sf, page 1 of 34

First published in 1992, The Children of Men was P D James’s first non-crime novel, written when she was 71 and recently made a life peer. It was sparked off by her reading an article about a drop in male fertility, which led to her wondering what the world would be like if children simply stopped being born. I decided to read it thinking of it as part of the British tradition of post-apocalyptic fiction—“cosy catastrophes”, even—along the lines of John Wyndham and John Christopher. (And, of course, Brian Aldiss, who not only coined the term “cosy catastrophe”, but wrote Greybeard, a 1964 novel about, well, a future in which children stopped being born…)

The Children of Men is set in the year 2021, 25 years after the last human birth. Since then, men have produced no fertile sperm—and, oddly, all the sperm stored in fertility banks has been found to be infertile, too. (A detail that may have been added simply because someone pointed it out as a loophole in James’s set-up, but it actually has quite an implication for what sort of novel this is. Without it, if men had simply become infertile from one date onwards, this would be SF. But with that detail, it implies a sort supernatural—even divine—cause to the infertility, backdated as it is. This is, then, perhaps a religious fantasy.)

The sometime narrator (via his occasional diary), otherwise protagonist, Theo Faron, is a lecturer on Victorian history at Oxford. (His pupils, now, aren’t young undergraduates, but adults taking evening classes. There aren’t any young to teach, anymore.)

He’s divorced, his wife having left him after the death of their 18-month-old daughter, whom he killed, not realising she was behind him when he reversed their car. But that death, devastating though it was, just seems to have confirmed the general air of emotional distance and lovelessness in his life: his mother was distant, his father was ill, and died when Theo was 12, and Theo has since come to admit that he never really loved his wife. Now, he’s perhaps one of the few people to be glad there are no children around to act as a reminder of what he lost.

Although the human race basically knows it’s heading for extinction, things are, in general (in England, anyway), pottering along much the same, or at least putting up with the slow erosion of a way of life—with resignation and a quiet sort of despair, rather than the rushing around and violence associated with your more dramatic apocalypse. Slowly, and mostly by their own volition, the populace is moving into the cities, as outlying villages become harder to maintain and supply with power. The old and infirm are encouraged to end their own lives (their partners receive an enhanced pension), and there are even mass events known as the Quietus, in which coach-loads of the elderly are sent out into the ocean on boats that are then sunk. Elsewhere, there’s a fashion among some women for pushing expensive dolls about in prams—dolls which can be updated every six months, to provide some illusion of growth—and the social convention is to treat these dolls as real babies, with people stopping to coo at them in their prams. (Though one early shocking incident in the novel has a woman snatch such a doll and dash it to pieces, leaving its owner as distraught as if it had been real.) Others treat their pets a little more like human babies, with Christening ceremonies and kittens in prams.

There are darker aspects, too. The last generation of humans to be born have become known as the Omegas. Now in their mid-twenties, they have a marked psychopathic character. Often handsome and intelligent, they’re also “cruel, arrogant and violent”. Some abandon society to form gangs. One such, known as the Painted Faces, attack travellers in an oddly ritualistic way, dancing round their cars and chanting, before burning the vehicle and sometimes killing one or more of the passengers, while the others are allowed to go. They are, in a sense, the ultimate lost generation: “Their unspoken question, ‘What is the point of all this?’”

And then there’s the government. While the majority of the ageing populace do their best to get on with a slowly failing normality (“the small domestic concerns of a shrinking world”), the Warden of England, Xan Lyppiatt, keeps things in check through a subtly tightening totalitarian grip. The SSP—the State Security Police—are able to make dissenters disappear, while criminals are sent to the (Isle of) Man Penal Colony, which seems to have been left to run wild. Foreign workers (known euphemistically as “Sojourners”) are imported to do manual labour, but are given no right to stay in the country once their stint is over, and are kept in camps.

Xan, as it happens, is Theo’s cousin, and the two spent a deal of time together growing up, though only enough to recognise a certain shared emotional coldness in one another. Theo was, for a time, on the Council of England as Xan’s advisor, but gave the position up, as he knew his advice was never followed.

