The post commissioned by Nevada Humanities is now live. The Editor/Publisher, Christi Shortridge, did a fine job, making some excellent suggestions and setting up a nice layout.
See the post here
Next Thursday, the 28th of March, a commissioned post about George R. Stewart goes live on the Double Down/Nevada Humanities weblog. It’s short – only 500 words – but brings together, through embedded links, information about several who’ve played major parts in the rediscovery of the work of George R. Stewart.
Here’s a direct link: https://www.nevadahumanities.org/blog/2024/3/13/nevadas-places-underlie-several-ecological-novels-of-george-r-stewart
The last post focused on Earth Abides-influenced author Christoper Priest, clearly a member of the GRS Fellowship. This post is about the similarly-influenced author, poet and “father” of the movie DRIVE, James Sallis.
Jim has written what I consider the best review of Earth Abides. He’s given his permission to publish the entire review, here:
The Boston Globe: A Reading Life
Earth Abides: Stewart’s dark eulogy for humankind
The worst thing about new books, French philosopher Joseph Joubert wrote, is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
Which is precisely how a truly great novel like George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides gets, if not lost, then seriously mislaid. Published in 1949, the same year as Orwell’s 1984 and two years after Camus’ The Plague, Earth Abides regularly appears on lists of great science fiction yet remains virtually unknown to any larger readership. In one 43-page overview of Stewart’s work, Earth Abides receives a single paragraph of five lines. And despite its having won the 1951 International Fantasy Award, even among science fiction fans the novel is little read or recognized.
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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By the first page, a viral plague has all but factored mankind from the world’s equation. Graduate student Isherwood Williams awakes from a sojourn in the wilderness and near death from a snake bite to stagger back towards civilization only to find it missing. Humankind has moved out and left no forwarding address.
Eventually Ish encounters a handful of others, the most important of them Em, who becomes his lifelong companion and proves the first to bear a child into this new world. Their terrible uncertainty (will children inherit the parents’ immunity to the plague?) reflects the fear of every prospective parent as to whether or not his/her child can survive the world’s harshness.
Meanwhile, a dialectic builds. Ish longs to maintain civilization, to give continued voice to the old ways, to preserve them. Libraries must be barricaded to preserve them from predators; wells must be dug; children must be taught.
But Ish’s entreaties, even to himself, are little more than that. A product of abstracted society, what does he know of how water is collected and purified, of how meat is cured? Which of us would?
And for the earth’s new inhabitants, his stories are at best myths of a distant world. Here, now, they can get all they need by scavenging. The new world’s children see no need for the “knowledge” Ish espouses. It has no relevance to their daily lives. As always, parents and children face one another across a great divide.
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Post-apocalyptic fiction is a mainstay, of course. Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, Edgar Pangborn’s Davy, Walter Tevis’ Mockingbird and Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, to forage among classics of the genre. Critics John Clute and Peter Nichols hold that the subgenre appeals to a universal longing for escape from the constraints of organized society, to the individual’s unique opportunity, excised from society, to prove himself. (A return to America’s great myth of the frontiersman?) Such extremes afford a window onto the very stuff of which mankind is composed — much as Wallace Stegner wrote that Stewart’s Storm (1941) depicts “the mortar that holds a civilization together.” Still, generally the unvoiced assumption is that civilization will rebuild itself.
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Ish’s assumption is the same. But civilization will not rebuild itself. It will only, inevitably, decay.
The novel breaks into three sections. The first limns Ish’s awakening to knowledge of the catastrophe and his slow building of a community. There follows the tale of a year in which the struggle between old and new culminates; then that of the emergence of a primitive society. Brief sections in italics recount the erasure, measure by measure, of humankind’s footprints. Cities collapse into themselves. Domestic animals disappear. Wilderness encroaches.
In the passing of a world, individual deaths might seem of little note. Two, however, are particularly chilling. The execution of outsider Charlie marks the new society’s transition from democracy to heirarchy. And that of Joey, onto whose fierce intelligence Ish has come to project all his hopes, signals the last hurrah of old values.
