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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3724 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 14, 2024

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Does anyone have any recommendations for sci-fi works involving population decline? I ask because most late 20th century — and even early 21st century — works I'm familiar with assume continual population growth, and frequently an overpopulation crisis. (Even the grimiest dystopian cyberpunk seems to take for granted that people will somehow keep popping out kids, enough to more than replace all the people getting gunned down by megacorp hit squads or torn apart by psychotic cyborgs.)

The only exceptions I can think of are works involving sudden plagues of infertility (Handmaid's Tale, Children of Men) or are Japanese (Yokohama Shopping Log). Anything else out there?

Edit: I'm talking less the "post-apocalyptic" genre, where the collapse has already occurred and the focus is rebuilding, but during the decline — particularly a slower one like Yokohama Shopping Log.

A lot of wildbow's works (Worm, Pact, Twig...) hit similar themes; though the decline is usually violent, he has a recurring pattern of stories starting from a place of relative stability and affluence and gradually cranking up the bleakness/hopelessness/lack of resources available both to individual characters and to society at large.

On the Japanese media side, Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou (English title might be something like Girls' Last Tour) is a worthy spiritual successor to YKK, perhaps slightly more on the bleak and eventful side. It's a sort of cute slice of life series about two girls traversing a ruined world in the wake of WW4 in search of a something/anything, as the last remnants of human activity around them flicker out. The author's narration and Twitter feed pattern-match against the worst cases of inadequately medicated clinical depression I have encountered. Both the manga and the anime adaptation are pretty great.

Classic example is planet Solaria in Asimov's universe.

This planet was underpopulated and declining not because some catastrophe, but unlimited affluence.

Originally, there were about 20,000 people living in vast estates individually or as married couples. There were thousands of robots for every Solarian. Almost all of the work and manufacturing was conducted by robots. The population was kept stable through strict birth and immigration controls. In the era of Robots and Empire, no more than five thousand Solarians were known to remain. Twenty thousand years later, the population was twelve hundred, with just one human per estate. Solarians hated physical contact with others and only communicated with each other via holograms.

I appreciate any mention in the wild of Yokohama Shopping Log, but alas that I cannot recommend anything like it.

It's more in the background but The Lord of the Rings has some of this.

The population decline in Middle Earth in Third Age is explicitly due to apocalyptic conditions - constant war, orc and other monster infestation and plagues spread by Sauron (the Shire is one of few places exempt from this general shithole state).

Not what OP intended.

Perhaps for most peoples, but the elves seem to be leaving/declining more because they just aren't feeling the vibe anymore.

The later books of the Three Body Problem series have natural population decline. One of the secondary ideas is that advancing technology makes manly vigour somewhat superfluous, resulting in an epidemic of androgynous soyboys who are not exactly top-tier in a crisis.

Fallen Angels maybe?

Children of Men

Interstellar?

A Canticle for Leibowitz?

I'd class that more in the "post-apocalyptic" genre — more "mass death" than "population decline."

These episodes from The Outer Limits (1995 - 2002) series: Dark Rain, Patient Zero, Rite of Passage, The Vaccine, Lithia, The Camp, and Promised Land.

The Luck of the Draw episode from Sliders - "in this Earth where San Francisco, populated by only 100,000 people in a world of half a billion".

These episodes from The Outer Limits (1995 - 2002) series

I had to remind myself of those episodes, because it's been awhile since I watched the show — not since back when it first aired.

There’s the post-collapse genre exemplified by Foundation. It shifts back to focusing on recovery pretty fast, but the idea of planning for population decay and instability is there. Dune flirts with the subject for similar reasons. I haven’t read past God-Emperor, but I hear the last couple Frank novels are weirdly desolate.

For more modern stories which play around in the post-apocalypse, maybe Revelation Space? Or influenced works like the sandbox space game Starsector. These are settings where humanity has not coped well with the collapse of major technologies. You really get a sense that humanity is limping along even when there are insane accomplishments in the setting.

You might appreciate an explicit (if minor) theme in A Fire Upon the Deep. The sympathetic alien leader of Woodcarvers is specifically struggling with the eugenics required to keep continuity of consciousness in an organism made of multiple separate brains. Shit’s wild. The whole book is great, and straddles the line between bleak and triumphant. I suspect the sequel, featuring a few humans marooned on a primitive planet, would hit similar themes.

On the fantasy side, Prince of Nothing. It’s also post-apocalyptic, and it’s very clear that the squabbling institutions of men are losing ground. The first apocalypse was triggered by summoning an entity which prevented live births so long as it remained in the world, and the group which summoned it is still around. Great series. Absolutely horrible.

So yeah, good question.

Prince of Nothing

Well, the Sranc certainly aren’t suffering from depopulation…

The Nonmen are a race explicitly suffering from depopulation as all their women were killed by the Womb Plague iirc, so you have a society of immortal individuals slowly dying off from war and madness. I think it’s The Unholy Consult that has the section exploring the last of their extant Mansions. Haunting and beautiful stuff, Bakker is easily one of the best fantasy authors living.

I second the Starsector recommendation, although do note that the game is still in development and the main storyline is currently only half-finished.

A Fire Upon the Deep

I suspect the sequel, featuring a few humans marooned on a primitive planet, would hit similar themes.

I will highly recommend the sequel, A Deepness in the Sky. That primitive planet? It circles a star that dies out then flashes on. The natives? Spider-aliens. The deepness? Their word for where they hibernate during the sun's darkness, and the place that protects them from the explosion of light. Thus, the Deepness in the Sky is their place of safety, off their bipolar world, somewhere outside of the constraints their world has imposed upon them.

And I haven't even mentioned the humans, yet.

Shit's wild.

It's pretty wild, but it suffers from the fact that the aliens are just humans who happen to look like spiders. Their psychology, politics and history are identical to that of western countries in 20th century Earth. Nothing about their strange history or biology makes them any different from humans. They have nuclear families, they have constitutional monarchies, they are just Spider-Alien Britain. Hell, the competing human factions and sub-factions in the book are more alien then the aliens.

I think this is by choice since the author seems to believe in a kind of Whig view of history that liberalism is the only real way to advance and anything else is doomed to slow death or stagnation.

The Three-Body Problem did a better job of showcasing actually bizarre aliens, instead of people who look bizarre.

Their psychology, politics and history are identical to that of western countries in 20th century Earth. Nothing about their strange history or biology makes them any different from humans. They have nuclear families, they have constitutional monarchies, they are just Spider-Alien Britain. Hell, the competing human factions and sub-factions in the book are more alien then the aliens.

Wasn't that how the weaponized autists interpreted them for the masses? When one of the protagonists meets them in real life, he's immediately weirded out.

Wasn't that how the weaponized autists interpreted them for the masses? When one of the protagonists meets them in real life, he's immediately weirded out.

Yes and no. The spider society really does have nuclear families, a class system, constitutional monarchies and a World War and Cold War that mirror that of 20th century Britain. The physical descriptions and names are made to more mirror human culture by the autists, but fundamentally the spiders' history and social structure is like 20th century Britain in reality, that part isn't made up.

Also, although, the humans are weirded out, the spiders find humans extremely cute; because, spider children can only look in one direction like humans and spiders find the way humans stare at them while speaking, adorable.

Yeah I loved their 'house of congress' analog turning out to just be a giant pit full of spiders.

Dying Earth, Book of the New Sun? That's the closest I can think of, but those are not decline so much as post-collapse.

For that matter, the Barsoom novels occur on a Mars which was previously much more inhabited.

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