Then one day Theo is contacted by a group of five people who ask him to take their message to his cousin. They want certain political changes—a proper oversight of the Man Penal Colony (as it’s pretty much run by internal gangs), an end to the Quietus, and rights for Sojourners. Theo does as he’s asked, more because he likes the young woman who first approached him, Julian (the spelling she insists on, rather than Julianne). Xan and the Council patiently explain to Theo that they’re doing the best they can in a changing world. “I’m not a tyrant, but I can’t afford to be merciful,” Xan says. Which is probably what all tyrants say.

But then, some time later, the group contacts Theo again. They had been blowing up the platforms used in the Quietus, and one of their group has been caught. Knowing it’s only a matter of time before he’s forced to reveal the names of the rest of the group, they have to go into hiding, and need Theo’s help. The clincher is that Julian is pregnant, and does not want her baby to be handed over to Xan, as will surely happen if they’re caught. Theo at first believes they’re deluding themselves, but Julian has him lay his hand on her belly and he feels the baby kick…

The Children of Men is, in a way, the cosiest of catastrophes: it allows everyone to continue their middle-class lives pretty much as before, only with the added knowledge that with them, the human race will die out. The likes of Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids and Christopher’s Death of Grass are about the fragility of civilisation, and how easily it can descend into barbarism and amoral chaos—written by a generation who had survived the Second World War and walked the precipice beside such a descent. James’s slow apocalypse, on the other hand, is a slip into despondency and resignation—it’s “a world overcome with ennui”, “a world with no future”—while a totalitarian dystopia takes hold. With its promises of “security, comfort, pleasure”, the Warden provides:

“…the illusion of democracy to people who no longer have the energy to care how or by whom they are governed as long as they get what the Warden has promised: freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from boredom.”

It’s perhaps notable that the world of Children of Men is wholly middle-class. Physical labour in the England of 2021 is carried out, it seems, entirely by the “Sojourners”, who are basically treated as temporary slaves. (We only glimpse them once in the book, and no mention is made of any working classes among the English.) In a way, then, the novel could be seen as a sort of exaggerated view of England from an over-anxious middle-class viewpoint, where physical labour is invisible, conformity is assured, foreigners are used but kept out of sight, and the rebellious element among the youth are a sort of nightmare of what frightened pensioners think punk rockers must be: barely rational murderous savages loose in the wilds. (The Omegas even feel a little like grown-up versions of the children from The Midwich Cuckoos: alien, and more than slightly inhuman.)

Perhaps it’s a telling remark when James said, in an interview from the time of the book’s publication: “I didn’t want it to be science fiction. I accept that there is some excellent writing in science fiction … but it’s not a genre I personally enjoy. I like to be in a world I know.” The Children of Men is, perhaps then, a picture not of a possible future, but of the world she knew. I don’t know if the point she was making, back then, was that middle-class life in the Britain of the 1990s was unsustainable in the face of increasingly harsh global and economic realities (which would be odd, considering she was a Conservative peer). She doesn’t really provide a glimpse outside her characters’ class bubble to really bring that home (making me wonder if she herself didn’t consider it, either). But, reading the novel today, that’s what it feels to me that it’s about. (It’s certainly the direction the film adaptation takes.)

There is a religious strand to the novel, though mostly in Theo’s worrying about whether other characters believe in God, in a world where most people (including him) don’t. Julian, though, does, as does the father of her baby—a significant detail? Is the mass infertility an equivalent of the Biblical flood, and this new birth a miracle? The novel ends before that can be decided.

In fact, the ending is even ambiguous about what will happen politically now hope might just have returned to this dying world. There is a regime change, but how much is it a case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”? Any remotely SF or fantasy writer would no doubt turn this book into the first of a trilogy; P D James returned to her detective novels, so there’s no way of telling where things in her version of 2021 would have headed.

Alfonso Cuarón’s film version, released in 2006, is a world apart from the novel, much more hard-hitting and unquestionably dystopian. A small detail—it’s women who are infertile in this future, not men—does away with that awkwardly supernatural-feeling point about sperm banks, and the focus is far more on the “fugees”, the refugees who flock to Britain, and how they’re treated (not just camps but cages). It’s a very powerful film, and certainly no cosy catastrophe.