The hammer that Ish has brought with him out of the old world, the sort of hammer John Henry might have had, becomes, finally, not a symbol of creation, but of endurance. Each year, ritualistically, Ish carries it above the village to chisel the number of the new year onto a stone there. Dying, he passes it to a new patriarch. That icon, and the reintroduction of the bow and arrow, prove Ish’s true contributions to the emergent society.
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George R. Stewart’s creative life ran forty-plus years, from a landmark biography of Bret Harte in 1931 to a major narrative of the Donner party, numerous volumes of the history of the American west, the novels Fire and Storm and five others — 28 books in all. Earth Abides was something of a sport. Yet it seems to me that, if remembered at all, Stewart will be remembered for this novel.
Art’s mission is to make our lives large again, to dredge us out of this terrible dailyness. I begin each reading of Earth Abides knowing that, once the flight’s done, I’ll be meeting a new man there at the end of the concourse. The guy who got on the flight’s okay. I like the one who gets off a lot better.
There has long been a Fellowship of George R. Stewart, going back to his early years as a young Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley – a chain of friends, fans, colleagues, and those inspired by the man and his work stretching slightly more than a century. With the recent rediscovery of Stewart by the larger general literate public through the reissue of his books, the filming of a major mini-series version of his great, never-out-of-print classic EARTH ABIDES, the Fellowship, which has worked quietly for most of that century to keep his work and ideas alive, is waking up, ready to share knowledge of the man, his great literary works, his profound influence on other writers, scholars, filmmakers and his readers. Some of us are nearing the end of our time, others have already left this life. So, it seems to me, it’s up to those of us still here to make sure we still-energetic members of the Fellowship fulfill a duty to honor all the Fellowship. In honoring them, we honor George R. Stewart.
In my years as student and teacher of the works of George R. Stewart I’ve met many members of the George R. Stewart Fellowship. Now, in honor of those who’ve led the renaissance of the man and his work – those who write music, or make films, or create literature – I plan to create a series of posts to honor them, and to teach you about them and their work. The first of these is author Christopher Priest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prestigehttps:/
The Prestige has been called Priest’s best book by critics- which says a great deal about this work by an author of a series of great books. It was filmed with Hugh Jackman as one of the protagonists, so many of you may have seen it.
I must admit I’d neither read the book nor seen the film until a comment was posted to this weblog – from Christopher Priest. He sent a link to his excellent review of Earth Abides, which praises the work, describing how it was a foundation of his distinguished career. We corresponded for a while; here are excerpts from our exchanges: (Please note that it begins with the post at the bottom of the file.)
Dear Mr Scott
Yes, GRS’s work definitely qualifies as visionary.
I am having trouble with my internet link today — keep losing it, so I’ll keep this brief. My stuff (thanks for asking — but I am greatly in GRS’s shade): the best-known of my novels is THE PRESTIGE, which was filmed a few years ago by Christopher Nolan. It has just been released as an ebook. My ‘key’ novel (i.e. not claimed by me as my best, but it was the novel where I really found what I wanted to write — but that was 35 years ago!) is called THE AFFIRMATION, and that too is on ebook. (Also paperback.) My most recent novel is called THE ADJACENT. It is in paperback, but not yet, I think) ebook.
The article I wrote about GRS was called ‘Standing on Shoulders’, which is all the claim I can make for any link with his wonderful work.
Best wishes
Chris Priest
rangerdon
Apr 11, 2015·georgerstewart.wordpress.com
In reply to
Dear Mr. Priest,
Yes. Good name, “Visionary realism.”
Most “science fiction,” however, seems to put humans (or aliens that are human in behavior) into advanced technological settings, but the interactions are as old as literature and story-telling. In other words, it’s the same old set of stories, told in a new setting. The Roddenberry Star Trek and some other works have done a good job of changing the story set, but generally it’s kisskissbangbang.
