Whilst on a forage one morning a rattlesnake bites him, and after applying first aid, Ish returns to his cabin to convalesce in bed for several days. Isherwood Williams, known as Ish, is a graduate student at Berkeley, studying the geography of an area in the mountains, somewhere in California. However, the context for the premise of the novel is less important than the premise itself, with Stewart eager to set the protagonist up as one of the few survivors in an eerily abandoned United States as expeditiously as possible. Though I assume it was original for its time, the premise of the book will sound well-worn to a contemporary reader. The book, to me, reads like the grandfather of its subgenre: grand and stately, slow moving and deliberate something of a chore to spend time with, despite its venerable wisdom ultimately, an understated book about the evanescence of human life, rewarding the patient. First published in 1949 by Random House in the United States, the novel was the inaugural winner of the International Fantasy Award, a British award for excellence within the sf and fantasy field and a precursor of the Hugo Award. Stewart is an early and celebrated exemplar of the post-apocalypse novel, a now well-established subgenre of sf.
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