The Children of Men

Content Warning: The following Chapter Summary and Analysis sections contain references to suicide, which is discussed in the source text.

On his 50th birthday, the novel’s first-person narrator, Oxford professor Dr. Theodore Faron, records in his diary that Joseph Ricardo, the “last human being to be born on earth” (3) has been killed during a fight in a Buenos Aires tavern. After hearing the news, Theo imagines aliens landing on earth in the future, and trying to figure out what humans were, and what they valued.

Because of the infertility epidemic known as Omega, finding the last born person has been a global obsession for 20 years—this is why everyone knows who Ricardo is. Today, people are more outraged by the inability to find the cause of infertility than with the fact that it exists. When Omega began in 1995, there were debates about whether a cure—if found— should be shared between countries. Spycraft returned as countries sought advantages over one another.

As the most recent generation, the Omegas, reached sexual maturity, they became distant from other people; however, their antisocial and violent tendencies are overlooked because they are the youngest people alive. Now, Omegas remove reminders of children from the world.