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

[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.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

OTOH sea levels could just be global warming effects. Simply extrapolating demographic and pessimal environmental trends gives you a lot of the world of YKK without any events needed.

Mt. Fuji missing a chunk is another matter.

It *could* be a Stage Five society (for the humans). Just can't tell.


The movie A.I. is similar: global warming floods, reduced birth rates, and uncertainty as to whether those are simply correlated or causally connected. Hmm, *also* similar in the replacement robot population. But one has gladiatoral contests between discarded robots, and the other has a peaceful coffeehouse and mysterious elite robots in a nuclear powered plane.


Imperial Earth had what, half a billion people on Earth, sans disasters? Some space emigration. Unclear if it was still shrinking or had stabilized.