Ten Great, Vintage Stories About Overpopulation and Eco-Catastrophe
Star Trek: 'The Mark of Gideon,' 1969
The 1960s and 1970s were the golden years in science fiction literature for stories about the horrors inherent in ecological collapse and overpopulation. In the interests of prompting people to take action, such stories often were provocative, even hectoring.
Here is a list of some well-known, and lesser-known, stories on eco-catastrophe and overpopulation, all designed to make you think. And maybe bring a touch or two of nostalgia for those who are Baby Boomers !
[ Given the age of these stories, and the increasing costs of acquiring paperbacks first published some 50 or more years ago, I've tried to give multiple sources for these tales. Hopefully this makes it a little easier to access them. ]
Billenium (1961), by J. G. Ballard: this Old School gem frequently has been anthologized, such as in the 1976 anthology 'The City: 2000 AD,' edited by Clem, Greenberg, and Olander, as well as 1962, eponymous compilation of Ballard tales. Despite the passage of the decades since its first appearance, ‘Billenium’s’ account of the street-level reality of overpopulation, where people are desperate to find another square yard of living space, remains one of the most powerful treatments of the topic ever to be published.
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The Purple Child (1966), by Emilio Belaval: this tale can be found in the 1971 anthology 'Voyages: Scenarios for A Ship Called Earth.' It’s a particularly grim, but effective, account of poverty and childbearing in rural Central America. Belaval, a Puerto Rican author, offers a rebuke to those gringos who wonder, “why don’t those grubby peasants practice birth control ?”
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The Vitanuls (1967) by John Brunner: This first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1967, and later in the 1972 Brunner anthology 'From This Day Forward.' An American MD stumbles across an unusual phenomenon when he tours a maternity hospital in India. The atmosphere of this story is somber and unsettling.
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Eco-Catastrophe (1969) by Paul R. Ehrlich: Famous in his day for his bestselling book The Population Bomb, Ehrlich crafts a convincing ‘what if’ story about a near-future world endangered because it didn’t follow the proscriptions outlined in Population Bomb. This story is included in Best SF: 1969, edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison.
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Total Environment (1968), by Brian W. Aldiss: this first appeared in the February, 1968 issue of Galaxy magazine, and later in 'The City: 2000 AD' (1976). The ‘environment’ of the title is an arcology in which 500 young Indian couples are sequestered, and left to their own devices. It’s an experiment in social science, designed to see how humans cope with severe overcrowding. Aldiss clearly intended this story to explore the implications of the iconic 'behavioral sink' experiments on rodents conducted in the late 1960s at the National Institutes of Health, by zoologist John B. Calhoun.
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Brian Aldiss also wrote Orgy of the Living and the Dying (1970), which is available in the 1970 anthology 'The Year 2000,' edited by Harry Harrison. ‘Orgy’ is set in an impoverished region of India in the midst of severe drought and famine. In this bleak and seemingly hopeless setting, the lead character (who is something of an Ugly European) is offered the chance to be an unlikely hero.
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Population Control, 1986 (1970), by Horacio Paredes, is an interesting entry, first appearing in Atlas magazine in 1970, and later, in the 1971 Zero Population Growth anthology 'Voyages: Scenarios for A Ship Called Earth.' It’s a rare tale by a ‘third world’ writer (Paredes was a Filipino) about the Population Bomb. ‘Population Control’ is a brief, but competent, tale of drastic measures taken to curtail population growth in India and the Philippines.
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And Watch the Smog Roll In (1971) by Barry Weissman: This was published in the 1971 anthology 'Protostars,' edited by David Gerrold. It’s a dark satire of a near-future California in the grip of overpopulation, severe pollution, and a dysfunctional bureaucracy gone amok (making this story, some might argue, rather uncomfortably predictive of our current reality).
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A Happy Day in 2381 (1970), by Robert Silverberg: this story first saw print in the 1971 anthology 'Nova,' and later in 'The City: 2000 AD' (above). In the Future City, Earth's population of 75 billion live in arcologies three kilometers high. Mattern, an inhabitant of one such arcology, hosts a visitor whose remarks leave Mattern wondering about the wisdom of Unchecked Fecundity. Silverberg later would expand this story into his 1971 novel 'The World Inside,' about an overpopulated Earth where people live their entire lives indoors.
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Triage (1976), by William Walling: this story first appeared in Analog in November, 1976. It later was included in the anthologies 'No Room for Man' (1979) edited by Clem, Greenberg, and Olander, and 'The Crash of Empire,' (1989) edited by Carr and Pournelle. In ‘Triage,’ a U.N. bureaucrat in charge of distributing food aid to the starving millions in third-world countries is forced to play God, a position in which no human being ever wants to find themselves.
