Science Fiction and Overpopulation
I have a question to which I don’t know the answer.
The prospect of a hugely over-crowded, hyperpopulated future was one raised, famously, by Malthus in his 1798 book An Essay on the Principle of Population. Throughout the 19th-century, the issue was discussed and debated by scientists, commentators, by the writers of magazine articles and publishers of tracts. There were anti-Malthusians who thought the Essay too pessimistic, and rather more who thought its argument sound and who who debated the best way to address or ameliorate its alarming prophesy. But here’s my question: why was there no fictional representation of this topic at this time? Science fiction was a vigorous and varied discourse during the whole century, after all. Why did no writers pick-up on over-population as an imaginative theme?
In the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Dave Langford and Brian Stapleford note, without exploring further, the lag between Malthus raising the matter and its appearance in science fiction:
Although the amended Malthusian argument was (and is) logically unassailable, it was ignored or even attacked by most speculative writers … It was not until the 1960s that awareness of the population problem resurfaced . The major nonfiction books involved in the popularization of the issue were The Population Bomb (1968) by Paul Ehrlich and The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (1972) by D H Meadows.
Langford and Stapleford go on to mention many fictional engagements with the question, such as Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! (1966) (‘a novel whose thrust was entirely lost,’ they argue ‘when it was filmed as Soylent Green in 1973’) — they don’t mention, but might have done, Anthony Burgess’s prior The Wanting Seed (1962), although Burgess himself believed that Harrison had ripped-off his idea. There are plenty of other examples of overpopulation SF from the 1960s, 1970s, and later: Lee Tung’s The Wind Obeys Lama Toru (1967); John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968); Brunner’s later The Sheep Look Up (1972); Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside (1972). Most of these stories take a grim perspective: the overpopulation is controlled by culling, as in William F Nolan’s and George Clayton Johnson’s Logan’s Run (1967), although Philip José Farmer’s Dayworld (1985) and its sequels have a less bloodthirsty solution: in his overpopulated future world everyone is awake for only one day a week, spending the other six days in suspended animation and thereby fitting seven people into one person’s space.
But why did it take more than a century and a half for concerns about overpopulation to filter through into fiction? Across the 19th-century there were loads of non-fiction books and papers published after Malthus. Notable examples from the UK — Alexander Hill Everett, New Ideas on Population: With Remarks on the Theories of Malthus and Godwin (1823); Michael Thomas Sadler, The Law of Population: A Treatise, in Six Books (1830); Annie Besant, The law of population; its consequences, and its bearing upon human conduct and morals (1878) — are the tip of the iceberg. In the 1880s there was an entire magazine dedicated to these questions: The Malthusian: A Crusade Against Poverty. A Monthly Journal (1887–9). France and Germany saw just as many interventions into the debate. It was an immediate and pressing concern. So why didn’t it impinge on 19th-century science fiction?
