Book meme, day... indefinite
Jan. 4th, 2019 07:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eye_of_a_catI fell out of doing this once a day so will do a few of the rest soon to catch up.
Previously:
1. Favourite book from childhood
2. Best Bargain
3. One with a blue cover
For this I pick George R. Stewart's Earth Abides. I have this edition, which has a very blue cover as part of an alien-looking landscape with purple land and clouds, a massive moon crescent in the distance and what I think peering closely is a futuristic city in the background and piles of wrecked cars and animal skeletons in the foreground.
It's an odd choice of cover art for this book. It is science fiction, but it's not the alien-planets kind of science fiction, and it's very much the opposite of futuristic-domed-cities science fiction.
It's post-apocalyptic fiction where the apocalypse, in the form of a devastating plague, happens off the page in the first few chapters. (The main character, Ish, is alone in the mountains studying for his ecology graduate work in 'the relationships, past and present, of men and plans and animals in this region' and returns to the city to find almost everyone dead.) Survivors gradually band together and start trying to rebuild some kind of community in the ruins, and as the years pass Ish in particular tries to preserve and pass on all the old knowledge of civilisation - geometry, economics, the broader country around them - to push back on the superstition he sees growing among the next generation of his community.
But it doesn't work. The knowledge isn't immediate and relevant to his children, who half-humour and half-respect him but nevertheless value the knowledge that means more in their lives instead, hunting with dogs and hammering coins into arrowheads. At the end of the book, as an old man, he travels with his great-grandchildren to see the ruins of the city he once lived in. They camp near the university library, and he wonders if he'll be able to sleep without dreams of 'a million books passing in endless procession, looking reproachfully upon me because after so long I have begun to have doubts in them and all that they stood for'. There are no futuristic cities. But Earth abides.
Previously:
1. Favourite book from childhood
2. Best Bargain
3. One with a blue cover
For this I pick George R. Stewart's Earth Abides. I have this edition, which has a very blue cover as part of an alien-looking landscape with purple land and clouds, a massive moon crescent in the distance and what I think peering closely is a futuristic city in the background and piles of wrecked cars and animal skeletons in the foreground.
It's an odd choice of cover art for this book. It is science fiction, but it's not the alien-planets kind of science fiction, and it's very much the opposite of futuristic-domed-cities science fiction.
It's post-apocalyptic fiction where the apocalypse, in the form of a devastating plague, happens off the page in the first few chapters. (The main character, Ish, is alone in the mountains studying for his ecology graduate work in 'the relationships, past and present, of men and plans and animals in this region' and returns to the city to find almost everyone dead.) Survivors gradually band together and start trying to rebuild some kind of community in the ruins, and as the years pass Ish in particular tries to preserve and pass on all the old knowledge of civilisation - geometry, economics, the broader country around them - to push back on the superstition he sees growing among the next generation of his community.
But it doesn't work. The knowledge isn't immediate and relevant to his children, who half-humour and half-respect him but nevertheless value the knowledge that means more in their lives instead, hunting with dogs and hammering coins into arrowheads. At the end of the book, as an old man, he travels with his great-grandchildren to see the ruins of the city he once lived in. They camp near the university library, and he wonders if he'll be able to sleep without dreams of 'a million books passing in endless procession, looking reproachfully upon me because after so long I have begun to have doubts in them and all that they stood for'. There are no futuristic cities. But Earth abides.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-07 05:34 pm (UTC)