You managed to see a film before me! This is on my must watch list though.

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My local Showcase isn't very good, but it does get in quick with SF films. It had 'Pitch Black' the day it came out for instance. I think the bloke who orders the films is an SF fan.

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You might like to wait until next week?

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Ah, OK, if you want to see it too

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I love Children of Men, it is far and away her best book (now where is my copy...?). I knew there was a film due, but I didn't know it was Alfonso Cuaron directing, and now I'm extremely excited about seeing it, great stuff!

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Really? I have read and enjoyed books by PD James but I thought this one sounded like a religious allegory, so I avoided it. Anyway, regardless of my preconceived ideas, I loved the film.

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Gary K. Wolfe, he say:

Unlike Compton [in Nomansland] and Aldiss [in Greybeard], however, P.D. James doesn't offer any plausible explanation for her sterility plague in The Children of Men; she simply makes vague reference to a 1991 report on declining European birthrates, and almost suggests divine intervention by indicating that even sperm frozen before the catastrophe suddenly loses its potency. Her novel is set in the same 21st century decade as Aldiss's, and shares with Greybeard the premise that a declining population would give rise to fascist governments. But while Aldiss's novel turns this premise into one of SF's more disturbing post-catastrophe pastorals, James seems less certain of her direction.

This uncertainty is reflected in her narrative technique, which alternates between the diary entries of Theo Faron, an Oxford professor of Victorian history and cousin of the dictatorial "Warden of England", Xan Lypiatt; and third-person chapters which read much more like a P.D. James mystery, with convincing dialogue and James's characteristically evocative sense of place. The diary chapters give her the opportunity to fill in loads of exposition, while the narrative chapters detail an increasingly unconvincing underground-vs-the-fascists plot, involving a group of youthful resisters calling themselves the Five Fishes and sounding like nothing so much as the White Rose of Nazi Germany. The resiters persuade Faron to talk to his cousin the Warden about various abuses of power, as though anyone thinks that would do any good, and as a result he ends up on the lam with them, culminating in a far too contrived and symbolic climax which asks us to believe, among other things, that dictators with virtually limitless powers take time off to personally participate in backwoods manhunts. James knows how to generate this excitement, and her vivid handling of violence--always startling in the civilized contexts of her mysteries--gives the novel an edge that belies its earlier self-consciously elegaic tone. But the logic of character and situation that makes those mysteries work well doesn't sustain the speculative social aspects of The Children of Men, and if you try to read it as SF you may come away thinking it's something of a mess.

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Yeah, thanks. All I can say without spoilers is that Cuaron has significantly improved on this plot IMHO and I didn't find plausibility or religiosity to be issues.

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The only thing I know about the new plot is that it's the women who are infertile, not the men. Which isn't obviously an improvement. But hopefully I'll get to the cinema sometime this week.

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No, it's the only bad change. Perhaps it was the only way they could get the money.

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Thinking about this again, because altariel was talking about the film... I wouldn't have noticed the reference to women being identified as the infertile ones if you hadn't mentioned it here, as it was a single throwaway line. I'm slightly surprised that it was made clear, as I'd have thought that if they knew that much they'd be closer to working out the cause of the infertility and thus have some idea of what might be done. But if it were known that men were source of the infertility, then I'd have thought there'd be a lot more interest in tracking down the child's father, because he'd be the immune one. The baby would still have enormous significance, both because she existed and because her genes might indicate something about her father, but Kee wouldn't be so important, as presumably the father might impregnate any woman.

And I can't remember whether we talked about this online, though I know you did say that you liked Theo not becoming an action hero: as well as the fact that he never picked up a gun, even when there was a chance, I really liked the fact that the one skill he had which was crucial was that he knew how to deliver a baby, because he was a father who remembered his own son's birth.

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I've read her mysteries and enjoyed them enough to keep on reading them, but this seemed like a writer trying to step out of her safety zone. I thought the atmosphere of the book was superb, melancholic. She might well have intended religious allegory, but I just read the social commentary. I don't read enough 'proper' SF to know whether it succeeds or fails on that score, but I do like a good dystopia.

