NOTES ON NOBODY’S CHILDREN
WARNING: This page contains substantial SPOILERS for Nobody’s Children.
NOTES ON PETER
Peter Guy Summerfield is a half-human, half-alien hybrid, which I admit to having issues with.
It’s not just that it’s complete nonsense scientifically – human beings can’t even breed with their nearest living relatives, the great apes, so what chance does a blue bipedal canine from another biosphere have?
It’s just that it’s so Star Trek.
It’s different when the aliens in question are essentially gods, like Doctor Who’s Time Lords – children with god / demon / faerie fathers and human mothers (or, more rarely, vice versa) have been a staple of legend for millennia. Some of the best treatments of Peter have imagined him in similarly mythic terms as something half-bestial – which does a grave disservice to his perfectly intelligent Killoran father Adrian, but at least allows him to become something a bit frightening and primal.
Jon’s novella has a good handle on this, showing Peter, though affectionate and vulnerable, as slightly unpredictable and dangerous, and heading towards an unknown but possibly disturbing adulthood.
Peter has very few lines in ‘Nursery Politics’, and is shunted off to Thatcher’s Britain for the second half of the novella. He is, nevertheless, key to the piece – he acts as a concrete embodiment of Benny’s protective parental impulses, which otherwise are focussed on the absent Mim juveniles, and her even more abstract future children.
Hopefully this comes through in that all-important final diary extract… and although it isn’t always obvious to the people she speaks to, Peter is at the forefront of Benny’s mind for most of the novella. If ‘Nursery Politics’ is about family, then Peter is its emotional lodestone.
- Notes on Nobody’s Children.
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