History Literature / EarthAbides

* BrokenBird: Possibly [[AmbiguousDisorder Evie]]. One of the first people Ish encounters when he starts inspecting towns is a wide-eyed teenage girl who flees at the sight of him, leading him to suspect she's been subjected to AttemptedRape.

** One character knows that the ruins of the cities and bridges were built by people called "the Americans". He then wonders if the land and skies were built by the older Americans depicted on coins.
** A society formed by the descendants of black sharecroppers still grows cotton even though though they don't have any use for it, so they burn it as an offering to their Gods.
* AlternateHistory: By the end of the book it is around what would have been the 1980s or 1990s, but with the rusting remnants of the 1940s surrounding them.

* BlackGalOnWhiteGuyDrama: [[spoiler: This turns out to be the case between Em and Ish when she reveals the "horrible secret" she was hiding, namely that she's a mixed race person. It ends up being subverted because Ish doesn't care about any of that and even if he did it wouldn't matter because he loves her anyways. He even seems somewhat amused that she was worried he'd shun her over this after years of being happily married, especially considering that most of the human race is dead and it'd be incredibly stupid and arbitrary for survivors to reject each other over something as meaningless as racial "impurity".]]

* AmbiguousDisorder: The nature of Evie's mental disability is a mystery even to the characters. Ish seems to think Evie had been born like this, but the children suggest that her handicap resulted from lack of nurturing after her family died in the plague. As none of them had known Evie before the apocalypse, they cannot be sure either way.

* DarkAndTroubledPast: Em seems to have some kind of unspecified trauma in her past that she's reluctant to discuss with Ish. [[spoiler: It's arguably subverted when it turns out the thing she was so worried about telling him is that she's an octoroon. It's worth noting that she ''did'' have a troubled past because she lost her family in the plague but she didn't try to conceal that from Ish, seeing as he also lost his family.]]

* RupturedAppendix: Averted. When Isherwood lists things going in his favor for the apocalypse, the fact that he's already had his appendix out is #1.

* WastelandElder: Ish has become this by the end of the novel.

%%* AfterTheEnd

* ApocalypseHow: Likely Class 3b. It is speculated, but not definitively proven, that the particular strain of measles that killed billions could have been the result of incautious biological research. The protagonist, Ish, decides that based on past evidence of species extinctions through natural mutations of diseases, that humanity could simply have been unlucky enough to encounter a particularly virulent mutant strain of measles.

%%* ScavengerWorld: Played straight, then deconstructed. Ish and his tribe initially live off scavenged canned food and other goods. Ish knows that the tribe cannot life like this forever[[spoiler:The children of the tribe become largely illiterate and uneducated because a conventional education has little to do with day-to-day life as a tribe of scavengers and hunter-gatherers. Eventually, Ish teaches the tribe how to shoot a bow and arrow after he gives up on schooling them, and they become hunter-gatherers]]

%%* WideEyedIdealist: Isherwood.

* BlackGalOnWhiteGuyDrama: [[spoiler: This turns out to be the case between Em and Ish when she reveals the "horrible secret" she was hiding, namely that she's a mixed race person. It ends up being subverted because Ish doesn't care about any of that and even if he did it wouldn't matter because he loves her anyways. He even seems somewhat amused that she was worried he'd shun her over this after years of being happily married, especially considering that most of the human race is dead and it'd be incredibly stupid and arbitrary for survivors to reject each other over something as meaningless racial impurity.]]

** Completely averted until Ish leaves California. After being driven off by a cult near Los Angeles, the only even remotely friendly survivors he runs across are a Native American settlement outside Albuquerque ([[spoiler: from whom his sons are able to secure seed corn on a later trip]]), the sharecroppers mentioned above, and the couple in New York. Ish is without meaningful human companionship until after he returns from his trip (almost the first third of the book) when he meets Em.

* DarkAndTroubledPast: Em seems to have some kind of unspecified trauma in her past that she's reluctant to discuss with Ish. [[spoiler: It's arguably subverted when it turns out the thing she was so worried about telling him is that she's an octoroon. It's worth noting that she ''did'' have a troubled past because she lost her family in the plague but she didn't try to keep that secret from him.]]

* BlackGalOnWhiteGuyDrama: [[spoiler: This turns out to be the case between Em and Ish when she reveals the "horrible secret" she was hiding, namely that she's a mixed race person. It ends up being subverted because Ish doesn't care about any of that and even if he did it wouldn't matter because he loves her anyways. He even seems somewhat amused that she was worried he'd hold this fact against her, especially considering that most of the human race is dead and it'd be incredibly stupid and arbitrary for survivors to reject each other over something as meaningless racial impurity.]]

* BlackGalOnWhiteGuyDrama: [[spoiler: Ish and

* TragicHero: Ish becomes this in the end. [[spoiler: His dreams of preserving knowledge and rebuilding civilization are a failure. His favored son Joey dies, the only child who took seriously to learning. The books in the library will go unread. He lives to old age to see his failure and unwillingly becomes a god-figure to a tribe of hunter gatherers. At least, he taught his people how to shoot a bow and they seem to be happy with their lot in life]]