Greybeard, by Brian Aldiss
Second paragraph of third chapter:In the sharp winter's air, their breath steamed behind them. The dinghy went first, followed by Jeff Pitt rowing his little boat, with two sheep in a net lying against his tattered backside. Their progress was slow; Pitt's pride in his rowing was greater than his ability
I am a big fan of the late great Brian Aldiss, and this was the best-known book of his that I had not already read. (If you're interested, LibraryThing and Goodreads agree that the Helliconia trilogy, Hothouse and Non-Stop outrank it.) 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. You can get it here.
This was my top unread sf book, and my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on those piles respectively are The Consuming Fire, by John Scalzi, and City of Blades, by Robert Jackson Bennett.
I am a big fan of the late great Brian Aldiss, and this was the best-known book of his that I had not already read. (If you're interested, LibraryThing and Goodreads agree that the Helliconia trilogy, Hothouse and Non-Stop outrank it.) 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. You can get it here.
This was my top unread sf book, and my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on those piles respectively are The Consuming Fire, by John Scalzi, and City of Blades, by Robert Jackson Bennett.