sf, page 1 of 35

If the “cosy catastrophe” is the archetypal post-WWII English SF story, surely the quiet invasion comes a close second (The Midwich Cuckoos or Quatermass II being prime examples). They’re quiet because they either occur in an isolated location (a cut off village in Cuckoos) or by hiding in plain sight (an industrial processing plant in Quatermass II). John Christopher’s The Possessors (first published in 1965) is of the former type, being set in a ski-chalet high in the Swiss Alps, which is further isolated from its nearest village when an avalanche blocks the one mountain road leading to it.

At first, the holidaymakers (all Brits, having chosen this chalet for the English-American couple who run it) continue as normal, expecting the pass to be cleared in a couple of days. They’re a hung-up bunch, many of them recovering (or not recovering) from a variety of losses: Jane Winchmore is a widow in her thirties, Douglas Poole is on the rebound from an abruptly ended affair, while hostess Mandy Hamilton left the three children from her first marriage behind in America. Others have clear compromises or unbalances in their relationships: plastic surgeon Selby Grainger is the eternal dallier-with-women, while his wife, the cooly beautiful Elizabeth, puts up with it, confident he won’t actually leave her, and Ruth Deeping clearly favours her younger son Andy over ten-year-old Stephen, whom she constantly nags. Perhaps the only fully happy one of the bunch, in fact, is eight-year-old Andy, so beloved by his mother, which is perhaps why he’s the first victim of the alien invasion. Thinking he’s found a glowing blue ball in the snow, he touches it and instantly drops to the ground. Selby declares him dead, and he’s put in a makeshift coffin in the cellar—only for him to get up and leave the chalet sometime in the night. Everyone joins in the search, though only his mother, Ruth, has any faith that a boy in so few clothes and no shoes can survive for any length of time in the snow. But he does return—only, not quite himself. Significantly colder to the touch and slightly less human, he has (as we, the readers, know from the book’s opening section) been taken over by an alien spore, flung out from its dying home planet millions of years ago, which landed by chance on the Earth and was uncovered by the recent avalanche.

The alien—symbiotic or parasitic, depending on whether you take its point of view or ours—needs to isolate the humans, one by one, so as to infect them. And of course the humans take a long time working out what’s happening, speculating first of all that it’s some new kind of illness, or an infectious mass hysteria, or even demonic possession. And all the time, the survivors are becoming increasingly besieged in the chalet, boarding themselves up against the possessors trying to get in, get them alone, and take them over.

For most of the book the story is driven by suspense and the increasing tensions between the already flawed characters. In this, there’s an obvious contrast to be drawn between the aliens (who work effortlessly together, and tempt in at least one character with the promise of an end to human struggles) and the humans, whose only working relationships are those founded on long-held compromises. Chalet owner George Hamilton, for instance, is a good husband to his wife Mandy because he ignores the bottles of gin she’s got stashed about the place, and is pretty much an alcoholic himself. (There’s a lot of drinking in the book. Interviewed in a special issue of Interzone, Sam Youd—the real name of John Christopher, and meant to rhyme with “cloud”, apparently—admitted: “It’s the way I live, yes, I do drink alcohol, and quite a bit of alcohol, though only wine…” Though it seems to have been pretty much part of the times anyway.)

It’s hard not to compare Christopher with his contemporary John Wyndham, both of whom were the face of general-readership SF in Britain at the time. Christopher’s characters are much more evidently flawed, and come with a greater dose of cynicism about human relationships, a sense that there can never be anything more than a “total failure of comprehension” between people. Offered the slightest sign of sympathy for her widowhood, young Jane just wants to escape, and instantly regrets it the one time she shares her feelings of despair with someone else. The sense is that isolation and compromise are built-in to the human condition, whereas the characters in, say, Day of the Triffids, though they have to overcome external difficulties and the occasional dangerous human, will eventually find some sense of community, even family, in the end. For Wyndham, decency is a struggle but a worthwhile one; for Christopher it feels, at times, like a lost cause.

But there are resonances with other SF-horror, too. The most obvious to me was The Thing, for its icy setting and its alien that takes on human form, but also for its sense that if the invasion isn’t stopped here, the whole of the human race is at risk: “there can be no question of toleration between it and us. We have to wipe it out, if we are not going to be assimilated by it.” Invasion of the Body Snatchers is another, as is one of my favourite Doctor Who serials, The Horror of Fang Rock (where, as here, the isolation is prolonged by a lingering thick fog).

It’s certainly a suspenseful read, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been filmed (it was optioned, apparently), because it could surely be made on a reasonable budget. (Special effects: one glowing blue sphere.) It perhaps has less of the weird feeling I might have liked—I’d have preferred more of what seems to be promised by the German translation of the book, titled Die Unheimlichen (“The Uncanny Ones”). This is far more of an adventure/disaster tale (and the cast of flawed characters, each with their cross to bear, recalls the set-up to so many 70s disaster movies), and a successful one, at that. I’d definitely like to read more by Christopher. I’ve been meaning to read The Tripods since around the end of the 1970s…

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.