LITERATURE, POPULATION IN

"Adam and Eve," wrote George Bernard Shaw in his ambitious play Back to Methuselah, "were hung up on two frightful possibilities. One was the extinction of mankind by their accidental death. The other was the prospect of living forever. They could bear neither. Consequently, they had to invent natural birth and natural death, which are, after all, only modes of perpetuating life without putting on any single creature the terrible burden of immortality." Thus not only the human race, but the science of demography was born.

Yet in demographic terms, for over a century Westerners have seemed unable to decide what they fear most. The precipitous drop in European fertility rates has produced anxiety about numerical dwindling, latterly echoed even in the United States. Yet the six-fold increase in worldwide population since the early 1800s has prompted a contrary fear of crushing biological overload. Given the emotive nature of these opposing horrors–We are about to dis-appear! vs. We are being overrun!–it is less surprising that population issues have filtered into the Western literary canon than that their direct treatment in mainstream literature is so rare.

Predictably, what Anton Kuijsten termed "demografiction" divides between the twin terrors of population decline and population excess. Less obvious is a third category: fear of population professionals.

Fear of Population Decline

When fertility fell earlier in France than in the rest of Europe, alarm spread that low birth rates would doom the French to obscurity. Horrified by Malthusianism, so at odds with the perceived French predicament, in 1899 Emile Zola published the pronatalist novel Fécondité in order to demonstrate that capitalism promotes poverty, while "fruitfulness" is the moral and economic strength of the working class.

Mathieu and Marianne Froment begin poor but happy, and heedlessly beget some dozen children, to the despair of their more prosperous betters, who promote Malthusian woe. By the time this gothic tale is through, the effete capitalists have paid for their venal shortsightedness with murder, suicide, and madness, their lines truncated when single sons fall prey to depravity or consumption. By contrast, Mathieu and Marianne's 158 progeny of three generations gather for their seventieth wedding anniversary on their thriving farm.

Zola's arguments retain remarkable resonance in the early twenty-first century. "Had not every civilization, every progress, been due to the impulse of numbers?," Mathieu asks, presaging Julian Simon. Warnings about "that terrible swarming of Asiatic barbarians" bound to "sweep down on our Europe, ravage it, and people it afresh" anticipate Pat Buchanan. And Mathieu's declaration that population equilibrium will only arrive "when the earth, being entirely inhabited, cleared, and utilized, shall at last have accomplished its destiny" would hearten Wall Street globalists as much as it would sicken wilderness advocates.

Fécondité's present-day foil, Headbirths, or The Germans Are Dying Out by Günter Grass is a short, droll novel whose protagonists constitute the fecund Froments' demographic antithesis. The childless Harm and Dörte Peters take a sociologically edifying holiday tour of Asia while debating the torturous "Yes-to-baby No-to-baby" question. Counterintuitively for the field, economics barely enter in; instead the Peterses agonize about Third World poverty and nuclear radiation. Yet amidst the liberal pieties, the couple airs concerns that ring more true. Would this very holiday be possible with an infant? Encumberment could put their "sacred right to self-realization in danger." Finally, Dörte warms to a child, but Harm has gone off the idea, and on return they put pregnancy on hold pending the outcome of the German election.

The Peters's very method of decision making has predetermined its outcome. Harm shouts, "If I make a child, I want to do it consciously. Do you hear? Not the Hindu way!" But conscious reasoning will always come up with an excuse to forestall the inconvenience of Yes-to-baby, while the unthinking "Hindu way" will continue to people the planet.

Harm and Dörte embody the teleological revolution of the West's second demographic transition, whereby meaning has come to dwell inordinately in the present at the expense of the future. Yet P. D. James's The Children of Men hauntingly illustrates that the present's sense of fulfillment–not to mention its economy–is contingent on progenitors. The human race having become universally infertile post-1995, James's world of 2021 is a grim, senescent place, as the last, spoilt generation runs rampant and the burdensome elderly organize mass suicides to avoid being the last to turn out the light. Even more conceptually clever is Amin Maalouf's kindred novel, The First Century After Beatrice, whose instruction to the patriarchal Third World might run: Be careful what you wish for. A pill marketed as guaranteeing the birth of sons does just what it says; in Maalouf's future Third World there are plenty of people–for the time being–but hardly any girls.

Prospective human extinction has inspired a raft of commercial fiction. As a rule, thrillers like Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain are satisfied with sacrificing a handful of cautionary unfortunates before catastrophe is averted, while science fiction gleefully smites millions of walk-ons with no guarantee of a happy ending.

