Back in 1968, science fiction author John Brunner wrote the first of his great dystopian novels, Stand on Zanzibar. The novel was about one of the great worries of the age, overpopulation, and was set in far-off 2010, when there were an unimaginable seven billion people. As you may have gathered from the news over the last week, we're now living in that dystopia. Though its turned out to be not quite as dystopian as Brunner imagined.
Stripping away the ephemera from the book (the continuation of 60's racism and sexism, the Catholic schism, the awful slang), Brunner's future can be described in one word: crowded. With seven billion people, humanity is apparently squashed together so tightly that no-one can live in a house, and even the wealthy are forced to share apartments. This produces a state of mass-psychosis, with the human race like too many rats sharing too small a cage. Some people can't handle the stress, go berserk and run amok as "muckers". As a result, everyone is in a constant state of fear of the people around them, or drugged out of their mind to avoid it.
We seem to have largely dodged that bullet. Yes, the US has mass-shootings - but they seem to be a result of permissive gun laws and a culture of violence, not of crowding-induced insanity. In most of the world, it seems that we still have enough room left in our cage. Which is pretty scary when you see how crowded some parts of that cage are. Singapore has 7,000 people per square kilometre, Macau more than twice that. Clearly we can go quite high, globally speaking, before we hit our psychological limits (our physical limits, resources and pollution, are another question entirely, but that's another book).
Oddly, for a dystopian novel about overpopulation, population control doesn't get much of a mention. A lot of effort is spent on eugenics, but this is seen more as a means of saving medical resources than limiting growth (there's even an odd moment when it becomes clear that you can be forced to have an abortion for eugenic reasons, but can't get one voluntarily). The effects of this are primarily psychological as well, with large numbers of people forbidden to have children due to some defect, and going neurotic as a result. We dodged that bullet too, thanks to a man with a moustache discrediting the entire idea. Meanwhile, we now have an increasing number of people who are voluntarily childless, and quite happy about it (though I suppose some people would regard this as a social pathology and a symptom of Calhoun's "second death").
Brunner clearly thought that things couldn't go on much longer with seven billion people. In reality, the population is still growing. While the demographic transition looks like it will deal with it in the end, the global population is likely to peak at between nine and ten billion. Which means that even if we manage to cope with the resulting resource and pollution problems, we're still going to need a bigger island. Brunner allowed two square feet (0.186 square metres) per person for standing-room-only, which means something like 1860 square kilometres for ten billion people. Bintan, anyone?
