Implosion

by D.F. Jones

Breeding machines and fertility camps.

When a foreign power puts a sterility drug in Britain's reservoirs, the result is all too predictable.

The birth-rate plummets and the country's future looks bleak. There is only one way to save the nation; all women with a natural immunity to the drug must be placed in special camps where they can be bred from like prize cattle.

They must be given special hormone treatment and artificial insemination so that they can produce triplets, quads, quins time after time until they die of exhaustion.

They must become Nation Mums, the sole hope of a desperate people. They must be pampered and disciplined to accept their role.

Even if one of them happens to be the wife of the Minister in charge of the whole terrifying affair...

Genres: Science Fiction, Dystopia

234 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

Dennis Feltham Jones, a British Science Filction Author wrote under the byline D.F. Jones

Reviews

[Jack · Rating 2 out of 5]

A hunk of clean coal from my bargain bin reading adventure. One can tell this was written by a military man. This has a masterful sort of pulp feel about it, in the sense that, in the hands of a better writer, it would've been perhaps too depressing to bother with. It's a sci-fi horror concept light on humanity and propelled forward with a journeyman love of bureaucratic detail. I was almost disappointed it wasn't more sexist. One of my hopes in this endeavour was to explore the authors who put too much of themselves on the page, and this might have happened here, but Jones is so dull a man it doesn't bear much examination.

[Papaphilly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a tough read for me. I really loved the concept and how the story progressed. However, I had a hard time with the stilted writing. A truly understated work, it covers quite a statement of British social class structure using a population crash. Interesting concept considering that the population bomb was the rage at the time. the truly upsetting aspect for me was the ordinariness of they decisions that were made for the very best reasons for society. This reminds me very much like The Children of Men and has the very same problems. Not a bad read by any accounts.

[Kathleen Moore]

I read this back around 1981, when a hardcover copy turned up on the shelves of the small-town library, in the small Alberta town I was living in at the time.
I was struck by how out-of-date the central biology problem in the story was: veterinarians had been already doing embryo transfers for several decades.
And in between its 1967 publication and my reading, the first human IVF had success happened...
A future that could never have been, even when the book was written.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 2 out of 5]

Considering my views on human procreation I have no idea why I read this in the first place.

[Abby Gaynor (Kube) · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25

An interesting sci-fi novel from the 60s—kept me engaged and intrigued! The ending left things hanging in just the right way for this genre. I really enjoyed it!

[Jason]

2007 begins with a post-apocalyptic implosion! D. F. Jones is a British science fiction author best know for Colossus, the novel (and film) of the intelligent supercomputers. I also reviewed another disaster novel of his here on the Report called Denver Is Missing.

Implosion has been sitting on my shelf awhile and I decided to pick it up because it looked like it might have some similar themes and ideas as the current film (and PD James novel), Children Of Men. Like that story, this one concerns the decline in the female birth rate. The UK is attacked by a shadowy Soviet bloc country with Prolix, a water soluble agent that renders women sterile. In the storm of discovery a new government is swept into power that promises to retaliate for the attack and do all it can to rehabilitate the country. In the middle of all this is Dr. John Bart, our protagonist.

The novel follows him as a newly elected Minister of Health who becomes one of the most powerful men in a country where 95% of the women have become sterilized. The government must resort to draconian measures to even have a small chance of keeping the country going. They create large breeding centers where all fertile women are taken to be constantly producing babies as the 'Mothers of the Country'. Children are moved into vast schooling camps to keep them away from dangers like road accidents.

Concurrent with all the story of all these national and geopolitical machinations, we follow the drama of Dr. Bart and his newly pregnant wife as she is sent off to one of the breeding centers. Massive government propaganda campaigns convince her of this necessity but ultimately she begins to question whether treating women like cattle is tenable.

The book is not too bad. It was interesting to think about how you would try to keep a country going where the population was going to plummet to barely a fraction of what it once was. The interpersonal storyline, however, was really dated and kind of unbelievable.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enemy contaminates the water in England, leaving the women sterile. Breeding grounds are then implemented.

[SciFiOne · Rating 2 out of 5]

1983 grade D