Our Children's Children

Clifford D. Simak Our Children's Children (1974)
The entire human race from five-hundred years in the future take refuge in the present, fleeing voracious alien monsters which will one day visit themselves upon our world. This presents a number of problems: the impossibility of clothing, feeding and housing several billion refugees, and the fact of the aforementioned voracious alien monsters having followed them back through their time tunnels. On top of this, there's also the matter that we weren't doing that great even before all these people turned up, what with the environment and everything. The solution seems to be using the time tunnels of our visitors to relocate humanity back to the pre-technological idyll of the Miocene era.

Our Children's Children is a fairly typical Simak, thematically speaking - strong ecological message, everything used to be better than it is now, and so on and so forth.

The problem is that the story is relayed by much the same method as that which kept Roy of the Rovers ticking along all those years, with those two anonymous blokes in the crowd helpfully describing what's happening on the pitch. Here we have presidential types and generals filling entire chapters with so much exposition that it reads like a play; also, an intrepid reporter - who may as well have been called something like Scoops Jackson - talking about stuff with his photographer. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of the kind of descriptive pastoral narrative at which Simak usually excels, and what little we have features angry kids protesting outside the White House while waving handily explanatory placards, just like you might see on the cover of a sixties Superman comic.

I don't know what went wrong here. The idea itself isn't bad - although the explanation of the nature of the voracious alien monsters is so pitifully shabby* that it could have come from a Russell T. Davies episode of Who. Simak did this about a thousand times better in The Visitors, and in almost all of his other novels, come to think of it. Our Children's Children isn't irredeemable, but it's not great by any description.

*: They're dinosaurs, and the time travelling events of the novel may serve to explain how they ended up back in the Cretaceous in the first place, or summink.