Winter of the world: Greybeard (1964) by Brian Aldiss

A science fictional processing of personal pain

In his sombre, powerful novel Greybeard, Brian Aldiss (1925 - 2017) imagines a world in which a nuclear accident in orbit has sterilised the human population. Set in the Thames Valley in southern England, the story unfolds decades after the “accident of 1981”. With no children having been born for many years, a dwindling population of elderly people eke out a basic living in the ruins of civilization. Led by the pragmatic Algy Timberlane - the “greybeard” of the title - a small group of wanderers journeys down the Thames by boat in search of purpose.

Originally published in 1964, Greybeard is Aldiss’ unique take on the British catastrophe novel. It presents a distinctive view of disaster, one characterised not by a sudden cataclysm, but by a slow, mournful descent into likely extinction. With subtlety and restraint, Aldiss depicts a world brought low as much by heartbreak and hopelessness as by the collapse of institutions. Influenced by some difficult experiences the writer went through, Greybeard is a reflection on the absence of children, the effects of disaster on the human and natural worlds, and our need to seek meaning and purpose in our lives.

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The personal resonance for Aldiss

By the early 1960s, Aldiss’ career as a science fiction writer was beginning to take off, following the success of his novels Non-Stop (1958) and Hothouse (1962). His personal life, however, was a different story. In 1959, Aldiss’ marriage was beginning to fall apart and his wife took their two children to live on the Isle of Wight. The writer was “bereft” at this turn of events, and began Greybeard largely as a means to process his feelings about it - imagining a world completely without children. 

In this way, this is a science fiction novel built on a personal sadness, which explains its sombre tone. At the time, Aldiss was concerned that the book would be too miserable to be a success, but realised that it could resonate with others who had experienced traumas like his own.

After the accident

Aldiss’ imagined future is shaped by the “accident of 1981”. At that time, numerous atomic weapons were detonated in Earth’s orbit. These disrupted the Van Allen radiation belt, otherwise held in check by Earth’s magnetosphere, and twice bathed the planet in ionising radiation. Mass short-term illness was the immediate result, but it gradually became clear that there was a horrifying long-term effect: global human sterility.

Aldiss describes starkly the effect of this:

“The earth renewed itself; only men grew older and were not replenished. The trees grew taller, the rookeries noisier, the graveyards fuller, the streets more silent.”

Greybeard begins in 2029, nearly five decades after the “accident of 1981”. Algernon Timberlane is in his mid-50s, and among the youngest people on Earth. Together with his wife Martha, he lives in the (fictional) English village of Sparcot. Without a government, proper amenities, or a younger generation to support them, a small community of older people are reduced to a basic existence. Algy, known as “Greybeard”, has long planned to leave the village, and a new impending disaster triggers his exodus, together with Martha and a few other aging travelers.

Greybeard’s aim is to reach the sea, which he has come to view as a source of hope and possible contact with the outside world. Traveling by boat down the Thames, Greybeard’s group encounters various strange communities, each struggling in their own ways with the reality of a world apparently without a future. Aldiss alternates the main narrative with flashbacks to the earlier parts of Algy’s life, including his own unhappy childhood.

Greybeard and the catastrophe novel

Greybeard fits within the tradition of the British catastrophe novel, alongside John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956), and J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962). One of Aldiss’ best-known contributions as a science fiction critic was his coining of the term “cosy catastrophe”, particularly in relation to Wyndham’s work. That label could arguably be applied to Aldiss’ own novel. Algy and Martha do suffer in their travels, but not unbearably so, and in a world of the old there are few people with the energy to threaten the characters with violence.

The novel also has a significant ecological angle. Aldiss had read Rachel Carson’s landmark environmental book Silent Spring (1962) and found it to be “extraordinary, beautiful, and chastening.” Right from its opening, Greybeard frequently remarks on the dramatic ecological changes since humans became sterile. Many species of birds, fish, and small mammals have grown rapidly in number, upending the balance of life. This fierce abundance recalls the prolific growth of plants in both Non-Stop and Hothouse, and connects the novel with works like Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976) by Kate Wilhelm.

Some of Aldiss’ most beautiful prose comes when Greybeard reflects on the coinciding decline of humans and the flourishing of the natural world. “The world would go on”, he thinks at one point, “man might die, but the earth still yielded up its abundance.”

The local angle

Greybeard is strongly rooted in real locations that Aldiss knew well. Although the novel opens in the fictional village of Sparcot, the other settings include Eynsham, Oxford city centre with its decaying colleges, the industrial suburb of Cowley, and the area around Little Wittenham in south Oxfordshire. 

Aldiss imagines how the nuclear catastrophe and dwindling population might affect the physical environment of the Thames Valley. In reality Oxford is prone to river and groundwater flooding, and in Greybeard parts of the city are submerged due to the abandonment of flood defences. Similarly, towards the end of the novel the wanderers encounter two islands in the swollen Thames. These are actually Wittenham Clumps, two notable hills turned into islands by the rising waters.

While Greybeard and his group are in Oxford, Aldiss references the city’s “town and gown” conflicts, and satirises the tradition-bound ways of the university, vainly trying to cling to an old and dying world.

Desolation and exhilaration

As the 1960s wore on, Aldiss would become associated with the New Wave science fiction movement, albeit in a somewhat uneasy way. For example, he was instrumental in securing a grant from the Arts Council which helped New Worlds magazine to survive for a few more years, during its experimental period under the editorship of Michael Moorcock. 

In its interrogation of Algy’s state of mind, Greybeard connects with J. G. Ballard’s view that SF writers should explore “inner space”, which was so influential on the New Wave. Algy experiences complex and mixed emotions inspired by the changing world around him. At one point, he feels a sense of “exhilaration” at the prospect of one day becoming the last living human being. 

Later, he decides to be “brutally frank” and speaks of some benefits he sees in the post-disaster world. “For all that everyone has lost since the terrible Accident back in 1981”, he says, “one thing at least we have gained - there is no longer any need for the hypocrisies and shams of civilisation; we can be our natural selves.” These are quite Ballardian sentiments, which echo the protagonist of The Drowned World, who essentially revels in the descent of a flooded London into apocalyptic murk.

The legacy of Greybeard

The elephant in the room where Greybeard is concerned is that there is a much better known novel - and its film adaptation - exploring a very similar theme. In 1992, P. D. James published her novel The Children of Men, which was adapted to film in 2006 by Alfonso Cuáron. Adam Roberts has written that James “committed nothing short of larceny on Aldiss’ (much better) novel and then failed to make anything much of its swag.”

Greybeard deserves better. Lauded by the SFE as “perhaps Aldiss’ finest single SF novel”, it is a beautifully written and powerful piece of work, processing personal pain in a way that only science fiction can.

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• In December 2013, Aldiss appeared on World Book Club on the BBC World Service, in an episode dedicated to Greybeard.
  
• In the UK, both Greybeard and The Children of Men were published by Faber and Faber; the publisher has since retreated from science fiction publishing.