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

Re: child permit trope

[disassembly_rsn]

Anne McCaffrey used the child permit trope in her Pegasus books.

In theory, that setup is going for a zero population growth scenario, but in practice not everyone cooperates with the system (or gets caught).

In the first book - a short story collection published in 1973 - it was mentioned in passing in a conversation between a married couple that they'd 'been approved' as parents.

In Pegasus in Flight (1990), it comes out that there are a lot of 'illegal' children. Part of that is for cultural reasons - people who object to birth control in and of itself - and part of that is that unregistered children can be profitable. The illegal children, at least in theory, have most kinds of legal rights if and when they're caught, but they're not allowed to have children themselves.

Tirla - an illegal kid who's a major player in the story - isn't too keen on what she can expect from the system if she gets caught. She's used fake IDs for years to get an online education, that sort of thing.