The Committed Men

The Bomb is lodged in our minds as the possibility of our future. In The Committed Men, M. John Harrison explores, with all its pain and horror, the world that is left to us after the Bomb has fallen and radiation spreads like cancer to drown those who survived the initial impact...

The scene is England after the apocalypse. Social organisation has collapsed, and the survivors, riddled with skin cancers, eke out a precarious scavenging existence in the ruins of the Great Society. Among the mutants are a group of reptilian humans – alien, cancer-free but persecuted by the smoothskins. When one of them is born of a human mother in Tinhouse, a group of humans sets off to deliver it to its own kind. The search of these committed men for the tribes of mutants is the theme of this powerful and strangely hypnotic novel.