Stewart’s great achievement, I think, was to introduce a very different type of protagonist – the ecosystem. It’s familiar to us, yet behaves in ways we can’t fully understand. His first big seller was *Ordeal By Hunger*, ( which not only introduces the ecosystem as protagonist, but with its opening view from orbit (written in the 1930s) might also be called the first Whole Earth work) is usually read as history, but it is the first book in my experience to consider Earth’s ecosystem as a player in the story. In *Storm*, he expands this idea, naming the ecosystem event, the storm, to show that it is the chief protagonist, but naming only a few human characters.
At any rate, many thanks for taking the time to share your ideas about these topics.
One question – which of your books should I read first?
Cheers,
Donald M. Scott
On Fri, Apr 10, 2015 at 1:08 AM, the EARTH ABIDES project wrote:
>
Dear Mr Scott
I have spent most of my adult life grappling with the problem of the phrase ‘science fiction’. It creates so many prejudices, on both sides. ‘Science’ means ‘knowledge’, of course, but that takes us nowhere. Some writers prefer ‘speculative fiction’, but again that is a bit of a blind alley as all fiction is to some extent speculative. A few years ago I coined ‘visionary realism’, which I still believe is about as accurate, inclusive and non-judgemental as possible — but no one else has ever bothered with it.
These days I just say I write novels. My current novel, The Adjacent, is about as far from traditional science fiction as it is possible, yet it is still fantastic in subject and treatment, while being (excuse me) visionary and realist.
I take your point about Stewart’s work as a scientist, though. Fascinating man and writer.
Christopher Priest
rangerdon
Apr 9, 2015·georgerstewart.wordpress.com
In reply to:
Yes, indeed, and many thanks. It appears both of us were inspired to write, in part, by George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides.
A couple of comments: I consider Stewart to be a science fiction writer in this, the purest sense of the term – most of his novels were fiction about scientific events (a storm, a forest fire, planetary ecology, and an ecological fictionalization of a real place) based on solid scientific research which he conducted on site, often with his colleagues from UC Berkeley. In fact, I now think we need a new term for what is traditionally called science fiction – I use the word “techspec” since most of our popular science fiction is fairly conventional drama or melodrama set in alternate or future technologies. However, I am not going to hold anyone else to this idea; it simply helps me understand Stewart.
And I’m ashamed to note here that since Stewart, through his books, drew me away from traditional science fiction, I was not familiar with your work before this message sent me to Google. I now intend to read it, as time permits during the construction of my new book, and I am deeply grateful for this education.
Cheers,
Don Scott
His wife Nina sent an email to inform me Chris had passed. In it, she wrote “Chris always had a very soft spot for Earth Abides, one of those texts that came into his life when he was a young writer and never really left it. I know he’d be thrilled and fascinated to know that a TV series was in the works.”
Christopher Priest, Member of the Fellowship of George R. Stewart, will be missed, and celebrated, by all of us.
His fellow writer James Sallis will be profiled in the next post.
Cover of the First Edition of Earth Abides. Artist H. Lawrence Hoffman
The Earth Abides mini-series will begin filming in April: https://thecinemaholic.com/earth-abides-adaptation/
For many people It’s a Wonderful Life is the Christmas movie. George R. Stewart fans will be interested to know that George R. Stewart – and another Stewart – spent their boyhoods in a town that was one of the inspirations for “Bedford Falls.”
George R. Stewart was raised in Indiana, Pennsylvania, where his mother’s family lived. His maternal grandfather, Andrew Wilson, planned to be a teacher and even helped found a school nearby (which would eventually become the prestigious Kiski School). But he couldn’t earn enough to support his family so he went into the mercantile business. He had a hand in a hardware store owned by another Stewart. That Stewart’s son was James Stewart, who was also raised in Indiana, PA.
