Brian W. Aldiss is a well-known name in the world of SF. I've been late to the party, in a manner of speaking, as my first Aldiss book was 'Non-Stop' (my review, read in 2018, only 60 years after its first publication), which wasn't free of flaws, but still a recommended read.

I had also bought 'Greybeard' at the time (2017), during the annual New Year's sales of the since a few years defunct bookshop The Sterling Bookshop (Brussels, Belgium), but never got round to reading it. Circumstances have to be favourable, and the last few years, my TBR-pile has been growing with French/Francophone books.

In my desire to reduce said pile and for the sake of variety looking for a "quick read", 'Greybeard' was an easy choice. And it is in a way an easy read. Aldiss's style is not of the exquisite kind of, say, an Olaf Stapledon, even if he too (Aldiss) tries to throw in some philosophical food for thought in his stories.

'Greybeard' was published in 1964 and projects a time in 1981 when nuclear tests in space would have an enormous and catastrophic impact (= the Accident) on Earth: people would be sterile and life would go extinct. Only, yes, people were sterile (or were they all?), but life continued to exist, albeit in reduced quantities. And there would be reindeer. Yes, I didn't really flinch at that, to be honest. But yes, reindeer.

So, no new children born and the youngest people would be 50+ of age. Others would thus be much older. And so, civilisation or mankind continued its way. There would of course be tribe-forming here and there, people trying to set up a new type of civilisation or continue as before. Many town and cities would be deserted or as good as. Of course, religion would play a vital role (again), people in general would still be mischievous, deceiving for their own profit.

In this story, we follow a "young" couple in chapters that switch back-and-forth between past, future and present. This is shown in the respective titles, but you have to be aware of it, otherwise you'll feel a little lost. And I was, to be honest. Not really because of the alternating chapters, rather because there are gaps here as well.

Gaps as in events following each other without proper explanation or introduction. Names appearing without proper explanation, it's up to the reader to "see" who's who, and why these people turn up. It's quite disjointed, I found. Furthermore, acronyms not explained, especially for terms/organisations/... that were well-known back then, but no longer exist today. That's also a problem today, authors (or publishers?) thinking all books will be read the same year or a few years after publication. Eh, no, as my TBR-pile has books I've bought 15-20 years ago, still haven't found the time to read them. Not to mention that publishers could at least try to add some explanatory notes when reissuing books several decades or centuries after initial publication.

While story-wise very difficult to follow and "see" what's going on (i.e. it's disjointed), how it's all related (because you/the reader have to fill in the gaps), 'Greybeard' is interesting food for thought theme/idea-wise, and shows that it's doesn't take much for mankind's stupidity to be the ruin of all. Nuclear disasters (as we had the last few decades, even without a war), deceiving others for one's own profit (be it politically, religiously, ...), etc. Or earlier this week (18-19/07/2024): Crowdstrike issuing an update that caused enormous problems around the world: flights cancelled, hospitals ceasing operations, companies not able to work, ... As the world has gone and still is going more and more digital, there will be more "strikes" like this in the future. It doesn't take much to cause a blackout on global scale.

The ending is also weird, not really "all's well that ends well", because it's unclear why Greybeard and his wife Martha did what they did and what happened to the rest of the world and how it sort of recovered from the Accident.

From my experience, when reading such books, I'd say the French author Pierre Bordage does a far better job at describing what could happen, how man would treat his fellow human being when the world gets into trouble. But with a silver lining, however.

More detailed reviews: here, here. ( )

This was the next book in the SF Masterwork series published in 1964. Brian Aldiss was a prolific author of mainly science fiction novels as well as a critic and editor of science fiction stories. He was an English author and particularly with Greybeard follows in the tradition of other English authors of the genre: H G Wells and John Wyndham in that his books are generally well written and avoid super-hero characters. Greybeard is a dystopian novel and is set in the English home counties which lends itself to a more parochial environment.

Greybeard is 56 years old and is carrying out sentry duty around the lands of Sparscot a small community somewhere near Oxford in England. He and his wife are the youngest people in a community struggling for survival after the Accident. In the late 1960's huge atomic bombs had been tested in the earths upper atmosphere which had resulted in a shower of radiation material which caused sickness and death on all parts of the globe and affected the reproductive organs of all human beings and larger animals. There had been no children born for over 50 years. Sparscot is run as a fiefdom by a local strongman and Greybeard has lived there for 15 years, but the warlord is losing his grip and Greybeard has been preparing a boat to take him and his wife down the river Thames to the communities that are said to be surviving along the coast. The dwindling population and gradual sinking of the land has left much of the countryside battling against rising water levels. Massive lakes have formed and the natural world has quickly started to seize back control. Rodents and small mammals who have been largely unaffected have become predators of an ageing human population. There are rumours of goblins living in the woods.................

Aldiss takes the theme of an ageing population with no hope for future generations. People who have survived the aftermath of the accident and who have not succumbed to melancholia continue to fight for their lives. Religious communities have sprung up and folklore and magic is increasingly playing a role in the lives of the survivors, rumours of children being born persist.

A world of wrinkly old people slowly losing their grip on day to day life maybe a nightmare for some people and I look around at some of my friends and I can appreciate that. Aldiss takes these fears and weaves them into a story where petty squabbles and reluctance to work for the good of the community take precedence. The strength of this novel is the creation of a world, where human beings are slowly sinking into a quagmire that they have created. In many ways it seems all too believable and the gloom and melancholic atmosphere was felt particularly keenly by this older reader. It does not work so well as a road movie novel, because Greybeard hardly gets going in his bid to reach the coast. 4 stars for readers over the age of sixty. ( )

incredibly boooooring! ( )

Goed geschreven en goed uitgewerkt relaas van
het leven na een nucleaire catastrofe die het menselijke ras onvruchtbaar maakt. Goeie setting, schone karakters. Niets dat je omverblaast, maar steeds aangenaam en prettige spanningsboog. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3610657.html

I wish I'd read it before P.D. James' The Children of Men, which took the same core concept in a slightly different direction. Indeed, The Children of Men has such strong similarities - humanity stopped reproducing 25 years ago, our protagonists undergo a weary odyssey to Oxford - that it's impossible to accept that she hadn't read this first.

It's a quiet, understated, very pessimistic book, written in 1964 when Aldiss was only in his thirties (but had just gone through a divorce and the Cuban Missile Crisis). Stoats are apparently a big problem in the late 2020s. The human race ends with a whimper rather than a bang. There is a lot of Aldissian stuff here, and you certainly couldn't mistake the writing style for anyone else's. But I didn't in the end feel that it was one of his more memorable books; I guess for its time, it caught the Zeitgeist well, but it has now been overtaken by events, and by P.D. James. ( )