With more than 7 billion people in the world since 2011, and the recent release of JG Ballard’s apocalypic novel High Rise as a film, writers’ concerns about a population explosion were at even greater height more than 40 years ago



With the human population passing the 7 billion mark in 2011 and set to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, overpopulation is a hotly debated topic. Whether raising the issues of resource depletion or water shortage, migrant pressures or the growing threat of global epidemics, we are often implicitly asking if population is exerting an irreparable burden upon our environment.

It’s not an exclusively modern fear. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb (pdf), a cautionary tome warning that population management threatened to spiral out of control, creating scarcity, and that the answer lay in reducing global growth rate to zero. 1968 was also the year in which the Club of Rome was founded, with business leaders sponsoring MIT scientists to model future scenarios of resource deprivation and population growth.



Ehrlich suggested that the west “lead by example”. Data implied that growth rates would prove less dramatic in Europe and the US than elsewhere, and in his view the west had the political clout, and a moral imperative to show the way. It was not just a question of reducing consumption. What was required was an active set of programmes to regulate human numbers. Ideas put forward included the regulation of behaviour by government, increased taxation on childcare goods, and placing sterilisers in the food and water supplies.

Where this fear expressed itself most clearly, however, was in the science fiction of the period.



Inspired by Ehrlich’s ideas, the sci-fi iconic all-encompassing supercomputer was frequently set to work by writers, regulating and corralling wayward human reproduction.

John Brunner, in 1968’s Stand on Zanzibar, depicted a future Manhattan playing host to overpopulation problems and a supercooled CPU, ensuring that citizens are ‘raised literate and educated ...’ but ‘behave as... statistic[s].’



Brunner was as much satirist as doom-monger, as science fiction authors often are. Increased regulation was seen as a threat, often hard to distinguish from despotism. Other authors made similar points. Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! (1966; better known in its 1973 screen adaptation, Soylent Green) visualised a future police state, rationing distribution within a growing anarchy, as resources further deplete.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A still from the 2016 film High-Rise, based on JG Ballard’s novel. Photograph: PR Image

For Naomi Mitchison (Solution Three, 1975) the despotism may be ‘benevolent’, again fostering drug use as a ‘desire dispeller’, but it also serves as a repressive curb on the female right to motherhood. Thomas Disch’s 334 (1972) depicts another variant New York, this time constrained by a paternalistic welfare state limiting the eligibility to have children for the (supposed) good of all, and whose acronym is, aptly enough, MODICUM.



If, in the 21st century, there’s recognition that birth rates tend to fall in developed societies as education increases, and improvement in the quality of life reduces the need for investment in larger families, past ideas of this sort were coloured by their era.

Forty years ago, when science fiction saw a coming age when contraception had become easily available, and free love a byword, it’s less surprising that what took hold were visions of future societies devoted to concubinage (Make Room! Make Room; Stand on Zanzibar) or non-reproductive sex practices (Solution Three) at the expense of the family unit.



Michael Moorcock summed up the principle in The Final Programme (written 1965; revised 1969, and filmed 1973), where an unproductive west is in its death throes, proxies for sex (such as drug taking, drinking, and playing the arcades) are rife and “...the good right hand had become the ... primary sexual organ...” . Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside (1971) reverses this idea: an effective “admission of defeat” in which reproduction is allowed to run unchecked in urban communities (the hive-like “monads”), but segregated from the stringently controlled agricultural communities that support them.



The strains that even a partial growth in urban population might bring to bear on society during the height of concern with the generation gap are also widely apparent. One familiar manifestation is in Kubrick’s version of A Clockwork Orange (1971), where youth violence runs rampant against the brutalist backdrop of Thamesmead’s no-frills architecture.



John Brunner reminded his readers that ‘Gangs develop primarily...in the slum or the ghetto where privacy... can’t be had and a reversion takes place to the wild state...’ , an idea echoed in the non-fiction of Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities) or Jonathan Raban (Soft City). One “solution” to the issue might, as Brunner noted in Stand on Zanzibar, be to channel prole violence into a continuous military draft (with obvious affinities with the Vietnam roll call). Another lies in encouraging the use of soporific drugs; although, as Kubrick stands to remind us, an unregulated access to stimulants may do just as much to provoke violence.



Disch conjures a dystopia in 334 in which the only human stock permitted to breed is “superior” stock, but even this brings its share of problems; in one subplot, a teenage gang commit murder, thanks simply to their highly-strung capacities and low threshold for boredom. The logical end to these generational tensions, and the struggle for space that exacerbates them, appears in the film Soylent Green; forcible euthanasia of the elderly and non-productive, and a recycling of their remains into a food supply that can support the mushrooming numbers of the young.

To modern sensibility, some of these tropes now seem prescient, while others appear overwrought; many had temporarily lost popularity by the late 70s. Perhaps the fictional seam was worked out, and some indices gradually altered. The overall global rate of population growth had slowed by the 1980s, and some fashionable theories of the 70s period, such as the idea that a violent demand for lebensraum was a necessary corollary of growing population, started to be questioned.



A comparison Disch made in 334 - that the 70s the west was in the approximate state of decline that the Roman Empire had been in during the eponymous year 334- seems, in retrospect, premature ... although many of the central issues have been resurrected in a teeming 21st century. While they lasted in their early form, the tropes were far reaching; even a populist tea-time favourite like Doctor Who could get in on the act. Colony in Space (1972), written by one of the BBCs great screenwriters, Malcolm Hulke, is set against a backdrop of mankind making a great trek to the stars. The colonists have abandoned the terrestrial for the lure of space for one simple reason: Earth’s cities are choked by insupportable overpopulation.

























