The nature of the catastrophe often expresses the prevailing angst of the era. E. M. Forster's story "The Machine Stops" reflects anxieties about auto-mation: A machine that tends to every human need creates a race of biological incompetents, like domesticated pets; when the machine breaks down and no one understands how it works, the species is finished. Subsequent science-fiction authors have also demonized dependence on technologies, extrapolating social disaster when metal, electricity, or plastic cease to function. Novels like John Christopher's No Blade of Grass and J. G. Ballard's The Burning World convey concerns about food and water supply, others like Christopher's The Long Winter about global temperature shift. But fictional apocalypse comes in a festival of more inventive guises: volcanic gas, planetary collision, infectious insanity, and extraterrestrial wasps. Arthur C. Clarke, however, designs extinction with a more cheerful slant. When a computer prints out "The Nine Billion Names of God" in his eponymous short story, the stars wink out quietly one by one; in Childhood's End, the last generation of men watches helplessly as its children evolve into incomprehensibly superior beings.

Otherwise, most doomsday novels feature war or disease. During the Cold War, of course, the most common threat to the human race in bookstores was bellicosity. The specter of nuclear holocaust gave rise not only to death-ray shoot-outs in outer space, but to realistic accounts like Neville Shute's mournful On the Beach (humanity's last remnants in Australia await an approaching cloud of nuclear fall-out), as well as to witty satires like Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (all water crystallizes into "ice-nine").

With fears of the Bomb receding and AIDS in ascendance, plague novels have become more the vogue. In a seminal work of this subgenre, George R. Stewart's Earth Abides, a young man in California recovers from a snakebite to find most of the human race dead from a new virus. As the handful of immune survivors form an ad hoc community, depopulation has some kid-in-a-candy-store appeal; houses, groceries, and liquor are free and abundant. But as Stewart tracks three post-plague generations, he vividly demonstrates that numbers maintain advanced civilization. Reduce the race to the size of a small town, and how many residents will remember how to make plastic? The last Americans plunder canned goods (with little respect for sell-by dates), and literacy atrophies; electrical and water systems break down. At length, the community reverts to its hunter-gatherer forebears.

As demonstrated by T. C. Boyle's After the Plague of 2001, whose title story also deploys Stewart's premise, the emergence of HIV, the threat of biological weapons, and the multiplication of disease vectors via globalization make epidemiology more than physics the black art of the age. At least on paper, expect more plague.

Fear of Population Excess

In the literature of population decline, peril makes people seem precious. The same cannot be said of the literature of population excess, in which two may be company but 30 billion is a crowd.

In Back to Methuselah, George Bernard Shaw commends an ideal lifespan of at least 300 years, lest "mere human mushrooms … decay and die when they are just beginning to have a glimmer of the wisdom." Yet Kurt Vonnegut's playful story "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" extrapolates what life might be like if "anti-gerasone" keeps folks alive for as long as they care to stick around. In a world of 12 billion, families of several generations live on top of one another, and the irritable 172-year-old Gramps tyrannizes his relatives with threats of disinheritance should he ever kick his own bucket. Taxed to penury to finance pensions, the youthful 112-year-old protagonist wails to his wife, "I don't think we're ever going to get a room to ourselves or an egg or anything."

With average Western lifespans climbing, its elderly cohorts swelling, and genetic research into the arrest of aging making headway, Vonnegut's premise becomes less fanciful. Likewise Simone de Beauvoir's novel, All Men Are Mortal, in which a fourteenth-century Italian takes a drug to induce immortality, only to discover that by the twentieth century his existence is boring, lusterless, and oppressive. While medical science still cannot offer eternal life, de Beauvoir's thesis–that brevity is one key to life's sweetness–suggests that great efforts lavished on longevity might be misspent.

Mainstream treatments of population excess are few. True, for those who argue that many poor countries are already too populous, the novels and travel books of V. S. Naipaul might qualify, and it is indeed sobering to come across in The Overcrowded Barracoon of 1972, "To be one of 439 million Indians is terrifying," when a slight three decades later Indians number over one billion. But for the most part authors define an "overpopulated" world as one more crowded than their own. Thus put off to the future, the issue has been primarily the purview of genre writers.

