An odd quirk of history: Although the generation that produced the Baby Boomers was enthusiastic about producing an abundance of children, or at least the process that leads to an abundance of children, many seemed ambivalent about their actual progeny. A number of male SF authors wrote works seemingly inspired by the alarm they felt while encountering the tsunami of Boomer kids1. Here are five examples.
“Star, Bright” by Mark Clifton (1952)
Pete Holme realizes that his young daughter Star has an exceptional IQ, even higher than his. From personal experience, Star’s father knows that superlative intelligence is often a curse. Bright people are so often pariahs. They are also uncomfortably aware of matters beyond the comprehension of their cheerfully lackwit neighbors. Pete sets out to ensure that Star is, if not happy, then no more miserable than she absolutely has to be.
Star has something Pete never had, a peer. Young Robert is as bright as Star, a natural ally in a world dominated by dullards like the majority and the occasional half-bright person like Pete. Together, the children can travel to a better world… but poor Pete will not be accompanying them.
I forgot until I reread this how depressed Pete Holme is, what with being socially isolated, a widower, and the single father of a child far brighter than he is. To his credit, Pete is nothing but supportive of Star.
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke (1953)
The US/Soviet space rivalry is brought to an abrupt and permanent end by the arrival of alien Overlords. The Overlords swiftly, bloodlessly conquer Earth. War is ended, prosperity made global, and aside from the minor issue of human autonomy, a golden age begins. A very brief golden age, as it is merely the means to an end.
The Overlords being diplomatically oblique about the purpose behind their sudden annexation of Earth, humans can be forgiven for thinking that the Overlords invaded to save humans from atomic self-destruction. Or to save humans at all. The Overlords are interested the generation to come, beings that might be said to be children but are (to their parents’ alarm) not human at all.
What the Overlords achieve on Earth is open to interpretation. Were they playing a role in Stapledonian psychic orthogenesis? Or were they providing a snack for their cosmic god? Either way, the parents had reason to be concerned.
The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham (1957)
An unidentifiable object suddenly appears in the town of Midwich and everyone within a two miles radius falls asleep. A day later, the object vanishes and the population wakes. A few unfortunates perished from secondary effects like exposure, but otherwise the locals seem unharmed. Then they discover that every fertile woman in the affected area is pregnant.
The sixty-one children who result appear human. Subsequent events reveal that the Children possess powers beyond human ken, that the boys all share one mind, as do the girls. Furthermore, the Children have no particular regard for the species used to bring them into being. Once the Children are adult and have no further need for their hosts, what fate will befall humans? And is there anything humans can do to save themselves?
Readers interested in what’s going in here should search the term “brood parasitism,” although they should be aware that anything involving parasitism is generally the stuff of nightmares.
An interesting detail: We learn that Midwich wasn’t the only town targeted. We are given a list of communities of affected communities. They were all isolated and easy to overlook. Odd that a British author would lump a UK rural town with villages and settlements in Mongolia, the Canadian Arctic, Australia, and Siberia.
“Wasted on the Young” by John Brunner (1965)
Hal Page is something even more terrible than some precious, nigh-alien child. Hal is an example of what a cosseted, pampered child can grow into. Hal has spent his short life shirking responsibility while indulging his every whim. Not only is Hal a drain on society, he is an inspiration to other would-be lay-abouts.
Hal is quite aware that someday a bill will come due, that society will expect that the luxuries of today be paid off with the labor of tomorrow. Hal has a cunning plan to avoid paying his bill… but it’s not cunning enough.
Kampus by James E. Gunn (1977)
Once respectable colleges are overrun by student hordes, full of bomb-tossing radicals prone to political absurdities, violence, and libidinous excesses. All hardworking professors can hope to do is keep their heads down and survive as long as they can before the students turn on them.
The students have developed a novel method to quickly and easily decant knowledge from their elderly professors. It is fatal to the unfortunate elderly scholars.
Gunn was, like the scholarly victims in his novel, a pre-Boomer academic, which I sense may have influenced his reaction to professors being transformed into educational smoothies for the convenience of lazy undergrads. At least the spicy autocomplete so popular on campuses these days leaves professors unharmed.
These are only a few of the stories created by pre-Boomer authors alarmed by rising generation—the children of the late 1940s and the 1950s, the teens of the 1960s and 1970s, and the young adults of the 1980s and beyond. Perhaps I overlooked your favorites2. Feel free to mention them in comments below.
For those interested in this topic, I highly recommend William Tenn’s 1953 anthology Children of Wonder. The stories range from 1904 (a story by E.M. Forster that isn’t “The Machine Stops”) to an original story by Katherine MacLean. They are mostly pretty darn good stories, too.