George and Jimmy bore a remarkable resemblance to each other. With all their similarities in family history, geography, and physiology, you’d expect they were related. But they shared only one possible distant relative, and lived in different worlds of the town. The George Stewart family went to the middle-class Presbyterian church on the flats; Jimmy Stewart and his parents attended the upper-class Presbyterian church on the hill. GRS went to a public high school out west, Jimmy to a prestigious private school in the east.
Still, the two young Stewarts’ lives paralleled in remarkable ways. GRS and his family moved to Pasadena; he went to Princeton; and after marriage, moved his family to Berkeley, California. Jimmy Stewart also went to Princeton and also moved to Pasadena; then spent his life in Southern California. GRS wrote books, two of which were filmed. Jimmy made films, like the beloved Christmas classic. GRS worked as an consultant to Walt Disney at the Disney studios for a time. Jimmy worked at many studios, creating that characters and stories that touch the hearts of millions.
Their paths apparently never crossed. GRS and his family left Indiana for California when he was 12, in 1905 – the year James Stewart was born. Out West, nothing in their interests or their work brought them together. Since the film we now consider a classic failed in its initial run, it is unlikely GRS would have seen it. (For one thing, GRS didn’t like the mass media and rarely if ever attended movies.)
Yet in the Christmas season we should remember there is one thing they shared – which, thanks to Capra’s film, we share with them: The experience of life in a small Midwestern American town in the early 20th century. For a time, we can walk the streets and meet the people of the town in an earlier time.
From my book (paraphrased and edited):
“George R. Stewart’s boyhood town was so archetypically American that it could pass for George Bailey’s “Bedford Falls” in Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. In fact, the town was “Bedford Falls” – at least for the movie’s male star. Indiana, Pennsylvania, was also the boyhood home of James Stewart, who played “George Bailey” in Capra’s film. … Although the movie’s “Bedford Falls” was built on a studio backlot in the San Fernando Valley, Jimmy Stewart said that when he walked onto the set for the first time he almost expected to hear the bells of his home church in Indiana.”
In fact, Producer/Director Frank Capra probably modeled his set on the upstate New York town of Seneca Falls. But for James Stewart, Indiana, Pennsylvania, was the place he held in his heart as he brought George Bailey to life on the set of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Each year, Indiana, Pennsylvania, holds an It’s a Wonderful Life Festival, with a parade, hot chocolate, tree lighting, and continuous showings of the film at the Jimmy Stewart Museum. The people in warm winter clothing lining the streets bring life to the snow-bound town, just as the movie brings life to “Bedford Falls.”
So when you watch Capra’s film this Christmas please give a thought to the boyhood town of George R. Stewart, Indiana, Pennsylvania, where he celebrated Christmas. A real town that for Jimmy Stewart was the model for Bedford Falls, a fictional town which brings an American Christmas into many hearts.
Merry Christmas!
After a busy summer, a short update.
Last week saw several successful GRS events – a talk about Stewart and his works to volunteers at the Nevada State Library, more work on the documentary about Stewart and one of his books, the end of the movie strikes, and a trip to the place that inspired my work.
The documentary, a a labor of love by the highly regarded filmmaker – his first documentary ‘stars’ Tom Hanks, Sam Shepard, David McCullough, John Mayer, and others – is clearly headed down the last filming stretch. We spent a few hours filming in the nearby Washoe Valley, accompanied by Road Scholar F. Brusca, with seemingly pleasant results.
Librarian Hope Williams and narration director Connie Corley do a fine job of producing talking books for those who are visually impaired. The talk was given at the annual thank-you brunch for the volunteers. The talk was well-received by the volunteers, who help produce Talking Books for Nevada and the Library of Congress; one called it “Enlightening!” – reward enough for presenting it.
With the strikes over in Hollywood, he Earth Abides mini-series can finally be produced. In the pipeline with other projects, it may be delayed but I’m confident it will be on the streaming screens in 2024.
