Behold the Man
Nebula winner and the New Wave's most notorious provocation: time-travel paradox as theology, handled with a seriousness that outlasted the scandal.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Greybeard about?
Radiation from orbital weapons tests has sterilised humanity; the youngest people alive are in their fifties, England has crumbled into superstitious fiefdoms along a wild Thames, and Algy 'Greybeard' Timberlane and his wife Martha boat downstream through the species' long retirement. Aldiss alternates the river journey with flashbacks through the collapse, and salts the twilight with rumours — gnomes in the woods, children glimpsed at a distance — that may be senility, hucksterism or hope. The tenderest of all catastrophe novels: less about extinction than about what a marriage is for.
Why it matters
Aldiss's mid-career masterpiece and the obvious (acknowledged or not) forerunner of P. D. James's The Children of Men and its film.
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