The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 16 June 1998
by George Stewart
People are generally fascinated by the idea of being the last person on Earth. It is certainly a common enough trope in genre science-fiction. In this book, George Stewart gives us just that scenario, as Isherwood Williams, surviving a rattlesnake bite on a hike in the Sierra, returns from the mountains to find almost every man, woman and child dead from a sudden and catastrophic plague. Ish explores and survives, finally deciding to take on the responsibility of re-founding American civilization with a small community of survivors in the Berkeley hills overlooking San Francisco Bay. This reader found that much of the sensibility Ish tries to carry over into the newly depopulated world is somewhat dated, the book having been first published in 1949. We doubt that survivors of such a catastrophe would be so determined to maintain civilization at the level it had reached before the plague, rather than concentrating on their own survival in desperate circumstances. In this book, Stewart is most successful in portraying Ish's development. We see the new society go from scavenging on the past to becoming more self-sufficient. We see Ish go from trying to preserve the sum of man's knowledge (in the form of UC Berkeley's Doe Library), to just making sure people know how to make a working bow and arrow. The scenario is portrayed very well, despite doubts about the details. The book, also, bears a very striking resemblance to a short novel by Jack London called The Scarlet Plague, which also describes a catastrophic pestilence from the point of view of survivors living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
See Also: [The City, Not Long After by Pat Murphy]