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Yeah, I think SF readers tend to have perspectives for criticism (see coalescent's quoted review) which are more important to us than they are to other readers. I applaud her taking the risk, though.

Actually - this reminds me a bit of that tension in fandom - we want people to write in our fandom, but we can't help but criticise them when they do. And by 'we' I mean 'not actually you and me'.

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One of the problems is that "literary" reviewers fall over themselves to praise sf written by outsiders, all the while reassuring themselves that it's not *really* sf because it's written by People We Approve Of. And they usually come out with the most outrageous statements about how novel the work is and how nobody has ever done anything like this before, when in fact it's been done many times before in the sf field, and often done better. It does tend to make people within sf tetchy. That happened with Children of Men -- I thought that it was a good book, but it was neither new nor as good as the work already done within the field, and yet it was being praised as "never been done before" and "stunningly good" by the literati. That then leads to a backlash within sf against the book, which isn't fair, but is a fairly normal human reaction. At least PD James didn't do an Atwood over it, so far as I'm aware.

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in what sense, "do an Atwood"?

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"Oryx and Crake is not science fiction. Science fiction is when you have chemicals and rockets." -- Margaret Atwood.

I took that quote from the second page of this article, which goes into a little more detail about Atwood's attempts to redefine sf as "that which I do not write":

http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Atwood.pdf

It's a pdf, but if you google on "atwood rockets" it's one of the first results that comes up, and Google has a button to let you read it in html if necessary.

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I can sort of see why she wouldn't want to be pigeonholed into any genre, not just sf. After all, Pratchett did complain he could talk about politics, war, sexual equality "but put in one lousy dragon and they call you a fantasy writer".

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The trouble is, Atwood doesn't say, "I don't write sf", she says "I don't write that awful sf nonsense", and she has a long history of doing so. She's a classic example of the attitude that provoked this:

'SF's no good!' they bellow till we're deaf;
And if it's good? Why then, it's not SF.

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Possibly of interest.

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She has backed down from that sort of stance. See here:

If you're writing about the future and you aren't doing forecast journalism, you'll probably be writing something people will call either science fiction or speculative fiction. I like to make a distinction between science fiction proper and speculative fiction. For me, the science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can't yet do, such as going through a wormhole in space to another universe; and speculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand, such as DNA identification and credit cards, and that takes place on Planet Earth. But the terms are fluid. Some use speculative fiction as an umbrella covering science fiction and all its hyphenated forms - science fiction fantasy, and so forth - and others choose the reverse.

I have written two works of science fiction or, if you prefer, speculative fiction: The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake.

(Also.)

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Yes, I remember that happening with 'Time's Arrow' which was a straight rip-off of Kurt Vonnegut. Then, as you say, you feel tetchy before you even read it.

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Yeah, I think SF readers tend to have perspectives for criticism (see coalescent's quoted review) which are more important to us than they are to other readers.

I don't think the suggestion that having a dictator personally participating in a manhunt offends suspension of disbelief is a criticism that applies only to sf. I think Wolfe's review suggest that it's a bad novel in part because it's bad sf, certainly, but that that's not the only reason.

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But, somehow, when non-SF writers are writing 'in the future' the discipline of plausibility, which is important in SF I think, goes out the window.

Coincidentally that issue - the big boss going out on patrol - was the first scene I saw of Babylon 5, and it sort of put me off right away, perhaps quite unfairly.

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Oooh, sounds interesting, will watch out for it (when it eventually gets to my little corner of the world). Thanks :)

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I hope it's going to do quite well at the box office, in which case it will go round the cinemas

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I agree with all that you've written, and enjoyed much of the movie, but the portrayal of Kee really had me squirming in my seat. She's infantilised throughout -- she lacks agency, talks in a childlike pinyin, is posed as virgin mary in a stable, is saved by the straight white guy over and over. She's a combination of stereotypes -- earth mother and noble savage, notably. I'm not the best at critiques of race portrayal, but this movie left me feeling uncomfortable.

