Today I read The Children of Men by P. D. James. This is fiction. It is, I think, mainstream fiction rather than science fiction. I’ve read science fiction my whole life, so I read it thinking about the world-building and how it hung together. I suspect that is not the way you’re supposed to read mainstream fiction.
The story is set in a world where the entire male half of the human race has been completely sterile for twenty-five years, starting in late 1995 with the book starting in early 2021. Early on it describes the realization that not only were all human males sterile, but also all stored sperm in sperm banks had become nonviable as well. This discovery cast the “pall of superstitious awe, of witchcraft, of divine intervention.”
Well, yeah. What else could it be but something supernatural that could cause about three billion males to simultaneously become sterile and *also* frozen sperm that were locked away from outside influence to likewise be affected? This bothered me.
I think that, as the sterility plague manifested itself insidiously, the sperm in sperm banks would have been slowly used up, the oldest being used first, or discarded because it was thought that it might become damaged by being kept frozen a long time (freezer burn, perhaps). But no one would have been worried because new deposits were being made. It was only when the situation was already beyond retrieval that they realized that they’d used up all the old, viable sperm and none of the newer stuff was viable. Thus, there need be nothing supernatural about the problem, even if people thought there was.
Oh, well, maybe that’s exactly what did happen, but the unreliable narrator doesn’t know it, so the situation seems supernatural to him. I decided that was what had really happened and I went on from there.
Then, all the relatively young men and women in England are required to come in for fertility tests every six months. Not all of them, actually. Those less than physically perfect — a man who had a mild case of epilepsy in childhood, a woman with a deformed hand — were not required to submit to this.
First, this seems pretty pointless, particularly with respect to the women. Apparently there was no concern about their fertility; they were as fertile as ever. The problem was with the men, so I don’t see any point testing the women. I guess they were making an inventory of “acceptable” women so if any man did turn up fertile, all the acceptable women within a hundred miles could be dragged in and no sperm would be wasted on women who had possibly become infertile since last year. I guess.
It seems a waste of effort to me, though. Were I in the shoes of the Warden (ruler of England), I’d have people working feverishly on human cloning, others working on inducing eggs to fuse with each other (hey, they’re both gametes, after all), and still others even working on crossbreeding humans and chimpanzees (if you can just get some fertile male offspring, you can try breeding back to human females). Heck, i’d be trying to set up a colony on the Moon, Mars if we could reach it, and certainly underground. Maybe the problem is something on Earth and we can escape it on other spheres. Maybe it’s something in the sunlight. When you’re looking at human extinction, why would you hesitate at the longest shots?
And why on Earth would you exclude *anybody* from your testing? Assuming you found a fertile male, no matter how unfortunate his genetic endowment, you’d have essentially half the human race with which to dilute it. You’d *want* him to breed with women of every race, the more the better, to get maximum genetic diversity. You’d want his sons to do the same, since there’d still be a lot of fertile women in their late 30s, early 40s, when his sons hit puberty.
Speaking of his sons, what about his daughters? There’d be no fertile males except their father and their half-brothers or, if they waited until their mid-20s, their half-nephews. Even putting them aside, by the time his grandsons were old enough to breed — at age twelve — there’d be no one under the age of fifty who was not at least a first cousin to them. You’re going to have genetic problems no matter what with only one male progenitor, so there’s no point trying to exclude the imperfect. That seems obviously dumb to me. Instead of wasting time and effort testing women for fertility, just test all the men, perfect and imperfect alike. If you find a fertile male, you can save the human race and *then* worry about the genetic issues.
Tomorrow I’ll write about my reaction to the story, not just the world-building.
