Greybeard

by Brian W. Aldiss

The sombre story of a group of people in their fifties who face the fact that there is no younger generation coming to replace them; instead nature is rushing back to obliterate the disaster they have brought on themselves.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Post Apocalyptic, Dystopia, Apocalyptic, Speculative Fiction, Fantasy

237 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Pseudonyms: Jael Cracken, Peter Pica, John Runciman, C.C. Shackleton, Arch Mendicant, & "Doc" Peristyle.

Brian Wilson Aldiss was one of the most important voices in science fiction writing today. He wrote his first novel while working as a bookseller in Oxford. Shortly afterwards he wrote his first work of science fiction and soon gained international recognition. Adored for his innovative literary techniques, evocative plots and irresistible characters, he became a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 1999.
Brian Aldiss died on August 19, 2017, just after celebrating his 92nd birthday with his family and closest friends.

Brian W. Aldiss Group on Good Reads

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Richard Derus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: 3.5* of five

$1.99 Kindle edition, ON SALE TODAY, 11 Jan 2021!

The Publisher Says: The sombre story of a group of people in their fifties who face the fact that there is no younger generation coming to replace them; instead nature is rushing back to obliterate the disaster they have brought on themselves. Was slighty revised by the author in 2012.

My Review: First published in 1964, at the tail end of one of the scariest passages during the Cold War, this post-apocalyptic look at the resilience and the lack of same in the human spirit was involving and affecting. It was also a disorganized mess.

Chapters 1-3 take place in 2025 and on, or the mid-point of the story. Chapter 4 takes place as the world finds its way through the crisis. Chapter 5 has us back in about 2030...Chapter 6 is early days of the Accident, as the sterilization of Earth's humans is called...and then back to 2030 in Chapter 7. It's kind of a confused way to tell a story. Not that it's a complicated story, but it's always nice to have things move along in sequence when there's no reason, stylistic or otherwise, for them not to.

Aldiss' Introduction to the 2012 edition tells of the genesis of the story...a divorce, a general reduction of his life to solitude, and a desperate yearning for his lost kids...and I must say that this Introduction is what kept me going for the whole short 237ish pages. I could relate to his sense of loss and his almost desperate longing. I looked for those things in his text and really didn't find them too terribly often. Many things occur in the book, but few of them happen, if you see what I mean; Greybeard, the main character, and Martha, Greybeard's wife, aren't prone to overstatement. Jeff, a character whose slippery presence is highly emotionally charged, makes little impact in the end. Charley, the dopey religious nut, isn't much of a shakes for shakin' stuff up either. Dr. Jingadangelow (!) the snake oil salesman is fun...I picture Eddie Izzard playing the role in a movie...but rattles on and rockets off ballistically.

I didn't love the book, but it's got at its heart a futureless bleakness that resonate with. After 50 years, the Accident's specifics don't quite line up with reality, but I have no smallest problem imagining specifics that end us up in the same place. One day soon, y'all should go read Sir Roy Calne's book Too Many People. I can see that causing the Accident with all too great a clarity of inner vision.

On the low end of the recommend-to-others scale, and then only to those who like post-apocalyptic stories.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the book "The Children of Men" by P.D. James (1920-2014) and many have thought that that book was a rip-off of the earlier "Greybeard" by Brian Aldiss (1925-2017) and having now read "Greybeard" I would agree. As I have read a lot of Aldiss but not "Greybeard," I thought I'd read it especially to compare the two books...The theme is that the human race has become sterile and so we have a society of aged people (who are only getting older, of course) without any young people. Both the James and Aldiss books are set in the early 21st C., Aldiss' starting in 2029. And as both authors are English, both books are set in England and, in fact, Oxford is featured in both of them.
I think I prefer "Greybeard" because I prefer Aldiss as a writer, so maybe that's unfair concerning the stories. I'm sure many readers preferred the P.D. James story. But I particularly liked the ending of Aldiss' book, so I will say the original story by Aldiss is better.

[notgettingenough · Rating 3 out of 5]

By complete coincidence, having just finished Dr Bloodmoney , I put my hands on Greybeard. Both are tales of a dystopian near future, both predicated on a nuclear accident, written at the same time in the early sixties and set in the aftermath, 1980s or so onwards.

I've already commented on the former: not well written, though not the worst of Dick's that I've read, and rather simplistic. Then again, the dilemma itself is simpler. The world is contaminated, but there is no doubt that human life will go on. Lots of mutant babies born, but also ones that aren't. Civilisation stays, well, civilised. Shortages lead to commerce, not to violence. Good old capitalism seems to hold everything together. Aldiss's scenario sees the human race and most, but not all, animals immediately become sterile. There is no optimistic streak that things will get back to the good ole days. Instead, if there is a note of optimism it's in the observation of Nature taking back control. Water expands its territory as does greenery. As humans abandon their own areas, Nature soon dominates, just as we observe in the real life catastrophe of Chernobyl.

