The Committed Men (novel)

In a dystopian Britain, social organization has collapsed, and the survivors, riddled with skin cancers, eke out a precarious scavenging existence in the ruins of the Great Society. A few bizarre communities try to maintain their structure in a chromium wilderness linked by crumbling motorways. But their rituals are meaningless cliches mouthed against the devastation. Only the roaming bands of hippie-style situationists have grasped that the old order, with its logic, its pseudo-liberalism and its immutable laws of cause and effect, has now been superseded. 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 - a search of the committed men for the tribes of mutants.[1]

Writing in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, science fiction specialist John Clute wrote, "[The Committed Men] is an impressive Post-Holocaust story set in a fractured England, centering physically on the ruins of the motorways, and generating a powerful sense of entropic dismantlement."[2]

A Kirkus reviewer wrote, "It erupts into the kind of savagery and grotesquerie that John Christopher used to specialize in, as Wendover, a doctor, finally finds himself trying to save a mutant baby from his own kind."[3]

David Pringle called the novel "brief, bleak, derivative - but stylishly written."[4]

In a 2018 interview Harrison revealed that he had been approached about a film adaption, which he declined. Explaining his decision: "I was less interested in shuffling and dealing than in saying something. I got an offer for the film rights of The Committed Men, but when I saw the treatment I found they had reversed its conclusions. Books are about meanings, not tropes, so I said no."[5]