Back in the days of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds, aliens, with their “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” could be seen as a warning against one of the great threats of the looming 20th century: letting pure intellect dominate, and lead us into our own technologically-flavoured destruction. Midway through the century, an alien of a different type (Klaatu by name) turned up to issue a more direct warning against blowing ourselves up, as though to say, “You just don’t get it, do you?” Later still, in the post-Morning of the Magicians/Chariots of the Gods? 70s and 80s, when aliens came not to invade us, they were still often remote (2001), weird (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) or at least impressed by our capacity to feel emotions (Starman).

But here we are in the 21st century, and it’s a sorry state of affairs when aliens come along to remind us how to be human.

I went to see Disclosure Day the day after the current president of the United States hosted an Ultimate Fighting Championship night in the White House, so the opening scene of Steven Spielberg’s latest dip into alien lore—a wrestling match in which one contestant breaks a chair on his opponent’s head while the crowd eggs him on to further showy violence—couldn’t help but feel like a political statement. Is this, Spielberg seems to be asking, America today: a baying crowd driven to distraction by a trumped-up fight while the world teeters on the brink of environmental instability and World War III, and meanwhile a shady organisation that somehow blurs the distinction between a tech company and a government agency is responsible for incarcerating and mistreating immigrants (of the interstellar variety, but immigrants all the same)…?

If it needs to be made any more explicit, we’re told at one point (slight spoiler) that Disclosure Day’s aliens regard empathy as an important evolutionary advance—a direct riposte, I assume, to a certain [update: ex-]trillionaire’s assertion that the same quality is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilisation”. (Elsewhere, footage of dead or injured Close Encounters-style aliens, with their emaciated bodies and overlarge heads, surrounded by various flavours of the uniformed military, can’t help recall images of the victims of Nazi concentration camps…)

It’s a pity, then, that Disclosure Day is such a mess. The story (though not the script) is by Spielberg himself, and I can’t help feeling the “story” in question was more a wish-list of scenes and ideas, which had to be knocked up into some sort of a narrative. Can we have crop circles, please? Just the one. It doesn’t have to mean anything in the narrative, but just be there for a brief attempt at a sense of wonder (though it comes off more as a tired joke)…? It is, in this way, the film of a true believer, who feels he has to include everything, rather than pick only what serves a well-honed story.

On the way, Spielberg gets to fake some archival UFO/alien footage, which I’m sure is already, in some sectors of the internet, being claimed to be actual alien footage, snuck into a Hollywood film against the government’s wishes (the government, of course, never watching Hollywood films) while also being a government-sanctioned plot to prepare us for the real disclosure day (the government, of course, being in secret control of Hollywood films) which will happen any day now. (No, now. No… now. Alright, but soon.)

Ever since Klaatu assumed the name of Carpenter in The Day the Earth Stood Still, the line between aliens and angels/saviours/gods (or, as von Däniken would have it, Gods?) has been somewhat blurred, but here the blurring is more slapdash than subtle. On the one hand, Spielberg spends a rather contrived scene assuring his viewers that a belief in aliens isn’t incompatible with traditional faiths, then he undermines it by having people treat our touched-by-the-aliens protagonists with religious awe. (Why should technologically more advanced beings be thought of as spiritually superior? If my neighbour has a better iPhone than me, is he holier? Does being guided by AI make a war any more spiritual? Or make the Buddah, not having a digital watch, any less?) There’s too much demand on the aliens in this film to be everything Spielberg wants them to be.

But I don’t think it’s the point of Disclosure Day to make sense. Its point it to thrust a lot of stuff at us—Steven Spielberg sense-of-wonder stuff (though it’s nowhere near as sense-of-wonder-ish as Close Encounters)—while making a broad point about empathy at a time when the world could really do with a reminder that such a thing exists.