My heart sank as I started Greybeard. There was plenty not to like, the main character is a man called Greybeard, people walk with big sticks, there are lots of stoats, probably sentient, and humans are clothed in what seems like medieval style. They live in the country. It felt like I'd walked into a fantasy book somehow managing to masquerade as SF. However, I stuck with it and it soon became reassuringly and more obviously dystopian. It might seem like Aldiss has the simpler job of the two authors. Everybody's sterile? So what's the problem. Humans are going to be extinct very soon. But that in itself creates a much more interesting set of problems. Why work? Why accept authority? What, exactly, is the point of anything? Is everybody really sterile? I thought Aldiss considers these issues with a depth which was lacking in Dick. I wonder if anybody has read both and would call me out as unfair to Dick?

I don't want to give away any of the story of Greybeard, but it's definitely worth a read and perhaps it makes sense to read Dick as well, just to see how two similar starts can develop in such different ways. It was my first Aldiss, and I immediately found myself looking through the shelves for another....to be continued.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Waterstones had a display of books set in London and we bought a few. I think this is the last one I had left to read, only to discover that the book isn't set in London at all. London features heavily in the book as somewhere they want to get to — in fact they want to get through London and out to the coast — but starting west of London they never quite make it. That said, their quest to reach London still makes the city feel like a character. Just out of scene, aspirational, but a character that they keep searching for and referring to.

48 years before a test explosion in space leaves the whole world sterilized. Once the sickness settles down and the radiation deaths slow down the world is left with an ageing population – an ageing population that can't have children. Algy and Martha were just children during the year of sterilization. Now, in their 50s, they are the youngsters in their community. Their leaders are increasingly old and increasingly paranoid, so they decide to take off, head down the Thames, and try and get to London, then hopefully onto the coast beyond.

Aldiss presents the touching tale of the travels of this group, as they pick up a handful of other disaffected community members on their way out, the story is also interspersed with flashbacks as we find out about Algy's and Martha's childhood meeting and their time in Douche (Documentation of Contemporary History – England). More touchingly, we come to understand how important the lack of any children has become to these people. As they grown older there is no one to look after them, as they die there will be nobody to replace them. Everybody lives with the knowledge that, as a species, we are dying out. Phantom pregnancies, rumours of freak shows of deformed half-human children, and con-men offering all sorts of life extending treatments all seem to spring out of this desire for things to be different. Even Douche itself is the vain hope that humanity needs to make sure there is some legacy, even if it's only information, to leave for the children that everybody hopes will come again if the radiation levels fall and somehow the sterility is reversed before they're all too old to even have children, let alone raise them.

[Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a story of one man's attempt to survive in a post apocalyptic world.

Post apocalyptic stories seem to fall into one of two categories. Either humanity is humbled by some huge disaster that nature has thrown at us or else humanity is the victim of its own foolishness, a disaster of its own making. This story falls very much in the latter category.

The nature of the catastrophe is this: An accident whilst nuclear testing in space has somehow raised the radiation level on earth to the extent that it has either sterilized everyone or only allowed horrifically deformed monstrosities to be born which were at first eugenically eradicated and then later fought over as it became apparent that in them lay humanity's only hope for the future. Consequently, society has collapsed and the population is aging with the youngest people being at least 60.

It uses a somewhat tired premise in that humanity has attempted to wield a technology beyond our ability to safely control and which led to our own downfall. Although it is more than that; it is a lament against Aldiss' own age: "It was really the generation before hers that was more to blame, the people who were grown up when she was born, the millions who were adults during the 1960's and 70's. They had known all about war and destruction and nuclear power and radiation and death - it was all second nature to them. But they never renounced it."

The story's misanthropy goes deeper than that. Our society was so deeply flawed and corrupt that the disaster was almost a blessing, clearing the slate and allowing us to regain our humanity. As one character suggests: "Have you thought of the world we were born in, and what it would have grown into had not that unfortunate little radiation experiment run amok? Would it not have been a world too complex, too impersonal, for the likes of us to flourish in?" He adds: "Is not this rag-taggle present preferable to that other mechanized, organized, deodorized present that we might have found ourselves in, simply because in this present we can live on a human scale?"

All in all it is a kind of rambling tale with no conventional form of plot and conclusion to be reached at the end. This is more a mediation on the time and follows a brief transition of Greybeard as he follows his dream. Not much in the way of action but it certainly gives you plenty to think about.

