Apartment Women by Gu Byeong-Mo

[james_davis_nicoll]

The Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments is a bold attempt to address South Korea’s negligible birthrate. In exchange for new homes in an invigorating rural setting, certain conditions need to be met.

Apartment Women by Gu Byeong-Mo

Comments

[thistleingrey]

It certainly sounds like a contemporary novel.

Aside from rent control and the medical support (which we never see in action and may not live up to the brochure hype), there’s no real effort to reduce the difficulty and cost of producing and rearing kids.

Real-world medical support is generally better than in the US (I'm not familiar with current Canadian standards), but the government and larger employers have done bupkis toward meaningful supports and changes besides whine about how few babies occur now.

[jbwoodford]

From the review, this has a similar vibe to parts of Charlie Stross' _Glasshouse_.

[autopope]

I resemble that remark!

(But Glasshouse was superficially more about applying the Stanford Prison Study protocol to gender roles (as opposed to prison inmate/guard roles) among posthumans from a society not unlike Varley's Eight Worlds setting. With, of course, several hidden subtexts. Very much not a contemporary novel at all.)

[jbwoodford]

It was the combination reward for generally adhering to societal gender role expectations (3 kids in 10 years) and facilitation of lack of privacy + social punishment for not adhering to implicit and explicit social rules. The setting of _Apartment Women_ didn't have netlink-based social indexing, but you get the idea that if the folks who run Dream Future had it they would definitely find a use for it.

[(Anonymous)]

I would have supposed that, given the inadequate birth rate, the housing shortage would take care of itself in time.

[violsva]

Some of us would prefer to have housing sooner than four decades from now.

[elusis]

... and to not have to clear a mummified/rotting body from said housing when the occupant has died of neglect.