Implosion (novel)

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Implosion is a science fiction novel by D. F. Jones, published in 1967.

The story is set in the United Kingdom, which has just been attacked by an unnamed minor Eastern Block nation. The weapon used, codenamed Prolix, is a new chemical sterilant that once ingested renders almost all women incapable of conceving children. The major characters are Dr. John Bart, the Minister for Health who soon finds his Ministry the most important in the new Britain, and his wife Julia, who is one of the few women still able to conceve. Dr. Bart finds himself creating a new society in which the remaining fertile women are herded into concentration camps, to spend the rest of their life making babies, while the rest of the world is shooting containers of the sterilant at each other, gradually moving everyone to the same place as Britain.

At the end of the book, mankind learns that the genetic quirk that kept some women able to reproduce causes their daughters to be able to bear only boys, thus dooming the human race to extinction.