I woke up early this morning to drive my car to the car dealership. Yesterday, in preparation, I had taken out The Children of Men from the Harvard Med School library. I had been quoted over 4 hours for the various maintenance, and the man taking my car was astonished that I intended to wait in the dealership until it was done. Perhaps he took pity on me; it was done by 11 AM, just over two hours. This was a particularly good thing because I had forgotten my lunch at home.
I hadn’t gotten a chance to finish my book, but I decided to make the most of the fact that it’s spring break, so I sat on the couch and read until I was finished.
This evening I’ve been working on my project for my Model of Development class. I’ve just finished the first cut at a program designed to simulate, and eventually reverse-engineer, the patterns that plant cells make when they divide.
Book Review:
The Children of Men is fantastic. It’s well-written, engrossing, and carefully thought out. The characterization, the setting is all supremely believable, to the point that by the end of Omega (the first “book”) I knew exactly what it felt like to watch the extinction of homo sapiens, powerless. I was truly shaken. The book also makes, above all, one dramatic and surprising point: everything we do, from emotion to morality, is conditioned on the assumption of the survival of humanity. Without this assumption, all of our reasons for doing all of the things that we do evaporate. I think I never quite realized how much we depend on the future for the present.
I have not seen the movie made from this book, but from what I can tell, apart from the above they are opposites in almost every way. The characters have the same names but completely different roles. The everyman in the movie is royalty in the book, and the amiable pot-head in the movie is a joyless professor in the book, who kills himself early in the story. From what I’ve heard, even the endings are perfect opposites.