There’s a push to see Disclosure Day at the cinema, but I have to say, it doesn’t really do much in the big-screen wow-ing visuals department. Worth watching on your home TV (if for no other reason than you can pause it to take a loo break, because it’s over two hours long), but not, I’d say, if you’re up for a wholly satisfying story—more if you’re happy with a dip into the realms of conspiracy culture (or are a believer, in which case it’s probably a delight), plus an occasionally moving reminder of what it means for people to perhaps, maybe, sometimes, be nice to each other, have hope in the future, and get together to turn things around generally.

If you want to learn about the life of JG Ballard, there are plenty of sources. There’s Ballard’s own writings on the subject, which includes both memoir (Miracles of Life) and fiction (Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women), which might be grouped together as self-mythologising (which I don’t intend as a negative term). Then there’s David Pringle’s detailed chronology (currently spread across ten or so volumes of the Deep Ends anthology, and really in need of standalone publication), the John Baxter biography The Inner Man from 2021, and now The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J G Ballard by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan.

When The Illuminated Man was first announced (at that point, it was only to be by Priest), I felt there was a certain amount of relief that Ballard would be getting a respectable biography, as Baxter’s book had attracted a certain amount of criticism (not least from Ballard’s daughters) for factual inaccuracies and a general misrepresentation of Ballard’s character (as, Edmund Gordon writes in a review of The Illuminated Man in The New Statesman, “a racist, sexist, mendacious creep, beset by alcohol problems and ‘psychotic tendencies’”—though that wasn’t the impression I came away from it with). This, then, was to be a more acceptable, hopefully more scholarly—if less gossipy (though it’s good to have both)—biography, presumably to be written with the collusion of Ballard’s estate (and, crucially, his daughters).

(I have to say that, at the time, I was quite grateful to read The Inner Man—always taking its speculations about Ballard’s psychology with the same grain of salt I’d bring to any biography. It was, for me, the first take on Ballard’s life I’d read that wasn’t by Ballard himself, and so was a welcome second perspective. Baxter had, for instance, clearly spoken to many of the other people involved, so that second perspective wasn’t only his own. And I couldn’t help feeling its dips into gossip and anecdote were a welcome contrast, a circus tent set up outside the crystalline pagoda of Ballard’s own powerful self-mythologising. Where else would I have got to read the story of Ballard buying The Who’s “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” and saying he preferred it played at 33rpm (as opposed to the faster 45rpm, presumably)? I even think Baxter’s might have been a biography Ballard would have enjoyed—had it, that is, been written about anyone but himself! After all, Ballard had good things to say about Baxter’s biographies of Steven Spielberg—“Baxter is a shrewd, witty and very readable writer”—and Woody Allen—“astute and entertaining”.)

Sadly, though, that idea of The Illuminated Man wasn’t to be. Priest fell ill and died before the book was finished. His partner (and, later, wife) Nina Allan has finished it but made two crucial decisions that fundamentally affected its character. First, Priest’s version of the book has been left unedited, even when some chapters clearly feel like they were written by a man of flagging energies. Second, Allan has taken this opportunity to write about Priest’s final illness and death in some detail. Which is understandable, considering what she and he must have been through, but I have to confess I skipped those chapters. The result is an unblended mix of straightforward biography and memoir about two different people. (In fact, the book makes most sense regarding the biographical chapters about Ballard as materials offered to support the memoir covering Priest’s illness and death.)

Christopher Priest’s portions of The Illuminated Man seem strongest, to me, in their critical comments on Ballard’s fiction. For instance, this:

“‘The Voices of Time’, we soon discover, is a story that does not give up its secrets. If there is a plot, an underlying purpose, it constantly evades the reader. Instead, every page, every paragraph, seems charged with meaning, never clarified, never given the benefit of cause and effect. The reader is cast alone. If obscurity is art, here we find it—but ‘The Voices of Time’ is not obscure.”

That’s the sort of thing I want from critical writing: it makes me want to return to the story, and gives me permission to feel confused as to what it’s presenting. Accept the confusion and bathe in the meaning, Priest is saying. Good advice.

Allan’s are (necessarily) the more complete sections, whether biographical (thanks to her interviewing the people involved where possible) or critical (her comments on Ballard’s final novels, for instance, make me want to give them another—or in some cases a first—go).

