Does there exist

[james_davis_nicoll]

An SF novel whose setting knowingly includes a global example of a Stage Five society?

[not interested in examples where death rates exceed birth rates for reasons due to calamities like war, famine, plague and the like; those aren't really Stage Five societies]

Comments

[kithrup]

Does Saturn's Children count?

[james_davis_nicoll]

Technically no (at the time the novel is set, human death rates are perfectly in balance with birth rates) but at one time such a society did exist.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Kage Baker? I know that the world of the Zeus Corporation is very sparsely populated, and I don't think it's because of a Big Bad but because of a nanny state.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

No, a faction of the Company spreads multiple plagues throughout history and especially in the run up to the "present" in the 23rd century.

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

I guess John Campbell's "Twilight" isn't a novel.

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Logan's Run?

Re: Logan's Run

[disassembly_rsn]

In the original book, the killing-people-at-21 policy was implemented specifically because originally the young people who implemented the policy preferred it to birth control. Kids under the age of 7 wouldn't be seen in public; the state raises them.

However, the way the society is *shown* doesn't make it look as though the birth rate is very high. I don't recall a large proportion of very young teens in the visible population.

Disclaimer: it's been a while since I read it.

[ross smith (from livejournal.com)]

A large chunk of Arthur C Clarke's output, e.g. Rendezvous With Rama and Imperial Earth.

-- Ross Smith

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Imperial Earth is the closest example I can think of. Most of the ones that look like Stage Five societies have some pathological explanation like an infertility plague in their past.

[oh6.livejournal.com]

In order of my thinking of them:

Ashinano Hitoshi's Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou is all over this one, but it's a 2000+ page manga series, not a novel.

Nancy Kress's Maximum Light sort of has this, but it's due to pervasive unacknowledged pollution, not choice.

Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia has this as background, but a lot of it was probably because the Instrumentality was not all that great at their job.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou has some unspecified event(s) in the near past which has seemingly caused the NPG situation -- sea levels are rising (or Japan is sinking) and Mt. Fuji is missing a chunk off the side of its cinder cone. Nobody talks about what happened at all, or why there are few children around.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Peter Watt's Blindsight -- low TFR, well below replacement levels; many young folks think sex with real human meatsacks is kinda icky and gross, and doesn't live up to the alternatives on offer, and why have children anyway?

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

why have children anyway

Well, in their defense: in that world, they may be right.

[thespian.livejournal.com]

certain phyles in Diamond Age have intentionally done this (older members of the Victorians hint at it but don't say anything directly, but note that all of the families with children have just one child. Several of the synthetic phyles, such as CryptNet or the one that I'm forgetting the name of that has the characters do death defying things to learn to rely on each other are entirely opted into by adults).

The Countess in the one story arc in Tepper's The Family Tree (not to give any plot points away) discusses how most women in her society stick to one 'well-planned' pregnancy in a lifetime (there are issues with that in context, but...).

Would anything involving the child-permit trope count (either repressive future dystopias or things like Bujold's Beta Colony in the Vorkosigan books)? They are usually for one, sometimes for two, but I've never seen anything above that, so those societies are either intentionally shrinking their numbers with accidental deaths, or making it up with immigrants.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The child-permit trope typically implicitly assumes that you won't get there without coercive measures. (On the other hand, the government could just be making unwarranted assumptions, like China in the real world, which is probably the model for many of them.)

[andrewducker]

Simak's "City" has mankind eventually dying out because we just don't reproduce enough to replace ourselves. (There's also the emigration to Jupiter, but the remaining people seem to just lose interest in propagation.)

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Lots of Clarke, I'd say particularly pre-nova Earth in Songs of Distant Earth - yes, there's a calamity, but it's impersonal in the future rather than the Four Horsemen in the present or past.

[a-neonta.livejournal.com]

Children of Men?

[http://users.livejournal.com/krin_o_o_/]

Would the Asgard in the Stargate universe qualify?

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Solaria, from The Naked Sun. Planetary (human) population of 20,000, minimal human-human contact, and the vast majority like it that way.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I don't think that makes it Stage Five by itself; the concept seems to be about shrinkage, not small size. Solaria seems to have been a colony that simply never had many people. The fact that Solaria was down to what, 1200? when Golan Trevize visited, does technically qualify, though this was over 25,000 years...

[matt-ruff.livejournal.com]

Any novel set in present day Europe or Japan?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Those are not really global examples.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

Kirk's Enterprise visited at least one over-populated world, but I don't recall mention of Earth, or the Federation as a whole, having population problems at that time.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Walter Tevis - the guy who wrote The Man Who Fell to Earth - wrote another downer, Mockingbird. No one is having children. Turns out it's robots scrupulously following their hardwired imperatives, but no human is being literally harmed. I don't know if that counts as intentional.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

I should read that--I think Walter Tevis is very underrated.

[daev.livejournal.com]

It's in the backstory of the final stage of October the First is Too Late by Fred Hoyle. Future humanity just got wise enough to stop having so many children, and now the whole homo sapiens species is living very well in a sort of multicultural Arcadia in Central America. Probably doesn't hold up to serious Nicollian scrutiny, but Hoyle was never very interested in being serious in his SF; he's just batting ideas around to mess with your head.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Stage 5, where humanity evolves around the impediments imposed by technological society and the successful breeders go on to a happy future of malthusian limits. Meathooks are optional.

Has anyone written a book where the Amish take over the world, simply by out-reproducing everyone else?

[maruad.livejournal.com]

I would have said the Elves of Middle Earth but you did say SF.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I think George R. R. Martin's "In the House of the Worm" might qualify.

Related question

[(Anonymous)]

Has anyone done a novel set in a world that's /mostly/ Stage Five, but where a few high-reproduction groups are much more common than they are today? A future with a lot of Mormons and Nigerians?


Doug M.

Re: Related question

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

Substitute "Arabs and/or Muslims" -- the people who indulge in this type of mongering seem to be hazy on the difference -- for "Mormons and Nigerians," and you have the scenario that keeps right-wing types up late at night frothing away on their blogs.

I don't know of any Cautionary Tales of a Nightmare Future based on this notion, but I'd be surprised if someone in that crowd hasn't written one.

[akawil]

Saturn's Children has a Stage 5 society as backstory, where eventually the human population declined all the way to extinction.

[traviswells.livejournal.com]

The webcomic Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life has the same sort of setting. Humans just apathied themselves to extinction after building sentient robots, and now the robots are trying to carry on without them.