The Overman Culture - Edmund Cooper

Science-fiction is there to question the unknowable and the imponderables. What would happen if we discovered life on another planet? What would happen if the world faced an apocalypse? What would happen if technology were to become so advanced that it would eliminate the need for humans? What if the world we see around us is not the world as it truly is? Many of these question arise in Edmund Cooper's work as a science-fiction writer, and you could find quite a few of these questions raised and dealt with in a thoughtful manner in his 1971 novel, The Overman Culture.

Even though he is only really a child, Michael Faraday is the person asking such questions in The Overman Culture. He is a smart child though, he knows some things are strange and don't make sense to him, but finds it difficult to get answers from parents, teachers and other adults. "Strange ideas make people unhappy" he is told. Still things refuse to add up. He is worried about one child in his class who disappeared after having a breakdown and declaring that the children are not real people. Another child fell out of a window and didn't bleed. Perhaps strangest of all, although Michael isn't aware of it just yet, he goes to school with Virginia Woolf, Horatio Nelson, Ernest Rutherford, Jane Austen and Emily Brontë. He particularly likes these children as he has seen them bleed and finds that curiously reassuring. He considers these type of people 'fragiles', while the others who behave strangely are 'drybones'.

The world outside is also strange, but similarly in a way he cannot fully grasp. Britain, America and Russia are still in a seemingly never-ending war with Germany, Italy and Japan. There is a force field over London to protect it from missiles, but there only seems to be air raids on Saturdays. The Prime Minister is Winston Churchill and Queen Victoria uses a hovercar, while Russian scientist are reportedly building missile bases on the moon. As an adolescent, Michael finds that some of the other 'fragile' children have doubts about the strangeness of this situation and they teams up to try and find out more information; information that is discouraged by the drybone adults, who are evasive and continue to refuse to answer their questions. They find that London is largely deserted and there doesn't seem to be a way out, but when they discover a library and the knowledge held within it, the mystery only deepens.

There is very much a sense of intrigue and mystery about the circumstances that affect the children who are all named after famous people, and there is definitely a successfully sinister character to the 'drybones'. What makes it perhaps even more strange is that the behaviour of the drybones is that while some appear threatening and clearly know more than they are letting on, there appears to be a sense of well meaning in their evasiveness. It's an intriguing proposition, not least in the alternative world England governed by Churchill and Queen Victoria. Cooper keeps this intrigue up in the novel's concise short chapters, each bring new revelations at the same time as Michael and the other children make curious discoveries.

Without wishing to give away anything, The Overman Culture does have some originality in that way as a science-fiction work: proposing a possible situation where we have to go right back to the fundamentals of what makes us human and how we would react to unfamiliar situations. Is there a deeper level that we can draw on that alerts us to our essential nature, even in a world that doesn't seem entirely right? Will our better nature cut through? The philosophical ideas are in there and not laboured over, allowing you to consider matters that arise for yourself, but the proposal does throw up some interesting questions, finds its own answers and is simply just a good SF novel.

Reading notes: The Overman Culture by Edmund Cooper was first published in 1971 by Hodder & Stoughton. I read a 1973 hardback edition published by the Readers Union Science Fiction Book Club.