Books like Greybeard

A quote from The Twinkling of an Eye, Brian Aldiss' autobiography:P D James, ordinarily a bestselling middle-class thriller writer, set The Children of Men in the future. The novel was published in 1992. I began to worry about her novel when readers wrote to me, pointing out many similarities between James' novel and my own Greybeard. Greybeard was published by the same publisher, edited by the same editor as James', 30 years earlier; it was still in print... The points of similarity between the novels are astonishing. Both centre around Oxford and are set in a world dominated by a tinpot dictator, where there are no more children... *******Author’s fear of nuclear radiation PLUS author’s recent divorce and consequent lack of contact with his own children PLUS author’s horror of stoats (stoats? Stoats!!)= Greybeard, a moony mournful meandering dystopian very British SF novel from 1964.The concept is that atomic tests made in space in 1981 radiated the entire planet and caused the higher mammals (except reindeer - Reindeer? Reindeer!!) to become sterile. A bit like - actually quite a lot like - P D James’ 1992 novel Children of Men which was, curiously, set in the exact same near-future period (late 2020s). The story follows one of the world’s youngest couples Algy and Martha who are in their early 50s. All other characters are 70 plus if they're a day. And the plot follows an unfortunately age-appropriate tired desultory fits-and-starts path as Greybeard and wife and a couple of geriatric friends bumble down a river to somewhere undefined for some hazy reason which is never spelled out, stopping here and there to tarry awhile and see what the ancient inhabitants are up to in their ramshackle decaying hamlets and follow various rumours about children beginning to be born again. The impulse to go on this watery road trip is an impending stoat attack on the isolated village where they’ve been living. Stoats? Stoats!!The present will always find the past’s version of the future (i.e. the present) comical. Mostly because whilst the technology can be guessed at and maybe eventually will come to pass (videophones = skype), the social attitudes remain fixed in the present of the novel, because future social attitudes can’t be extrapolated. Or at least it’s much more difficult. So the long flashback to the year 2003 is almost unreadable. I would fish out some cringe-making quotes at this point, but I think I already did that in a previous Brian Aldiss review, and I still think of myself as a fan, so this time I’ll refrain. I haven’t read it but Children of Men sounds like a better novel, even if it also sounds like a bit of a rip-off - okay, a LOT of a rip-off. But the movie Children of Men is great stuff, so in this case I’d say watch that and forget both novels. (Although I really dislike the queasy religious ending in the movie.) (But it’s still great.) My 1968 paperback copy of Greybeard has the worst cover. There’s a photo of a man with a beard but a) he’s a young man and b) his beard is brown. Major fail ! These people would put a boy on the cover of Lolita. No idea why he seems to be weeping green ice cream either.