[Graham P · Rating 2 out of 5]

Besides reading his 'The Hand-Reared Boy' decades ago, this is my first Aldiss SF novel, and while it has the gridwork of a great work of spec literature, Aldiss turns a middling effort with high potential into a dullish network of melodramatic dead-ends. The entire population is infertile and the youngest (at least in the UK) is none other than Greybeard, a British DOUCH officer with his alluring wife, Martha. Told between flashbacks and the dull, meandering present, most of the journey is a wayward trek through the overgrown Thames where weasels/stoats seems to be the defining threat alongside treacherous snakeskin salesmen. But even presenting a roadblock, Aldiss shows a threat and then never develops the reader into it. In a way, it's a novel of stops and starts, a dull and tarnished diagram of a novel that is unsure of itself. And don't even start on the DOUCH organization that tries to record human history before the curtain of extinction finally comes to a close....perhaps Aldiss thought it was clever at the time to name a political group after feminine hygiene, but reading of DOUCH continually mentioned through the flashbacks in Washington DC, I wondered how serious Aldiss really took this novel. While no means a piss-poor book, it is one marred by its own dullness, a slog that makes the future Thames feel like walking backwards in mudbanks while whistling songs of a dull yesteryear.

A fair novel, and a disappointing one. And if for anything, it has one of the most tepid and boring kidnapping scenes ever put to the page.

Barefoot in the Head is next for Aldiss. I have faith in that one.

[Rog Pile · Rating 5 out of 5]

The time is the early twenty-first century, and humankind is dying, the entire race rendered sterile by an atomic 'accident' in 1981. Greybeard, barely yet sixty, is one of the youngest men alive. The story opens in the village of Sparcot on the Thames, where Big Jim Mole governs a ramshackle community of oldsters, eking out a living by farming, poaching (though who there is to poach from is not clear) and occasionally exacting a toll from travelers who attempt to take a boat under the Sparcot bridge.

Although Man is dying out other lifeforms are prospering: rabbits and foxes are plentiful. Stoats have increased to the point where they have become a menace, hunting in massive packs. One or two of the larger mammals have also survived, including the reindeer, introduced to Britain in the latter years of the twentieth century. Far from being a gloomy scenario, the theme of humankind’s sterile end provides a rich canvas for Aldiss's narrative: villages, forest, river, lakes and cities, swarming with life, human and animal.

Greybeard decides that the time has come to leave Sparcot and Jim Mole's tyrannical regime, and takes advantage of a threatened stoat attack and the ensuing confusion to slip away down the river with his wife Martha and a few companions. Away from the enforced isolation of Sparcot they find that the human race is returning to a semblance of normality. At Swifford Fair they encounter the bizarre Bunny Jingedangelow, seller of rejuvenating potions and eternal life. Here and there are reminders of the old world they have left behind: crossing a lake dotted with islands, a railway station and signal box jut out of the flood, home to a mad hermit.

With alternating chapters the narrative moves between present and past, showing how the world has come to this pass. The flashback sequences are less enjoyable: the breakdown of civilization, martial law, famine and disease, hag-ridden army officers philosophizing over gin and tonics in fly ridden bars. While not exactly dull, these scenes are inevitably gloomy, and it's a relief when the flashback is over. We've been there too many times before.

It's a brave book which has no dashing, youthful hero or young female beauty to hold the lead roles. There is love: the love of Greybeard for his Martha. The book evokes a pastoral vision of England; an England reverting to a wild Pleistocene state. The ending...the ending is marvelous.

[Olethros · Rating 3 out of 5]

-Producto de su tiempo pero con estilo poco común entonces y ahora.-

Género. Ciencia-Ficción.

Lo que nos cuenta. En el 2029, en el pueblo inglés de Sparcot, se han ido reuniendo diferentes grupos de supervivientes tras la guerra que cambió el mundo hace ya muchos años. Desde entonces, los recién nacidos ya no se ven mientras que los hombres envejecen poco a poco. Algernon Timberlane, más conocido como Barbagrís, lleva allí con su esposa desde hace once años, pero una serie de acontecimientos le hacen darse cuenta de que su tiempo en el lugar ha terminado, por lo que acompañado de su esposa y de algún otro habitante del pueblo emprenden viaje en un esquife por el río. Pero Barbagrís no siempre vivió en Sparcot. En el pasado estuvo inmerso de cierta forma en el discurrir de algunas acciones en el seno del fin del mundo como lo conocían y formó parte de DOUCH (I), la rama inglesa de Documentación Universal Contemporánea Histórica.

¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

[Veeral · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book's theme is very much similar to "The Children of Men" by P. D. James or more correctly it is the other way round as this book was published before "The Children of Men". I haven't read the latter though as there is a general consent out there that the movie for once was better than the book. And having watched the fantastic movie starring brilliant and underrated Clive Owen, I have no plans to read the novel by P. D. James.

Now coming back to this book's review, I could only say that it started off pretty well but kind of dipped in the middle when it became over-preachy and philosophical. But I have to admit that the characters are well developed for such a comparatively short novel. Aldiss relies excessively on human philosophy in the latter half of the novel which cripples the pace somewhat, but that doesn't make this a particularly bad experience.

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

I knew this book would be a little depressing, which is one of the reasons I put off reading it. Similar (although much earlier) to Children of Men, it is a tale of the remnant population post an 'accident' that caused mass infertility among mammals, including humans. Some pity prose and observations, as well as some quality existential observations. 3.5 stars.