Towards the end of the book, Allan asks, of biographies: “Are we reading to confirm that our hero really was a hero, or to discover that they were secretly a monster?” For me, it’s neither. I never look for writers I admire to be heroes—certainly not saints—because that’s plainly only going to end in disappointment. What I want is to get a glimpse of the human being behind it all. Ballard was, both in interviews and on the page, an impressive man, but not the sort to ever admit to, say, playing The Who at the wrong rpm, which is, frankly, the sort of thing I want to read! The Illuminated Man provided a better example though, when Allan looks at a rare Ballard notebook for a novel he never completed (he destroyed all such preparatory materials once a book was finished). Seeing him, in his notes, trying out ideas and asking himself questions, feels like a wonderfully humanising moment, a side of him that never comes through in his interviews and writing.

As I say, I think of Ballard’s own writing on his life as self-mythologising, but I don’t mean to imply he’s covering up the truth; rather, he’s coming up with the version of events that best expresses how those events felt to him—how he experienced them, what they meant to him—which is a crucial difference (especially when those events are so intimately entangled with his fiction). We all alter the facts of our lives to fit an evolving inner story—unconsciously streamlining them to bring out the meaning they have for us. It’s only when it’s someone gets a proper biography written about them that this really comes to the fore. In a sense, Ballard’s version of his own life, as presented in both the novels and the memoir is the core of his whole body of fiction, which might all be understood as a complex response to traumatic events and times, an attempt to make meaning out of often disparate events, ideas, experiences. Having this myth brought up against the facts does not invalidate the myth, but emphasises its artistry.

Ballard himself provides an example. In Empire of the Sun, young Jim is separated from his parents for the duration of his internment by the Japanese; in reality, as Ballard admitted, he was with his parents the whole time. But, he said, he made the change because when he was in the camp, his parents were no longer the ones who had control over his life—they couldn’t punish or reward, and were busy being revealed as all-too-human beings, in a sudden change from their former lofty distance. They were, in a sense, no longer parents (just as Ballard was abruptly shunted into no longer being a child). Jim’s being separated from his parents in Empire, Ballard said, was how it felt, hence the myth, the fiction. (Thus also fitting it into the standard fairy tale trope of children thrown out into the wild alone.)

I don’t know if The Illuminated Man can really be a replacement for Baxter’s The Inner Man. At one point Allan castigates Baxter for presenting unattributed information, but on the same page (p. 199) she has a block quote that is itself unattributed. (Maybe that was a publisher’s error.) She mentions Ballard’s family’s unhappiness with Baxter’s book, which was in part due to his sometimes overplayed speculations on Ballard’s psychology, but Allan then goes on to speculate whether Ballard would have remained faithful to his wife, had she survived, which seems, to me, on the same level.

But that’s what biographies do. I only know Ballard through his fiction, interviews, and other writings, and I like to learn about his life as a sort of accompaniment to the writing. I’ll keep The Illuminated Man on my shelves, but it’s probably The Inner Man I’ll refer to first when I need to, if only because it’s in chronological order. (The Illuminated Man, for instance, has a chapter on Ballard’s novel Hello America after the one on The Empire of the Sun, and a chapter on the early Vermillion Sands stories after the chapter on Crash. If nothing else, this leaves out the connecting tissue: what was Ballard doing before and between these books?)

Ballard was evidently a complex man—that sort of fiction wouldn’t come from someone who wasn’t. In a way, his fiction arrived pre-analysed (though in a distinctively Ballardian fashion), and it begs for other takes, going deeper, and seeing things Ballard himself didn’t highlight. It’s an infinitely rich body of work—as, no doubt, was the man himself, and the myth he created.

I’ll end with something from Nina Allan on Ballard the man:

“…listening to him talk—the tone of his voice, the clarity of his thinking, the whole vast hinterland of memory and intellect that lies behind the words he speaks has an immediacy and power that exceeds any number of pages filled with third party speculation and literary analysis.”

But it’s good to have the third party speculation and literary analysis all the same.