Finally, a trip to Thornton State Beach, where I met Stewart and his family, with Ranger Ted Stout. We were in the San Francisco area for a 50th anniversary gathering of rangers who worked on Alcatraz; it was good to see old colleagues and meet new ones. A couple of others had Thornton Beach/GRS connections, including Bob Valen (we met at Thornton Beach when he worked for California Fish and Game) and John Cantwell, (who used to visit the beach when he was a lad, eventually becoming the “Rock and Roll Ranger of Alcatraz.”)
Watcher over the Pacific, Thornton State Beach. The dip in the earth in the right center is the San Andreas Fault.
Ted, retired Chief Naturalist at Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, had never been to Thornton Beach. But his background as a geologist intrigued him about the place – John McPhee’s Assembling California begins and ends at Mussel Rock, about 2 miles south of the old Thornton Beach access trail. To hike to the Rock is to hike millions of years into the past, as the land’s strata curve up to meet the San Andreas Fault where it comes ashore from the Pacific. It was a beautiful day. Now-abandoned Thornton Beach was filled with visitors clambering over the cliffs and trails. There were even a few surprises – local folks have adopted the former park to some extent – and even built some benches to rest upon.
A “Friend of Thornton Beach”-made Bench
As things have turned out, the new Director of the California State Parks was our boss on Alcatraz. So who knows? Maybe there will a chance to do some work to make Thornton State Beach safer, more accessible, and well-interpreted.
On the way back to Carson City, Ted and I had a visit with more members of the Thornton Beach/GRS Fellowship, John and Angela Lucia. (John worked at Thornton Beach, Angela at Half Moon Bay State Beach.) After a pleasant and somewhat jolly conversation and one of Angela’s magnificent meals, we headed over the mountain to Carson chatting about Thornton Beach along the way.
John and Angela Lucia, Ted Stout on the Viewer’s right
Bob Valen and his son Eric, both former park rangers (Bob would serve as Chief Naturalist at Guadalupe Mountains National Park and Big Thicket National Preserve, Eric would ranger at Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area and Theodore Roosevelt National Park) came to visit in Carson City on their way back to Washington state. The weather was perfect as they visited the local museums. On the final day, we went to Lake Tahoe, which Eric had never seen. We parked in the Taylor Creek Visitor Center lot; Bob and Eric walked over to Taylor Creek while I napped in the car. My mistake – they saw and photographed two black bears, harvesting salmon.
Eric and Bob Valen at historic Camp Richardson beach, Lake Tahoe
That Tahoe day was the perfect ending to a remarkable week. George R. Stewart would have been proud.
Thornton State Beach sign, salvaged after the flood of 1982-3. Now passed to the Stewardship of Ranger John Cantwell.
Dr. Julian Kilker is a distinguished professor of journalism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a fine photographer. I had the honor of working with him while acting as Caretaker (and unofficial historian) at the historic Walking Box Ranch (https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/walking-box-ranch) in Southern Nevada.(The GRS book was finished at the WBR.)
Paula Garrett was the day-to-day manager at the ranch for the Nevada Public Lands Institute. Over the years we’ve kept in touch through the occasional email. Paula sent one of her emails last week, suggesting I read a linked article by Julian. Always do as your manager suggests – and so I read the article.
Julian is an artist in the photography of the evening and night-time landscapes of the Mojave Desert. A LIght in the Darkness discusses his techniques – like “painting with light” – and shows a couple of examples of his work. Having taught photography myself, and having painted with light, I found the article head-spinning, stimulating ideas about art and research techniques specific to a place – like Julian’s Mojave Desert.
Deeply into Julian’s article, mind spinning with ideas, I turned the page. And read:
“…In his 1951 novel Sheep Rock, George R. Stewart recounts the history of a remote Nevada location through the innovative approach of making place the protagonist…”
The dance of celebration that followed took up most of the day. I called Julian; we talked for some time about his article, the idea of the integration of research and art, photography, and the old days at the Walking Box Ranch. I contacted the Barrick Museum (publishers of DRY HEAT where the article appears); left a message with Paula; and otherwise made this a GRS day.
