but it's just something I read recently and found myself comparing unfavorably to Earth Abides in the plausability department. Or The Stand by Stephen King. That one not only has plausibility working against it (well, after all, it's by King) but it seems to contain just about every possible cliche of that and a few other genres. Earth Abides rarely stretches plausability, doesn't go in for special effects or cliches, but just manages to be a thoroughly absorbing story.