Greybeard was published by Faber and Faber in 1964. It is Aldiss’s most restrained and, in some ways, most accomplished novel — a story of the end of humanity told not with explosions or monsters but with the quiet accumulation of absence. Atmospheric nuclear testing in the 1980s has irradiated the upper atmosphere, rendering all mammals — not just humans — sterile. No children have been born for over fifty years. The youngest people on Earth are in their fifties. The population is declining irreversibly, and the infrastructure of civilization — roads, buildings, governments, institutions — is crumbling for lack of people to maintain it.
Algernon “Greybeard” Timberlane and his wife Martha travel down the Thames from Oxford toward the coast, through a landscape that Aldiss describes with pastoral beauty. The fields are reverting to forest. Deer graze in abandoned towns. The Thames, no longer dredged or managed, is silting up and flooding its banks. The England that Greybeard moves through is becoming something it has not been since before the Roman invasion: a wild country, beautiful and indifferent.
The novel alternates between the present journey and flashbacks to the decades of decline: the government’s desperate attempts to find a cure, the social breakdown as hope faded, the rise of cults and charlatans promising fertility. Aldiss’s England is recognizably English even in collapse — people maintain their gardens, observe social niceties, and complain about the weather — and the contrast between the ordinariness of the characters and the enormity of their situation gives the novel its peculiar, devastating power.
Collecting Greybeard
First edition (Faber and Faber, London, 1964): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $200–$500
- Very good/very good: $80–$200