FIGURED THIS WOULD INTEREST MANY OF MY READERS:

After watching the film of Children of Men*, I didn’t go back to P.D. James’s originating novel, which I’ve never read, but farther back, to Brian Aldiss’s Greybeard, first published in 1964, a novel I last read somewhere between ten and fifteen years ago.

I went back to Greybeard because other than remembering that it is about a future Earth where humans are infertile, I had no memory of its incidents or characters, only a vague recollection of the book’s tone and affect, which I remembered as being like a soft, pastoral requiem — immensely lyrical, unbearably and unrelievedly sad.

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