I had assumed post-baby boom stories would have been about Gen X or later, rather than stories by Silents and earlier about boomers themselves. I’m not eager for a world that has left the boomers completely behind, because I am one. But as more and more of us shuffle off this mortal coil, the world will hopefully be pay more attention to what comes next, as opposed to the reasonable alternative of spending the next few generations cursing the self centered generation that never really took the focus off of itself.
The backdrop of Logan’s Run is about Wild and Crazy Boomers upending everything.
Would “In Hiding” by Wilmar H. Shiras count? The boomers were still babies (or toddlers) in 1948 when it came out.
By no coincidence whatsoever, “In Hiding” is included in the Tenn anthology…
I think it does. So would Poul Anderson’s Twilight World, I think.
There was some confusion elsewhere: “Star, Bright” is a short story. If there is a novel version, I am unaware of it.
Does Slan count? It’s got a next generation of telepaths and came out in the same era.
It’s a bit later, I think, but I have vague recollections of a story where interstellar colonists were giving birth to Homo habilis or some other protohuman, and they radioed Earth to tell them, only to get a message back years or decades later that the same thing was happening back home
The latter one is “The Locusts” by Larry Niven.
I could have restricted myself to Ray Bradbury and still had enough examples: “The Veldt” comes to mind. “All Summer in a Day.” That one about alien invasion…
May I ask: why leave out “Absolom”? Was it already reviewed? (I know nothing about the story so I don’t know if contents have anything to do with it.)
I had another use for it. HA HA HA.
HA.
Does Waldo count?
By an odd coincidence, I reread “Waldo” recently. While one could, in theory, count it, because Waldo begins designing stuff when he’s a kid, that’s all backstory; he is definitely a young adult by the time the story starts.
Waldo’s doctor friend complains that children these days are too sedentary and spend too much time playing inside, etc. (which ties into the plot due to spoiler) – and that’s the kind of complaint that fits the theme of this essay.
Here’s the quote:
“It was all very well for a kid to like to read books, he felt, but a normal boy ought to be out doing a little hell raising too.’
I might not have reread Waldo (or Magic, Inc) in mmmmmmmmmaybe half a century? Good thing I know where my copy is!
In storage, half an hour drive away.
Disappointingly, I had a Heinlein trilogy (“The Puppet Masters”, “Magic, Inc”, and “Waldo”) – not disappointing that I had it, but, rather, what happened to it. Neighbor’s kid who was staying with us a short time had a mae cat, unneutered, and…wel you can guess the rest. A library destroyed.
But, yeah. Waldo was an adult, but he stiill hadn’t “grown up”.
The post-war “the children are different, and that’s scary” genre is a favorite of mine; I attribute it mostly to anxieties about the different world that the kids would be growing up in – a world with an atomic bomb and with knowledge of the horrors of the war, with two additional factors: the differences in how the children were experiencing the world (compared to their parents – television being the big factor (this is where Bradbury’s Veldt comes in) and in some cases, the shock that some returning soldiers experienced in meeting their child at age 6 who had been a toddler or infant the last time they saw them (see the vintage memoir “This is Goggle, or the Education of a Father”).
A few examples:
When the Bough Breaks (Padgett)
The Children’s Room (Raymond Jones – much like Star, Bright, but somehow creepier)
Absalom (I love this one too)
Generation Gaps (a really dire one by George H. Smith)
and a movie example “Quatermass IV” (hippies are controlled by aliens, don’t you know)
A more cheerful example – “Junior Achievement” (William Lee).
I sometimes wonder if I was the only person to read Kevin O’Donnell’s War of Omission (circa early 1980’s) which features 2 different sets of oppressive folks, seem to me to be boomers. The first set is government bureaucrats, who break into your house while you’re having sex with your girlfriend in order to check for housing code violations, thus killing the vibes entirely. The second set consists of youthful revolutionaries who are fighting against the oppressive government flunkies, but who in their zeal destroy the underpinnings of our society and thus are just as heinous as the bureaucrats. The tech was interesting, but the depiction of all these people really annoyed me.
I think I have a complete collection of O’Donnell books. I definitely have War of Omission.
Two from the 80’s spring to mind for me.
First off, “Children of the Thunder” by John Brunner. Yes, him again. It’s late-stage Brunner but still has a certain viciousness to it that moderns may not appreciate, particularly given the sex and violence coming from teens. The protagonist figures out that the children are an evolutionary leap but fails to appreciate the full ramifications until waaaay too late in the narrative.
Secondly, “The Quatermass Conclusion” by Nigel Kneale, also known as “Quatermass IV”, the novelisation of the slightly creepy TV series (and the not-so-great theatrical release of same). It leans heavily upon hippy, punk (and crusty) anarchic sociopolitical themes for its setting. Unfortunately our brave old man protagonist is unable to save many of the young fools from themselves. Go figure.