One exception is Colin Macpherson's The Tide Turners, set in his present of six billion people and credibly deploying available technology. Determined to give the earth a "rest" from human depredation, a group of young Australian eco-idealists design a virus that will leave humans sterile. Their aim is to disseminate the virus worldwide and shrink population to two billion over 40 years, though there's one unaddressed fly in the ointment: Total success would leave the species not reduced but extinct. Little matter, since the plot is foiled by a murderous cabal of anti-environmental capitalists.

As literature, The Tide Turners is pretty crude; the characters often speak like Sierra Club pamphlets. Moreover, the amateur virologists are portrayed as perfectly noble; proclaims the project's founder to his flock, "You're all heroes." Yet given that these do-gooders plan to expose the entire species to a contagious foreign virus after testing it for a few months on 150 subjects, The Tide Turners might better belong in the third category posited here.

Perhaps the most prestigious modern writer to take on population excess is Anthony Burgess, whose amusing social satire The Wanting Seed exemplifies how overdoing "fruitfulness" leads to biological perversity and moral inversion. In his anti-natalist Britain of the near future, homosexuality confers prestige ("It's sapiens to be homo"); parenthood, shame. While in George Orwell's 1984 sham wars create social cohesion, here they are staged as a means of population control. When iron state control breaks down, wholesale cannibalism ensues.

Though aspiring to realism, George Turner's The Sea and Summer is set in mid-twenty-first century Australia–where, along with California, a dis-proportionate number of dystopic novels take place. (Perhaps a paradisiacal reputation helps set the stage for paradise lost.) Here multiple catastrophes inter-sect–global-warming floods, monetary collapse, food shortage, and mass unemployment–each exacerbated by population growth. In Turner's strict class structure, the middle-class "Sweet" live in constant terror of slipping to the "Swill," the dirty, teeming ruck living in tower blocks on meager state handouts.

Turner's book and Harry Harrison's entertaining Make Room, Make Room–set in a New York City of 35 million, and the basis of 1973's cannibalistic cult film Soylent Green–are two better representatives of a whole class of population pulp novels that took off in the 1960s, powered by Ehrlich-style alarmism. Overabundance in these books reliably cheapens humanity into chaff; in fact, cannibalism is a running theme. In swarming dystopias, civil liberties erode, and small, protected elites often control the seething horde through fascistic or mechanistic means. Drab, mass-produced garments portray a loss of individuality, as the one is lost in a sea of the many. Quality of life plummets: The food runs to tasteless seaweed pellets. Drink may be available, but only rotgut; writers seem especially distressed by the prospect of no longer being able to get a decent bottle of wine. Living space is at a premium, domestic architecture dismal, often vast banks of the bleak Bauhaus high-rises typical of 1960s public housing.

Yet by and large these high-density nightmares are uncomplicated by race, which lends them a certain innocence. The same cannot be said of Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints, a novel both prescientand appalling.

It is the year 2000, and Raspail's population projection of seven billion worldwide turned out to be close. Resentful and wretched, 800,000 residents of Calcutta swarm onto a fleet of ships and steer the convoy toward the coast of France. As the rutting, reeking, hate-driven throng approaches, liberal, multicultural France prepares to greet her "visitors" with open arms. Meantime, resident immigrants, despising their menial jobs, constitute a waiting fifth column. By the time the ships run ashore–and the first landing party is a tide of bloated corpses thrown overboard–similar sea-jackings have occurred elsewhere, and the full-scale invasion of the First World by the Third has begun.

Certainly The Camp of the Saints is racist. While Turner personalizes the "Swill," Raspail's stinking "river of sperm" floating toward France is dehumanized, its mascot at the prow a speechless deformed dwarf. Yet it's a tough call whether Raspail is more disgusted by "the sweating, starving mass, stewing in urine and noxious gases" or by his own countrymen, who are too paralyzed with self-contempt to defend their borders: "Cowardice toward the weak is cowardice at its most subtle, and indeed, its most deadly." And to give the novel its due, it is written with tremendous verbal energy and passion.

Raspail gives bilious voice to an emotion whose statement is increasingly taboo in the West, but that can grow even more virulent when suppressed: the fierce resentment felt by majority populations when that status seems threatened. And the Third World migration pressures that Raspail foresaw have been brought to bear on the early twenty-first century, as squalid human trafficking proliferates and hundreds of asylum seekers nightly storm the Channel Tunnel at Calais, often bringing rail service to a halt. In their even-handed work, Fear of Population Decline, even Michael Teitelbaum and Jay M. Winter concede, "It seems doubtful … whether large-scale immigration can ever serve as a politically viable response to declining population." If The Camp of the Saints contains a lesson, it is that nativist concerns about immigration need fair airing, for such primitive anxiety is too potent to be consigned solely to the far right.

