The Bible is clear that God is in control of the future, but we still love to imagine that we can predict what will happen next. And futuristic fiction books can be an entertaining diversion from our present boring or stressful lives. Sometimes these books seem to be quite good at predicting the future when you read them many years after they were written, i.e. Orwell’s 1984 and Toffler’s Future Shock. Also do not miss the short story, The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster which describes humans who never leave their tiny abodes and just spend all day in virtual reality on the internet, a story written in 1909! In other words, some future prognostication does turn out to be close to reality.

I’m currently reading a book by P.D. James called The Children Of Men, published in 1992. The story so far is a bit slow compared to many other books I’ve read in this genre. I’ve done a lot of skimming looking for the action to start. I much prefer John Christopher’s style. The plot of this novel does seem like a possible reality, however, which is why I wanted to read it after watching a random movie on Netflix that claimed to be based on this book. That movie was called Night Raiders. The plot of the book is that for some reason, the world was struck by total infertility and the population has dwindled, along with mental health. They are frantically doing everything they can to figure out how to end this infertility, including state-sponsored porn.

This book is good at making you think about what would happen if there were no more children being born. We used to be told, ‘children are our future’. And in the novel you see that children are also an important part of daily life. Without children, the world loses it joy and all hope of survival and begins to deteriorate into crime, depression, fear, and other bad things until the British government institutes strong systems of control, including an island where criminals are sent. Most people have stopped believing in God. They become so mentally disturbed that they treat dolls and animals like babies, even getting them christened in defunct churches.

This book was written before the internet and iPhones so the author did not include the major social changes that were just about to take place. Reading the story you feel like it is taking place in a much more distant past due to this lack of technology. The story is set in a non-technological 2021, with the infertility starting in 1995 . It didn’t take long for the lack of births to totally alter society. Whole towns are being shut down because of the lack of population growth. Elderly people are encouraged to kill themselves because there are not enough young people to take care of them or feed them. People don’t want to work. They lose themselves in escapism.

In the real world we may not be struck with instant and complete infertility, but we are seeing declining birth rates in the most developed nations. Many young women (and a few men) are rejecting marriage and parenthood and I wonder if they have considered the long-term implications of what will happen to the world in general if this decline in reproduction becomes widespread. Probably not because they have explicitly been taught since childhood that the world is overpopulated, that abortion is perfectly normal, and that children are parasites. They are praised for not having children! They are taught to hate so-called ‘breeders’. They are taught to love the earth and animals more than human life. They are simply doing what they have been taught to do.

Maybe this book will turn out to be like 1984, a chillingly accurate prediction of the end of our future without children.

Edit : I finished the book. Here’s a little more about it. Also I watched the 2007 movie based on the book and it was very different from the book .