[Jack (Sci-Fi Finds) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aldiss presents a bleak future where humanity is infertile, society has collapsed, and the average age of the population is in the seventies. He paints a vivid world with some memorable characters, but his insistence on extended flashback sequences kills the momentum entirely. Slow and contemplative in tone, clunky in execution. It does have an interesting ending, which was probably worth persevering for. My least favourite from this author so far.

[Jonathan-David Jackson · Rating 2 out of 5]

My first disappointing read in the SF Masterworks series. Through nuclear experimentation in the 1980s, all humans and most animals (except for a few little ones like stoats, which now maraud around in vicious herds devouring whole villages) are sterile, so by 2020 humanity has been ravaged by war and the only people left are those ages 50 and onwards, like Greybeard. Coincidentally, his actual name is Algernon, like the mouse of Flowers for Algernon - maybe that was a more popular name in the 60s?

There isn't much to the story, and it jumps around between the past and the present when it would've been much better in chronological order. Greybeard and his wife Martha live in Oxford under martial law, then they leave for no real reason and settle in a small village for 11 years - again for no real reason. And then they leave, for the same reason. Well, they leave because of stoats, but mostly for no reason. The characters are not interesting, their dialogue is weird, and they do and say things just because the author wants them to.

This could have been a superbly bleak and interesting novel about the end of humanity, but instead it was just boring and poorly written. Brian Aldiss is no longer with us, so he won't be hurt by my insulting his book. I gave up reading about halfway through.

[Santiago L. Moreno · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una novela que, sin llegar a la grandeza de sus obras mayores, cuenta con la esencia de lo que ha hecho grande a Brian Aldiss. El amor por los personajes, la decadencia de lo civilizatorio y el retorno de la Naturaleza a sus dominios tras la partida del Hombre, no más que un mero apunte en el tiempo.

[Elise · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was similar to P.D Jame's novel "The Children of Men" only it was written in 1964. Though many of the conclusions were the same, the feeling of each was very different. I liked them both, though Aldiss's book had us flying in hover cars by now. Tell me, where are the hover cars?

[Fantasy boy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Graybeard by Brian W. Aldiss is a post apocalypse science fiction. The story is about the after the nuclear war, the radiations had generated the infertility of women that happened in late 1980s. In the story, since women couldn’t have given birth to having children for the next generations; mankind was facing the crisis of the extinction in later generations. Governments couldn’t figure out the solutions of the disease of the sterile; politicians was using the global catastrophe to benefit their own votes. Base on the background, a few decades after the event humans became older without any children to ease the super high aging population. Basically, no children were born since the radiation incident, but is it so ? The whole story is based on the governments couldn’t solve the issue and people were getting senile, seeing the future without children to sustain the societies. A easily envisioning of bleak future for the people who were having no children. The story has interesting premise to tell the possible future without children and how people has lived and seen their life which compares to the prospect past of having children.

Aldiss’s writing is suit to the story, its descriptive writing of the nature in rural countryside is superb. The description of those greying ages characters are reflected on nowadays living in the dense popularity but birth rates is diminishing. Hothouse might be Aldiss’s the most remarkable written book I have read. Greybeard is still an exceptional written book. Although Hothouse has the most sublimely captivating writing of the secondary world in Sci Fi genre.

The story has inserted flesh back of the world before the radiation, back and fro to the story lines gradually reveal what happened to the world. The false prophet, immortals, gnomons from fairy tales etc those elements imply that the it might not be what you think of the world would have developed till the end of the story which tells you the clue that has been hidden in the beginning of the story.

Basically, the themes of the story you can see in some Sci Fi books. Butler’s Dawn is telling the same thing about the new generation of humans, but would you accept the prolonging of mankind with deformity or rather accepting extinction? Are the new generations still humans? Or they are the other species.

[Unai · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘In the end, we’re all alone. Consciousness it’s a burden.’

Con divagaciones así es fácil ganarme en mi estado de animo actual, aunque no sea lo que pretende transmitir la novela si no tan solo un personaje en un momento dado. Realmente Aldiss como los que le copiaron después no llegan al final redondo de la mas absoluta extinción de la raza humana, que es lo que a mi me hubiera gustado leer, pero tampoco cae en la esperanza absurda de “Hijos de los hombres”. El camino de Aldiss es mas elegante realmente del que yo creo que hubiera preferido.

