The Children of Men

What Hacker News says

1. groosOct 2026
   The term 'Voluntary Exit Offer' reminds me of the suicide drug Quietus in P.D. James' Children of Men, which the government offers to people who no longer wish to live.
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2. keiferskiOct 2023
   I find that a lot of science fiction tends to project the author's worldview into the future and then comes up with a bunch of magic to explain how it'll inevitably happen. I haven't read any of Banks but based on the article, it pretty much sounds like the same thing on steroids. As (I think) William Gibson said, sci-fi is about the present, not the future.

   Can anyone recommend sci-fi that doesn't do this, but instead tries to predict the future/near future and present a realistic vision of things, even if it's not precisely what the author hopes would happen? The closest thing I can think of is Children of Men, which is unfortunately a bit too dystopian for me.

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3. keiferskiOct 2023
   I'm looking for this kind of book: an author studies current trends, technology, culture, religion, history, etc. deeply, not shallowly. They study how the Printing Press/Industrial Revolution/computer/Internet/etc. changed society, culture, and politics.

   Then the author uses this knowledge to write a story about how the world will be in 2050, 2100, or 2500. Sci-fi that is merely fantasy with a veneer of spaceships and robots isn't what I'm looking for.

   I didn't say anything about it being optimistic or pessimistic, just that most writers seem to inject their personal politics into their writing, which is a real distraction from the worldbuilding. Children of Men is particularly pessimistic, and I think anyone reading it would agree.

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4. e12eSep 2019
   > A book from a very popular author (no name because spoiler)

   The author's name is a spoiler? Are you talking about P. D. James' The Children of Men?

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5. apocalypstyxDec 2016
   Fiction:

   Inherent Vice --- Thomas Pynchon

   The Great and Secret Show --- Clive Barker

   Jurassic Park --- Michael Crichton

   The Mothman Prophecies --- John A. Keel (1)

   The Wind in the Willows --- Kenneth Grahame

   Ender's Game --- Orson Scott Card

   All Quiet on the Western Front --- Erich Maria Remarque

   The Drought --- J. G. Ballard

   The Dead Father's Club --- Matt Harris

   Children of Men --- P. D. James

   The Islanders --- Pascal Garnier

   Silence of the Lambs --- Thomas Harris

   Inherit the Wind --- Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee

   The Butt --- Will Self

   Inside Outside --- Philip Jose Farmer

   The Panda Theory --- Pascal Garnier

   Fanshaw --- Nathaniel Hawthorne

   The Scarlet Letter --- Nathaniel Hawthorne

   This Census-Taker --- China Mieville

   The House of the Seven Gables --- Nathaniel Hawthorne

   The A26 --- Pascal Garnier

   The Blithedale Romance --- Nathaniel Hawthorne

   The Weird --- Edited by Jeff VanderMeer & Ann VanderMeer (2)

   Front Seat Passenger --- Pascal Garnier

   Non-Fiction:

   The Wealth of Networks --- Yochai Benkler

   Field Notes from A Catastrophe --- Elizabeth Kolbert

   What Ever Happened to Modernism? --- Gabriel Josipovici

   Escape Velocity --- Mark Dery

   What We See When We Read --- Peter Mendelsund

   (1) Author described as non-fiction, publisher hedged bets and labelled in as such, supposedly.

   (2) If only this book could be picked by Subterranean or Centipede press so it'd be a better printed and bound book than Tor ever seems to want to do.

   I always recommend Ballard, even when not wanted. Relevant quote:

      A story by J. G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who don't
      think. One begins with characters who regard the physical universe
      as a mysterious and arbitrary place, and who would not dream of
      trying to understand its actual laws. Furthermore, in order to be
      the protagonist of a J.G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a
      very minor character therein, you must have cut yourself off from
      the entire body of scientific education. In this way, when the world
      disaster — be it wind or water — comes upon you, you are under
      absolutely no obligation to do anything about it but sit and worship
      it. Even more further, some force has acted to remove from the face
      of the world all people who might impose good sense or rational
      behavior on you, so that the disaster proceeds unchecked and unopposed
      except by the almost inevitable thumb-rule engineer type who for
      his individual comfort builds a huge pyramid (without huge footings)
      to resist high winds, or trains a herd of alligators and renegade
      divers to help him out in dealing with deep water.  Algis Budrys,
      Galaxy magazine (December 1966)
   
   

   I'd recommend Pascal Garnier for anyone who likes sickly dark humor + surrealism + noir + a kind of Ballardian-air. Also Pynchon. Hawthorne might be the stand-out this year, in the sense of his works' subtle, implicit ability to question the authorial mode, the nature of the text itself, and the instability of it.

   In non-fiction I'd recommend Dery's Escape Velocity; It's from the 90s but still deals too presciently with many of the issues around the near-religification of modern electronic technology. And Josipovici if you lean toward depressive jolts of existential anxiety (it deals mostly with the arts, but I think there's a broader life applicability).

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6. akbarnamaJul 2016
   I am Malala by Christina Lamb and Malala Yousafzai

   The Children of Men by P D James

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