James recently abandoned a review of “Children of the Thunder”, due to it being fairly unpleasant, I believe.
Yup. Noped right out of Children of the Thunder/
Fair. My response to it was a resounding WTF!? even after filtering through my ruthlessly objective single guy persona. Similar feelings to some of Heinlein’s late stage works. It would probably be in the DNF category for me these days as fatherhood has made me much less objective.
I put the novel down to the author being upset by the (perceived) social upheaval in the UK during time of writing. Sex, drugs and violence were the three touchstones of the “not quite right” teenagers, deliberately chosen for shock factor. The unpleasantness on both sides of the novel’s dystopian plot echoes the arguments of conservative anti-liberal campaigners such as Mary Whitehouse (equivalent to the Moral Majority in the US) and the rise of violence on both liberal and conservative wings.
The redeeming feature is, at a guess, the author’s intent of holding up a dark mirror to SF novels such as The Chrysalids and The Midwich Cuckoos. That and the strangely accurate description of future UK. As ever YMMV.
Yep, I mentioned Quatermass IV above.
Alfred Bester’s Star Light, Star Bright is another good example.
And then there’s Anthony Fremont, in Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life” who is three years old, has godlike power, and no morality whatever. Bad news for his community and quite probably the rest of the world.
If we aren’t concentrating on Boomers, I somewhat spoil by mentioning “The Food of the Gods” (1904) by H. G. Wells, and that it features the Young Generation causing trouble.
Lewis Padgett’s “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” seems as if it should fit here, but it turns out it came out a few years too early in 1943. It still seems to anticipate the trend of these stories.
See also “The Day It All Happened, Baby!” (1966) by Robert Thom, about a wealthy 20-something rock star who manages to get the voting age lowered to 14, which leads to anyone over 35 being sent to concentration camps. It was the basis for the 1968 exploitation film, “Wild in the Streets.”
I’ve been hoping for years that someone, anyone, would write up Wild In the Streets. A classic of its kind, with Richard Pryor as a drummer and scenes of hippies drugging Congress by dumping LSD into the DC reservoirs in order to take over the nation. Bonus points for Shelly Winter’s role as the protagonist’s apologetic Mom.
I recall reading a short story in an early 1970s “Analog” in which the Dirty Freeloading Hippy generation has taken over society, and is running it into the ground. The narrator, an older, strait-laced academic type, has had enough and is moving to the Moon colony, the last refuge of traditional folk like him. He refuses the request of a Hippy Government representative to stay on Earth and try to keep things together; the next generation are now coming up, and they threaten to be much worse, and more dangerous, than the Hippies. Even when I read the story, a couple of years after its publication, it struck me as one of the most unintentionally hilarious things I’d ever read.
i think it _may_ be “Generation Gaps” by “Clancy O’Brien” (George H Smith) in the September 1972 “Analog”; the title and publication date sound about right, though I’m not certain. It was certainly one of those stories that stays in the memory – but for all the wrong reasons.
I remember that one! I think I hurt my eyes rolling them — though to this day I use the term “Gerry Retention”.
Yes, that’s Generation Gaps (as mentioned above)
Basically, the Asimov anthology Tomorrow’s Children.
Would A Clockwork Orange fit the criteria? Burgess was of about the right vintage, and it’s definitely about the shortcomings of kids these days.
In the same line but with thugs born slightly earlier: Pendulum, by John Christopher. He was known more for YA adventure-SF, but this one proposes an England just a few years after the book was written (1968) and even bleaker than A Clockwork Orange: by partway through the book the only “authority” is motorcycle gangs.
In Damon Knight’s “Special Delivery” (1954) the child, Leonardo, is born perfectly normal and no one is more surprised by this than Leonardo himself.
I think all the “my kid is behaving weirdly because they are possessed” stories are basically this, on grotesque steroids. Choose your favourite.
There was a very nice adaptation of “Star, Bright” on the radio show “X Minus One” in the Fifties. It is available on Youtube.
To me “Zero Hour” by Bradbury is the prime example of a “fear the children” story. The 1955 version on the radio show “Suspense” is outstanding, and available on Youtube.
Well, if we’re going to mention Bradbury, you really can’t leave out “The Small Assassin.” My mother read this while she was pregnant with her first child (me) and briefly regretted her life choices.
I wasn’t aware of “It’s the children who are wrong” as a meme – with a graphic and everything, and with various substitutions for “children” – until I saw it again on a “Not Always Right” website story, about wontons. “Am I out of touch?” ;-)
It’s one of those stories where the protagonist finds a Chinese restaurant serving delicious wontons, but when he tries to go back for more, he finds that mysteriously, it is no longer on the side of the parking lot where his car is parked. It is on the other side. Inexplicable – if you doubt the customer’s explanation, as it seems that most readers do.