[Charles Dee Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very satisfying sf adventure story. Atomic testing sterilizes humans and most other mammals in the 1980's. Algernon Timberlane, Graybeard, was a child at the time and now, a man in his fifties, is among the earth's last generation. England is quasi-medieval, with remnants if 20th century culture still in use. Flashbacks recount the history of the last fifty years, the breakdown of governments, one last world war For a time Timberlane works for Childsweep, a worldwide effort to kidnap children in the least affected areas for repopulation experiments. He then becomes part of the Documentation of Contemporary History, an organization with the unfortunate acronym DOUCH, made even worse when Timerberlane, as a English operative, drives around in a truck labeled DOUCH(E). (Is this one of those Anglo/American linguistic disconnects like "fanny" or "spunk"?) But England devolves to a time of warlords, massive epidemics, petty dictators, and snake oil salesmen offering eternal life. Graybeard, his wife, and two friends make they way down the Thames, wanting one last chance to see the coast. The novel ends with a slight hint of hope, but most remarkable is Graybeard's realization that he has lead a fuller life than he could have ever expected from whatever might have been the "normal" progression of humankind into the 21st century.

Aldiss is an excellent storyteller. His descriptive passages can be either lovely or grotesque as the scene requires. And created that rarest of al things in sf novels, real characters capable of both cowardly and heroic behavior.

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this years ago, or tried to but I didnt get it at the time and probably didnt finish it back then. This time however I found it very enjoyable!

Basically the book is set in about the 2030s, 50 years after a nuclear accident when bombs were set off in space, causing a catastrophic disruption in the Van Allen belts that surround the Earth and protect us from solar radiation.. The 'accident' resulted in this radiation from the sun briefly reaching the Earth, rendering the human ace sterile. At the time the book opens the human race is represented by the elderly, eeking out a living pottering around Oxford and London, looking for, and on guard against, others. There are rumours of new children born but it seems to be all myths perpetuated by deranged old lunatics, or is it?.....

Re-reading after all these year I would heartily recommend this if you are a fan of post-apocalyptic works- in fact I'd go so far as to say this is the best Aldiss book I've read so far!
Brilliant!

[Alien · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ein post-apokalyptischer Roman. Durch einen Atomtest im Weltall wurde die Menschheit steril. Das Buch ezählt die Geschichte von Greybeard, der einige Jahrzehnte später mit 56 zu den jüngsten verbliebenen Menschen zählt.

Stilistisch überdurchschnittlich, athmosphärisch schön. Trotzdem fragte ich mich eine Weile "was soll's?". Doch dann gibt es noch eine überraschende (wenn auch etwas unplausible) Wendung.

PS: der deutsche Titel ist übrigens doof. Es gibt keinen Aufstand.

[Felix Zilich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Романы про «медленный Апокалипсис» были в Британии 1960-х серьезным трендом, но этот - точно один из лучших. Ни грамма не постарел, читается словно современное произведение из одной волны с «Last of Us» или «Walking Dead».

Конец Света наступил в 1981 году. Он был очень медленным и мучительным.

Испытания американцами в космосе ядерного оружия вызвали возмущение в поясе Ван Аллена, после чего на планету обрушилась волна жесткого облучения. Процент раковых заболеваний увеличился в десятки раз, но самое главное - человечество оказалось стерилизовано. Дети перестали рождаться не только у людей, но и у всех крупных животных. В мире, у которого больше нет будущего и который неизбежно дряхлеет с каждым днём, конец цивилизации становится рутиной. В первые годы начали закрываться заводы с продуктами для детей. Потом начались беспорядки, эпидемии и войны. Гражданские и не только. Люди воевали и убивали друг друга, а выжившие - продолжали стареть, борясь с холерой, депрессией и голодом.

2029 год. В маленьком посёлке Спаркот недалеко от Оксфорда живут только старики. Олджи Тимберлейн по кличке «Седая Борода» среди них - почти подросток. Большой, лысый бугай с бородой до пояса, 54 лет. Он застрял здесь больше десяти лет назад, приехав из Штатов вместе с женой к своей умирающей матери. Понимая, что с каждой весной он становится только старше, Олджи решает впервые за все это время сбежать из посёлка и отправиться в большое путешествие к морю. Тем более, что повод для этого есть самый серьезный - расплодившиеся горностаи сбились в стаи и вырезают один посёлок за другим.

Внешний мир сложно назвать более безопасным. Мир изменился, природа возродилась, но человек по прежнему остаётся самым опасным существом. В мире стариков главный - тот, у кого есть ствол, жажда выжить и потёкшая крыша. Все теперь говорят на ломаном английском, уверены, что прошло не 48 лет, а 200-300 (или даже полторы тысячи), верят, что в лесных чащах снова появились эльфы, гномы и люди-барсуки.

..Норсгрей был одержим барсуками.
Он верил в магическую силу барсуков. По словам Норсгрея, его почти шестидесятилетняя дочь однажды убежала в лес («когда он вытянул щупальца и задушил людские города») и стала женой барсука. Теперь в лесу жили мужчины-барсуки, ее сыновья, и женщины-барсуки, ее дочери; лица у них черные с белым, необычайно красивые.
— А здесь есть горностаи? — спросила Марта, перебив старца, поскольку его речь грозила затянуться. Норсгрей указал на нижние ветви одного дерева.
— Вон там, миссис леди, один сейчас смотрит на нас. Сидит в своем гнездышке — хитрый, как черт. Только нас он не тронет; знает, что я породнился с барсуками.
Все посмотрели, куда показывал Норсгрей, но не увидели ничего, кроме седых от инея веток ясеня.