Fear of Population Professionals

All of these works radically diverge on which human aggregate constitutes the intolerable, and which the ideal. Not only Raspail but also John Brunner (Stand on Zanzibar) presents a millennial total of seven billion as horrific; Vonnegut cites an alarming 12 billion. Zola counter-claims that the earth could readily support "ten times" his own time's population of 1.5 billion, while Olaf Stapledon's blissful, stable utopia in Last and First Men contains only 100 million people. Yet demographers no more agree on optimal and catastrophic numbers than do the amateurs–which has helped to foster a whole literature demonizing not a population problem itself, but the folks who think they know how to fix it.

One such specimen is this writer's Game Control, whose irascible protagonist Calvin Piper has been fired as head of USAID's population division for his unacceptable promotion of higher infant mortality in the Third World. But his retirement in Nairobi is hardly idle: Calvin is researching a pathogen that would neatly decimate a third of the world's population overnight. Despite its outlandish premise, Game Control is closer to social satire than science fiction, and focuses as firmly on demographers as on their subject. Luminaries in the field like Julian Simon, John Bongaarts, Ben Wattenberg, and Garrett Hardin all make textual appearances, and Calvin's shy, worthy girlfriend Eleanor Merritt works for the Pathfinder Fund.

Calvin's fomenting about the dire consequences of inaction is sometimes convincing, but his motivation is suspect. He's resentful about having been fired. Though not strictly a bigot–dismisses Eleanor, "Calvin's not a racist. He hates everybody"–he is certainly a misanthrope. (In fact, Calvin finally comes to recognize the illogic of going to so much trouble to save a race he detests.) When, having uncovered his ludicrous scheme, Eleanor sets out to prove that AIDS alone will "cure" population growth, Calvin refuses to believe that the disease is up to the job. His attachment is not to humanity's salvation, but to his pet project, and most of all: to being right.

Zola also peopled Fécondité with glib demo-graphic know-it-alls, and in Thomas Love Peacock's Melincourt, Malthus himself (as Mr. Fax) gives fatuous advice: "The world is overstocked with featherless bipeds…. It is better that the world should havea small number of peaceable inhabitants … than the disproportionate mass of fools, slaves, coxcombs, thieves, rascals, liars, and cutthroats with which it is at present encumbered." Peacock leaves little doubt that Malthus is an ass.

For Peacock, Malthusianism is class-driven: "It seems … peculiarly hard that all the blessings of life should be confined to the rich. If you banish the smiles of love from the cottage of poverty, what remains to cheer its dreariness?" Thus, the wealthy get all the land, the fine food, the wines, and the status, and now they want a monopoly on sex as well.

An array of commercial fiction, too, engenders a healthy suspicion of population snake oil. The plague in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's The Time of the Fourth Horseman is caused by population control gone wrong. In the medical thriller Benefits, by Zoe Fairbairns, a contraceptive in the water supply gives rise to dreadful mutations, while both Turner's The Sea and Summer and Blanche d'Alpuget's White Eye put a more nefarious slant than The Tide Turners on a sterilization virus.

More serious writers have raised the alarm about social control of reproduction, notably Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World of fascistic eugenics. Like Burgess, Huxley turns "family values" ingeniously on their head: with raising test-tube children the business of the state, promiscuity is lauded; love, monogamy, and childbirth are obscene. The principles of Henry Ford–from whose birthday all dates are marked, à la "the year of our Ford 600"–are applied to churn out identical editions of people, bred to be contented with their place. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale has a gloomier texture, and there's no missing the feminist message: After environmental degradation has rendered much of the population sterile, fertile women are forced into sexual slavery to bear children for wealthy barren couples. Huxley is more fun.

The gentlest poke at the population pro would be R. K. Narayan's charming The Painter of Signs. During Indira Gandhi's aggressive vasectomy drive, a young artisan is smitten with a zealous family planning worker, who breaks his heart. Then, no woman who views children as "defeat for her cause" and is "obsessed with the sexual activities of others" could possibly have made a good wife.

Demography, Life, and Literature

Demography is a lightning rod for literary reservations about humanity itself, which can appear repulsive in sufficient quantity, or even seem to deserve its fate when having brought extinction upon itself. Alternatively, "demografiction" can animate the humanitarian truism that biologically people all sink or swim together. This collective existential ambivalence helps to express the dichotomy that other people are at once resource and rival: individuals need social cooperation to survive, yet the fiercest competition for that survival comes from our own kind. Because beneath the field's dry statistical surface there teems an irresistible Pandora's box of paranoia, nationalism, racism, rivalrous ambition, misanthropy, and apocalyptic dread, demography is sure to tempt more fiction-writing dabblers to prize open the lid.