And despite that, I love that it's one of the refugees that is fertile, I hated that it's "women's infertility", I wished there was more of a look at how classism would stratify -- a brief look at the uppers doesn't really explore it.

I confess, too, that I was hoping the baby would die of the flu or some other thing -- that we would have to deal with a future with hope snatched away, chasing it again like some holy grail among all the other myths and legends and dreams come to life in the world drawn in the movie.

I also found myself wavering about the child being female. On the one hand, it was interesting to see that everyone had assumed it would be male, over and over, and to have their assumptions foiled. But on the other ... can you imagine the life of that girl? What wars would be fought over her presumed fertility?

From a feminist perspective, the fact that it was women's fertility that was the problem made the "avoiding fertility tests is illegal" all the more sinister, but also made the freedoms that women still seemed to have in that world less believable.

And last but not least -- the borders have been closed for eight years, and they're still finding *that many* illegal immigrants, every day? I expected mines in the water off the refugee camp, in such an environment.

So, I enjoyed it, but so many things also triggered "but..." that I was also disappointed. Geez I'm hard to please.

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It is a shame it's always about the white man. I just take that for granted these days, though I shouldn't. Even 'the killing fields' was about the white man, and you are right that Kee is the least well developed character, though I thought the actress did a good job.

One issue with the book for me was that one child is not enough, not even significant. She would only be significant as a sign that the pollution or disease, or whatever, is wearing off. So unless there are many more of them to come, she won't make any difference at all.

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That's true -- what a single girl symbolises is hope, though. Because she can herself get pregnant and have children, potentially to different fathers, and...

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I thought the fact that one woman could become pregnant signified that others might do it too - and Kee herself was clearly young enough to do it again. Presumably the people at the Human Project would do tests to try to discover whether there was some factor that made her resistant to whatever it was that caused the infertility, and whether it was possible to reproduce it. It's probably significant that she comes from outside the mainstream of society, suggesting that it needs to embrace the immigrants rather than persecute them in order to renew itself.

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She's infantilised throughout

I wondered whether a society with no new children would try to keep its yonger members infantilised as long as possible - cf "Baby Diego". But that seemed more likely within the privileged classes than the illegals.

I thought the oddest thing was that people weren't falling over themselves to grab the baby at the end. They all gaze at her in awe, then the fighting resumes and everyone seems to forget about her, so it's easy for Theo and Kee to get away.

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Yes, I think people would grab and inadvertently kill the baby in real life. That bit was almost mystical/religious.

BTW I think the novel explored the infantilisation of pets for example, and adults having dolls.

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It was clear in the film that many people were quite obsessive about pets (presumably the infertility was just a human thing), though I don't remember dolls; that would make sense, though.

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She's infantilised throughout -- she lacks agency, talks in a childlike pinyin, is posed as virgin mary in a stable, is saved by the straight white guy over and over.

There is definitely some truth in this but I think there is also an argument that she deliberately signs her agency over to Theo. It is she who defies the Fishers: first by revealing her pregnancy and then by escaping from them. Now I'm sure the idea of surrendering volition to a man is equally problematic but this is something different to being straightforwardly passive.

As for being the virgin Mary, the film poses her that way and then immediately undercuts it. She jokes she is a virgin and for a split second Theo buys it because he has bought into the imagery as much as any viewer. Then he realises and she reveals that she has no idea who the father might be out of her many partners. This is the opposite of a chaste, holy figure.

The whole thing about explicitly stating that it is women that are infertile is baffling though, particularly since it is not in the source material.

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I tend to enjoy science fiction written by non-sf writers because it can address the interesting sf-y ideas without being bogged down by the weight of previous interpretations of that idea (which, of course, I haven't read). However, whilst I enjoyed Children of Men, I felt it fell outside PD James' comfort zone. I might be misremembering (it's a long time since I read it) but I thought she felt the need to wrap things up too tidily and hopefully at the end, in the manner of detective over the dining table.