Говорят, идея романа появилась у Олдисса после развода. Жена ушла, забрала детей и, читая в новостях про испытания ядерного оружия, 40-летний писатель понял, что других детей у него походу больше никогда и не будет. Быть может, не только у него одного. Спойлер: будут, и не один. Тем не менее, депрессия толкнула его к творчеству Томаса Харди и он написал отличную книгу о том, как выживальщики плывут по реке, а вокруг - таинственный и загадочный лес, полный тростника, горностаев, северных оленей, а также «эльфов», «гномов» и «барсуков».

...Тимберлейн свыкся с нелегкой работой на озере, но не забыл урок, усвоенный в Спаркоте: безмятежный покой не приходит извне, но рождается внутри. Чтобы в очередной раз вспомнить об этом, Тимберлейну достаточно было посетить свою любимую бухту. С нее открывался вид на обширное кладбище, где почти каждый день появлялась очередная скорбная процессия с гробом

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is my fascination with the apocalyptic theme? Is it a macabre interest in the decimation of mankind or just a desire for a simpler world (a simpler world only able to be created through the destruction of this complexity)? Who’s to say? I can tell you that I know my interest in apocalyptic literature--as well as films, music, and videogames--is tied heavily to my interest in the Medieval period, especially the Early Middle Ages--notoriously and erroneously known as the Dark Ages--and the Black Death of 1348. It is interesting, to me at least, that the word apocalypse simply means revelation and literally has nothing to do with the end of the world. Of course, our association with that topic is from the book of Revelation of St. John, which, in case you were unfamiliar with the Christian scriptures, is the book describing the Christian view of the end of the world. (Whether or not I give any credence to this book is inconsequential.) Such a fact should change our opinion on what an apocalyptic story is. It is raising the veil and showing us beyond our petty world. It is a memento mori: a reminder of death. The “apocalypse” is a change, a transition into something different--something better is too subjective to say definitively. Still, as most apocalyptic literature is quick to point out, the death of man is not the death of the world or the universe. When I was younger (meaning six or seven), I was foolish and close-minded enough to think that when the Bible said God would destroy the world that the rest of the universe would be destroyed as well, but it wasn’t too long (meaning eight or nine) when I realized that if the world, or just mankind, ceased to exist, the universe wouldn’t notice. I was smart enough to reduce this to the personal, and thus began my interest in nihilism and existentialism. (Obviously I was a child and didn’t realize I was developing an interest in such heady topics.) Now, I realize this is a long preface to my review of Greybeard, but I just want to give an idea on my views of the end of mankind and the literature related to it.
Starting out, I want to say that this is my first excursion into the world of Brian Aldiss, so I will be reviewing this book, not as a work of Mr. Aldiss, but as a work independent. That being said, along with my long preface about my views on the apocalyptic subject, I should say that I have a fondness for apocalyptic literature, so my opinion on this novel is probably skewed slightly. I wanted to give it five stars, but forced myself down to four. I do that because the part of me that loves literature knows that the writing is not very good. It’s not very bad either, but it is certainly lacking is fluidity--clunky is the wrong word, but if you must wrench it from me, you can have it. I love this type of writing though: matter-of-fact-philosophizing, I call it. Mr. Aldiss is clearly a smart man who has read his Wells, and is not far from imitating him (this isn’t a bad thing). The book brought to mind In the Days of the Comet, without all that free-love crap at the end. Not so much from content, but from concept. I’ll get back to that shortly. (Maybe not.)
Greybeard is the book P.D. James’s Children of Men should’ve been, and that’s all I’ll say about that. The year is 2029: we are in the last generation of men. Back in 1981, a nuclear experiment in space caused a heavy dose of radiation to settle in on earth, killing off many of the larger mammals. Dogs went the way of the dinosaur, but luckily the cat survived, though a little hindered. Humans were rendered sterile, though some mutated babies are being born in between the time from 1981 to 2029. We join Greybeard in Sparcot, a secluded town on the banks of the Thames, and we follow his history for a couple of years. Don’t worry: Mr. Aldiss isn’t about to leave you without an explanation. The chapters go back and forth from The Accident--the nuclear tests that resulted in the disturbance in the Van Allen Belts--to the present.
It is essentially a study of man’s maddening consolations in the face of his own extinction. Gnomes roam the forests. They will replace children, since man cannot have anymore. Oxford is sinking, and when it does, the naked young of the river will populate it. A massiah promises a “second generation.” Each group of secluded mankind has it’s own consolation, each just as maddened as the last. Greybeard leads his group down the river after his eleven years of secluded “peace” in Sparcot, and discovers these insanities along with us.
And that is basically the story. Granted, there are extensive flashbacks to before their Sparcot days, even back to just after The Accident--not to mention the ending, which, for spoiler reasons, I will try to refrain from.
The basic dilemma brought up by Greybeard--whose real name is Algy Timberlane--is whether or not life is better with or without the accident. It is a moral quandary that he is sparsely given the opportunity to ponder, but it is in the background of his every thought and action--in the background of every human being. There is a point where he says to his wife Martha that without the accident, they would not have led such meaningful lives, living in the normal 20th century ideas of materialistic life, and he asks if she thinks their lives are not better since the Accident happened. I love that her response is simply “No, I don’t. We would’ve had children and grandchildren by now, but for the Accident, and nothing can ever make up for that.”
I don’t have children, though I’ve always had a strong desire to have some (especially a daughter), but I can imagine that living without the thought of someone to live for would leave you hollow. That’s why Algy and Martha hold to each other so solidly. She is more the saint than he is. He has a bit of a drinking problem, but that’s to be expected. She just deals with his coming home and drinking gin till his thoughts and feelings spill out. Maybe if there hadn’t been the Accident, she’d have left him. They probably wouldn’t even have met. Charley Samuels holds to his religion as tightly as Jeff Pitts holds to his bow and arrow or Dr. Jangedangelow holds to his delusions. We all have our consolations.

