Did Warren Thompson live and fight in vain?

[james_davis_nicoll]

It is entirely Gareth Rees' fault for quoting

Suggested solutions not involving mass murder are rare, and not usually to be taken seriously

that I looked at this entry on overpopulation at the Science Fiction Encyclopedia.

Although the real-world situation grows worse each passing day, the fashionability of overpopulation stories in sf has waned dramatically since 1980, partly in accordance with a general tendency to skip over the most frightening problems of the Near Future and partly because of the absorption of the population problem into a more general sense of impending ecocatastrophe (> Ecology; Climate Change). Perhaps, though, the problem does not really deserve to be considered urgent. As Malthus pointed out, the situation is self-correcting; when there are more people than the world can accommodate, the surplus will inevitably die – one way, or another.

Comments

[oh6]

Skimming that page, I find myself wondering if I haven't started reading some science fiction novel by mistake.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The BS at the end of the entry appears to indicate not an editorial comment on the article but the identity of the author, which I believe was Brian M. Stableford.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

... or, maybe, the fears of overpopulation in science fiction were based on:

1) the fear and loathing of children
2) a failure to understand how women would use birth control
3) contempt for the rest of the world

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I wonder what the 1990s edition of the sfe says about overpopulation.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

1ed Edition; I don't see that line. Interestingly, Mote in God's Eye is called "lurid" in this edition, but the comment about it in the 3rd is less negative:

A rare application of Malthusian thinking to an Alien situation is employed in The Mote in God's Eye (1974) [...]

The 2nd Edition has "Suggested solutions not involving mass murder are rare, and not usually to be taken seriously, and in general is very much like the version of that entry in the 3rd Edition.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that casual dismissal of non-murderous options sure foreshadows how BS handled overpopulation in the emortality series.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

If the population (http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/2631942.html) had continued to increase, so that nanotech emortality spread through a world that was still vomiting out babies from billions of wombs, nothing could have restrained the negative Malthusian checks. The so-called plague wars had already proved themselves inadequate to cut population dramatically in a world of advanced medical care, but there were plenty more and even nastier weapons to hand. The world was set to go bad in a big way; all that remained for sane men to do was to exercise the least bad option and that's what Conrad Hellier set out to do.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

"Vomiting out babies": babies=puke?

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

I would add to number 3 "and for the aforementioned women." I am in particular reminded of the Harry Harrison short story where the husband is trying to fight off assassins because his wife has had a kid more than the government allotment, and IIRC it is indicated to be the fault of the foolish woman and her irresistable womb-drive. There's failure of understanding, and then there's contempt, and stories like that have a sharp stink of it.

(Huh. While doing a quick scan for the name of the story, I saw that in the world of "Make Room! Make Room!", global population is supposed to be over 7 billion. Hard to imagine such a densely populated world, right? :D )

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

My stars, no wonder things are so terrible in that world!

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

There's a failure of basic arithmetic in many overpopulation stories. The actual limits may be way out there. Currently achieved agricultural yields could feed a world of 100 billion people, perhaps more. Extrapolations of technologies lead to worlds that could support 1 trillion people (although this would be almost like living in a world-sized space colony, with food artificially produced and air cleaned and recycled.) The ultimate limit would be set by the need to radiate waste heat to space.

It seem unlikely we'll get anywhere near those numbers anytime soon.

[captaincrowbar.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

A few months ago I re-read Heinlein's Starman Jones (1953), for the first time since I was about 15, mumblety-mumble years ago. It makes the usual Heinlein noises about how overcrowded future Earth is, the frontier colonies are the only place for a Real Man, etc. ("This whole planet is one big jail, and a crowded one at that.") A few chapters later comes the shocking revelation that the population of the crowded Earth is an incredible ... four billion.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

I remember re-reading that as an adult and being struck by how much the protagonist's life seemed to resemble that of a turn-of-the-century country boy, with features such as cooking on a wood stove. (The family had access to lots of wood, and empty land.) I suppose in 1953 it would have been tricky to portray poverty if the family had been in a tiny apartment on the 46th floor of a city tower, with unreliable robots and a video wall whose 3D kept fading out.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

It still is.

There was a recent story on CBC about the shitty houses on First Nation's reserves, and the picture attached to it was a crudely constructed and maintained shack with an ExpressVu dish on the outside. There was, of course, the usual complaints about such a luxury and they can't have been that poor off if they had satellite TV.

Ignored, of course, was that someone might have bought the dish and receiver for them. And even if they were paying for everything, basic programming only runs you about $23 a month. Given the costs of building anything in remote communities, if I had no job, living in a community where there's not a whole lot to do, and the choice between spending $300 a year to have some entertainment and intellectual stimulation or buying 5 sheets of plywood (and no, I'm not exaggerating) to improve the place I was living in, I know why many people would prefer the TV.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Good points. Some people will naturally expect their local conditions to apply everywhere, which brings us full circle...

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Of course, Heinlein could have instead had some fun playing with people's expectations of what "poverty" is, but perhaps his libertarian tendencies made it hard for him to imagine poor-but-virtuous people who weren't poor by _his_ standards.

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

The obsession with the inevitability of overpopulation also seems to always rest on the assumption that no matter how nightmarishly horrible the situation gets, humankind will never dreeeeeaaaaam of passing any sort of laws limiting how much people are allowed to multiply. You know, like has already been done in some parts of the world.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, the draconian anti-natalist regime on overpopulated Earth is a fairly popular trope as well: Ender's Game is one of the most prominent examples. What's rare is the appreciation that you might not even need coercion (most knowledgeable observers think China's one-child policy was a poor way to go about it).

There are some cases, like Robert Charles Wilson's Spin, in which the deceleration of population growth is acknowledged but it's stated that we're way above the Earth's carrying capacity anyway, so a dieback is inevitable unless super-powerful aliens intervene or something.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...also Niven's ARM.

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

One way of looking at it is that we [for some values etc] worried less about the population bomb as we came to worry more about the prosperity bomb -- i.e. as it came to seem less likely that there'd be umpty billion desperately poor Third Worlders, and more likely that a modest three to five billion Indians, Chinese, Indonesians, Brazilians etc would actually have a shot at clean water, a car, an electric kitchen, a basic 72" 3D flatscreen, and so on. I don't know how much that reflected awareness of how fast the demographic transition was/is proceeding.

The implications are mixed. Which is less comfortable/odious: "The world can't sustain Those People having as many children as We did for 200 years" or "The world can't sustain Those People raising their standard of living as We did for 200 years"..?