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

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

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