[MK]

Interesting connection to The Children of Men by P.D. James, noted in a goodreads user's review for this book:

Greybeard
by Brian W. Aldiss
416390
Paul Bryant's review Jul 10, 2016
* * * it was ok
bookshelves: sf-novels-aaargh

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...


******* more at link - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I purchased Greybeard on Kindle in Jan of 2018. I'm reading Children of Men in Jan/Feb of 2019. Hopefully I can find time to get back and read this book (Greybeard) sometime later in Feb or March of this year {2019). Maybe check out the movie Children of Men, too !

[Colin Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

During 1981 the world had been all but destroyed when several nuclear devices are detonated in space and the worlds balance changes and many find themselves impotent. Then cholera rages and government disintegrates. Martha and Algy "Greybeard" Timberlane are among the youngest survivors and this is their journey of survival and that lingering hope that they may yet find babies being born.

A good page-turner was first published in 1964 at the height of the "Cold War" when a nuclear war was often thought imminent. Then the plague, something of our current situation there, and then useless governments losing control. The characters were very down to earth and the type of people that have basic skills to see them survive and with the pioneering spirit to hope for the best.

A four star read for syfy aficionados.

[Roberta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Il Doomsday Clock, l'Orologio dell'Apocalisse, è stato inventato nel 1947 dagli scienziati della rivista Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists dell'Università di Chicago e consiste in un orologio metaforico che misura il pericolo di una ipotetica fine del mondo. La mezzanotte segna la fine del mondo.
Al momento della sua creazione, durante la guerra fredda, l'orologio fu impostato a sette minuti dalla mezzanotte; da allora, le lancette sono state spostate 21 volte. La massima vicinanza alla mezzanotte è stata di due minuti ed è stata raggiunta due volte, una tra il 1953 e il 1960 e una nel 2018; la massima lontananza è stata di 17 minuti, tra il 1991 (trattati START) e il 1995.

Barbagrigia è del 1964 e verte sulla paura della boomba atomica. In questo caso le esplosioni sono avvenute nello spazio e l'umanità non è stata obliterata da una versione gigante della Little Boy di Hiroshima, ma l'estinzione avviene in modo più subdolo: siamo diventati sterili. Non nascono quasi più bambini e quei pochi che nascono sono deformi, destinati a non sopravvivere. Barbagrigia e la moglie Martha, i protagonisti, coi loro cinquant'anni sono tra le persone più giovani che camminano sul nostro pianeta.

L'inizio del libro è buono, la fine anche, con la parte centrale ho fatto un po' di fatica. Arrivando però alle ultime pagine, grazie al flashback sull'infanzia di Barbagrigia e sul deterioramento della società come la conosciamo, le cose si sono fatte più chiare: è un buon libro, un racconto solido che merita la lettura, purchè lo si affronti con un minimo di contesto. Le paure del 1964 non sono le paure del 2018, o almeno si concretizzano in forme diverse. La lentezza del romanzo comunica l'invecchiamento globale. Il viaggio di Barbagrigia lo porta da un villaggio imbarbarito a una oligarchia di avidi sapienti, fino alla foce di un Tamigi bucolico imbruttita da deliri religiosi.
Interessante sottolineare come l'isolamento delle poche comunità rimaste abbia influito anche sul linguaggio, creando dialetti locali non sempre comprensibili.
Concludo dicendo che Aldiss non si è lasciato andare al darwinismo sfrenato, non è pronto a far abdicare il genere umano, ma è una speranza che ci lascia intravedere e non mi rovina la storia col solito "felici e contenti".