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Perhaps that weight of genre history is what stops more people reading SF? It's interesting if she wrote SF with detective-genre structure.

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Saw it this evening - excellent film. Didn't feel like SF to me, though...the references were so very close to home. Probably just my SF-ignorance!

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it wasn't so far from reality was it?

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Frighteningly, no. I was struck by the sequence at Bexhill that was shot as news footage - very powerful.

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Glad you liked the film.
When I read the book years ago I was riveted. It was so dark. At the time I commented to friends and family that this story would make an excellent English film or telefilm. I was surprised someone hadn't snapped up the story to make into a film or series back in the 90s!
I thought" "at last!", but upon reading a detailed synopsis of the story on the net, I was very disappointed. There have been movie trailers playing on Australian television as well (it's opening here in another week). It's hard to accept someone else's vision or altered plot when you've read a story that has captivated the imagination so vividly. For one, Julian is a part-black British woman, and the pregnant woman's character isn't all that important or developed - it's what she and her unborn child represent that is the main function of her character in the plot.
Theo was also an ex-university lecturer with unremarkable qualities - that's what made his character all the more remarkable as he rose to the occasion. The relation between him and his cousin, the Warden was also an interesting paradigm. The good and the evil in the same family - much like the good and evil in humanity and in all of us.
I think P.D. James was more of an allegory than scientifically credible Sci Fi. It was a statement about several things. The refugees, sorry, the Sojourners (I'm being a purist) are covered in the story and I can't for the life of me understand why the script writers felt it appropriate to include terrorism, nuclear was and Islamic uprisings in the storyline. Like, "HUH?!".
Sounds to me as if P.D. James' novel has been garrotted (another thing - it was a chilling scene in the book when Julian was garrotted in a supposedly "safe" house, as the crooks were closing in towards the end - to be shot by bandits on step-throughs in the film just sounds anti-climactic....perhaps garrotting is too gruesome an end to be portraying on the screen for our American friends - shades of what's been happened in Iraq, perhaps?)...
Sounds to me as if the film pulls alot of punches - what about the mass drownings, or "Quietus", that are revealed to us in the book? The idea of officially sanctioned suicide in such a desperate way (as opposed to merely branding a cyanide pill with the name and leaving it at that) whilst strangers watch the raft from the shore is just gruesome.
With the threat of global warming, caused by atmospheric pollution not being plausible to people only a few generations ago, surely a seemingly irreversible mass infertility event seems implausible to us now, but could be possible in the future due to chemical pollution?
I think it was a good premise and allowed Ms. James to concoct a wonderfully dark tale about humanity without hope and the tenacity of a few who are unwilling to accept it.
Through the book I could imagine the deafening silence of the countryside and the danger that lurks after dark as the main characters drive through the night to an isolated safe house. I could also imagine the pampered Omegas, and the slave-like Sojourners.
Lastly, I will go to see the film. I will take it on its merits. The best films in my opinion are those that are truly original, as adaptions of novels tend to disappoint me with their add-ins and omissions. I wish it were different, but I know why people say "the book is better", because the images in our minds are often more powerful as we feel them, whereas someone else's aesthetic, detached from our own imagination is merely observed on a cinema screen.
Then again, some people either can't, won't or don't have the time to read and cinema is gunna be as good as it gets for them. At least with a book, if it doesn't agree with you, you don't have to sit through the whole bloody screening, and you can give it to a someone else, donate it to a second hand book shop or use it as a draught excluder. Try doing that with your $10 movie ticket!

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Thanks for this detailed analysis. I didn't know that Quietus was self-drowning, and I agree, that's much more horrible than a capsule.

the deafening silence of the countryside and the danger that lurks after dark as the main characters drive through the night to an isolated safe house

I love this description: it has literally made the little hairs bristle on my neck

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I thought it was knockout. A little unsteady for perhaps the first forty minutes, and then it was - wow.

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