See also: Population Thought, History of.

bibliography

fear of population decline.

Ballard, J. G. 1964. The Burning World (An Earth Without Water). New York: Berkley Medallion.

Boyle, T. Coraghessan. 2001. After the Plague. New York: Viking Press.

Christopher, John. 1956. No Blade of Grass. New York: Simon and Schuster.

——. 1962. The Long Winter. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Clarke, Arthur C. 1953. Childhood's End. New York: Ballantine Publishing Group.

——. 1967. The Nine Billion Names of God: The Best Short Stories of Arthur C. Clarke. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc.

Crichton, Michael. 1969. The Andromeda Strain. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Forster, E. M. 1911. The Machine Stops and Other Stories. Cambridge, Eng.: Provost and Scholars of King's College.

Grass, Günter. 1982. Headbirths, or The Germans are Dying Out, trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

James, P. D. 1994. The Children of Men. New York: Warner Books.

Maalouf, Anton. 1994. The First Century After Beatrice. London: Abacus.

Shaw, George Bernard. 1921. Back to Methuselah. London: Constable and Co.

Shute, Neville. 1957. On the Beach. New York: Morrow.

Stewart, George R. 1949. Earth Abides. New York: Ballantine Books.

Vonnegut, Kurt. 1963. Cat's Cradle. New York: Delacorte Press.

Zola, Emile. 1899. Fécondité, trans. E. Vizetelly. 1900. London: Chatto and Windus.

fear of population excess. Ballard, J. G. 1967. "Billenium." In Cities of Wonder, ed. Damon Knight. New York: McFadden-Bartell.

Blish, James, and Norman L. Knight. 1967. A Torrent of Faces. New York: Doubleday.

Brunner, John. 1968. Stand on Zanzibar. New York: Doubleday.

Burgess, Anthony. 1962. The Wanting Seed. New York: Norton.

de Beauvoir, Simone. 1955. All Men Are Mortal. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Co.

Ehrlich, Max. 1971. The Edict. New York: Doubleday.

Goldberg, Marshall, and Kenneth Lay. 1980. Disposable People. New York: Tower.

Harrison, Harry. 1967. Make Room, Make Room. New York: Berkley Medallion.

Macpherson, Colin. 1999. The Tide Turners. Queensland, Australia: Mopoke Publishing.

Moorcock, Michael. 1975. The Distant Suns. New York: Unicorn. Anthologized in Sailing to Utopia. 1996. New York: Orion Publishing Group.

Naipaul, V. S. 1972. The Overcrowded Barracoon. London: André Deutsch.

Oliver, Chad. 1985. Shadows in the Sun. New York: Crown.

Pendleton, Don. 1970. Population Doomsday. New York: Pinnacle Books.

Raspail, Jean. 1975. The Camp of the Saints, trans. Norman Shapiro. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Turner, George. 1987. The Sea and Summer. London: Faber and Faber.

Vonnegut, Kurt. 1968. "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow." In Welcome to the Monkey-house. New York: Delacorte Press.

fear of population professionals.

Atwood, Margaret. 1986. The Handmaid's Tale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

d'Alpuget, Blanche. 1986. White Eye. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Fairbairns, Zoe. 1979. Benefits. New York: Virago.

Huxley, Aldous. 1932. Brave New World. London: Chatto and Windus.

Narayan, R. K. 1976. The Painter of Signs. London: William Heinemann.

Peacock, Thomas Love. [1817] 1948. Melincourt. In The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock. London: Rupert Hart-Davis.

Shriver, Lionel. 1994. Game Control. London: Faber and Faber.

Stapledon, Olaf. 1968. Last and First Men. New York: Dover Publications.

Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn. 1976. The Time of the Fourth Horseman. New York: Doubleday.

other references.

Kuijsten, Anton. 1999. "Demografiction." In The Joy of Demography and Other Disciplines: Essays in Honour of Dirk van de Kaa, ed. Anton Kuijsten, Henk de Gans, and Henk de Feijter. Amsterdam: Nethurd Publications, Amsterdam.

Teitelbaum, Michael S., and Jay M. Winter. 1985. Fear of Population Decline. San Diego: Academic Press.

Lionel Shriver