Here’s a link to Julian’s article: https://issuu.com/unlvmuseum/docs/dryheat_issue002
Here’s a brief update on the MGM+/Prime Video miniseries.
Contracts between rights-holders and Amazon have been signed, sealed and delivered. The script is already written (perhaps by the Producer, who’s been working on developing the series for several years). A Writers’ Room has been set up. (Scripts are often modified.)
There is also another film in production – it must (for now) remain a mystery, but extensive work is underway. It promises to be an excellent film, about matters Stewartian The only clue I will offer is this: https://californiatypewritermovie.com/
If all goes well, one or both of these film projects should be finished and available in 2024 or so.
ISH’S HAMMER
Artist, Steve Williams. Used with permission.
(The Header painting for this George R. Stewart weblog is also by Steve Williams. Steve attended the Liverpool Institute of Art with John Lennon and Paul McCartney.)
Word came several years ago that a film or mini-series based on Earth Abides was “in development.” “In development” means that producers (or others) were proposing to funders and distributors that a work should be filmed. A little research revealed that the production company doing the proposing was helmed by two academy-award-winning producers, so the prospect was promising.
After that, nothing. I’d check regularly, and post an update – which was always an update about silence. Until now.
A few weeks ago, a trusted source asked my advice about a possible contract for an Earth Abides mini series. He mentioned the series would be presented on a newly revamped and renamed streaming service premiering on January 15. And indeed, on January 15th MGM +, a premium service owned by Amazon, was announced. So had the series, films, and mini-series MGM+ is producing or has in development – including …. EARTH ABIDES
Since those involved in the effort – Producers Michael Phillips, Juliana Maio, and Kearie Peak, GRS family representative Ed, HarperCollins Representative Matt S. – are champions of the effort, and since it’s been publicly announced, it’s sure to be a fine work. (Between them the producers have four Academy Awards. Philips for The Sting, Taxi Driver, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind; Maio for a documentary about the Jewish community Cairo.) The series has already been scripted, which should reduce production time.
The mini-series, once produced will be available on the new MGM+. Judging by the fact that episodes of other MGM+ mini-series are already available on Prime Video, it’s likely that at least some episodes of Earth Abides will also be on Prime Video.
Will the mini-series be an accurate film version of EA?
Here’s a cautionary tale found in three letters to GRS in the George Rippey Stewart Papers (at the Bancroft Library. The letters were from Stewart’s old school chum Buddy DeSylva. DeSylva had gone on to some fame as a composer, discoverer of Shirley Temple, co-founder of Capitol Records, and producer. (There’s even a musical about DeSylva.) DeSilva’s first letter, happy and enthusiastic, informed Stewart that Paramount wanted to film FIRE. The second letter, a few months later warned Stewart Paramount had made a few changes to the novel. The third letter was downright apologetic; Stewart would not recognize his novel at all in the film. (The movie, Red Skies Of Montana, completely omitted the focus on fire ecology which is the central theme of FIRE.) Stewart didn’t seem upset. He knew the novel had a wide audience, and would stand on its own. As it has – his novel is still honored and read; the movie, largely forgotten.
In the same way – No matter how this series turns out EARTH ABIDES will endure. A mini-series, even if it changes the novel in important ways, will introduce the book to millions of new readers. Younger readers. Many of those readers will probably turn to Stewart’s other novels; and they will carry the books and their profound beauty and encouragement forward, into the unknown time ahead. Then the work of all of us who’ve carried the torch of enlightenment found in the works of George R. Stewart forward to the generations yet to come will have done our work. So we can rest, perhaps with a Stewartian Old Fashioned in hand, listening to appropriate music – like distinguished composer Philip Aaberg’s Earth Abides – and consider our work well done.
As George R. Stewart wrote, at the end of his last ecological novel:
the EARTH ABIDES project 