[Ape · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a brilliant book. It was written in the mid sixties when people had a fear of nuclear war, but really, this could be a tale written under the fear of environmental armaggedon. I've even heard of people saying they're not going to have children for environmental reasons, and here is a tale of a world without children. It's also a tale about growing old, and the circumstances of the plot enhancing the fear and the isolation that growing old brings, even when you're not living in a post-apocalyptic world.

I love his method of story telling. The book goes through "now time" as Greybeard (Algy Timberland) and his wife Martha leave the place, Sparcot, where they've been existing for the last 12 years and travel down the Thames river to the sea. Interspersed with the story of this journey is the story of their life together told in episodes, starting with the most recent, and going backwards in time all the way back to when they were 7 years old and first met. That feels a bit like how our memories work and how the older we get, the further back we look, likewise as they continue on a river that's getting wider and slower as they approach the sea. Just so well planned. I particularly loved the last episode when they were kids, as there's a lot about their parents, and that the "Accident" only happened in the last couple of years and people are only starting to realise what global repercussions there will be (and the theory that the same effect from a big comet killed off the dinosaurs in the same way - not a big bang sudden death, but a slow and depressing fizzle). And depressingly, it's always money and commerce in the background that makes people panic and act - not the actual important things in life. The first companies to fail are the ones catering to children (Algy's father ran a toy factory, a popular product being a teddy bear), all this collapsing drives a global war as people search for surviving children. Then at the end there's Dr Jingadangelow who has turned himself into a fat old messiah with all his ancient followers on a steam boat paddling around an estury, stopping off at new islands demanding payment and tribute to see him, which people do because they're old and scared and need something to believe in.

[Stephen Curran · Rating 4 out of 5]

In an England increasingly overrun by vicious stoats and coypu, where the tribal and elderly population fret about gnomes hiding in the forests, Greybeard and Martha decide to leave their settlement and climb aboard a boat. As they take their long, slow journey in search of the mouth of the Thames (encountering conmen and showmen and scholars, and a hermit who believes his family has successfully procreated with badgers) the narrative jumps further and further back in time, eventually arriving in Greybeard's childhood, where we discover the nature of the 'Accident' that has left the human race childless and sterile.

All this is related in prose far more precise and lyrical than anyone might usually expect to find in the Science Fiction section. A passage chosen at random: “Frost glittered on the pinched sedges outside the door; as he looked at its tiny lost reflections, he heard the creak-crunch of footsteps moving across a stretch of grass.”

Brian Aldiss has described this book as being about his estrangement from his own children. More broadly, it is a story about the conflict between the instinct to reproduce and the apparent death-wish of our species. Its predictions on the outcome of this struggle are not optimistic, but neither are they wholly without hope.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Algy Timberlane, now called Greybeard, is one of the youngest men in the world at the age of 56. Within his lifetime, Greybeard lived through the Accident that sterilized most higher mammals, fought in the wars over the remaining children of earth. For the past few decades he’s been living in an England where government has collapsed and reverted back to isolated societies. With his wife Martha and a few others, Greybeard escapes a paranoid village to travel along the Thames. They pass through the ruins of the old world and the remnants of an infirm population, a tour of how the world ends, lit by faint rays of hope amongst the darkness.

I wasn’t sure what to expect with Greybeard, but in hindsight it’s one of those books I should have read ages ago. Aldiss is an excellent storyteller who’s created an intricate world, displaying the beauty and the grotesque with bittersweet grandeur. There’s a lot of thought in Greybeard, not just about the lack of children but about aging and dying, and those themes of entropy work wonders when combined with the apocalypse.

Full review found here.

[Huw Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Due to The Accident, in which nuclear weapons were exploded in space, the humans on earth have been rendered sterile. There are no children being born and society has disintegrated into small tribes. Greybeard. whose real name is Algy, started off in the army and then documented the chaos that ensued. After a brutal encounter he and his wife decide to leave the group they are in and go downriver to see what is happening on the coast. This creates the opportunity for Aldiss to write a series of interlocking vignettes jumping backwards and forwards through history to document the way society crumbles when it appears to have no future.
This book is beautifully written and the links between the episodes are seamless. He has a very vivid view of how society would rewrite itself. His prose is spare and bleak, suitable to his storyline but remains readable throughout.

[Kathleen (itpdx) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good post-apocalyptic science fiction.
Published in the mid-60's and set in Britain around 2030 with visits back over the past 50 years. A nuclear "accident" happened in 1981 causing sterilization of many species of higher animals including man. Few children have been born and most of those have had terrible mutations. Wars and revolutions have broken out and civilization has disintegrated and aged. The main character, Greybeard, has taken part in two hopeful human initiatives--trying to save the children and recording the current history of man for posterity (if there is any) or others. Interesting characters including one who in a very Shakespearean way mistakes his words.