/lit/ - Literature

fucking niggers

>>23390090
and they're "immigrating" here in floods. overpopulation is a real problem

>>23390064
survivor bias, that apocalyptic fiction sold well because the 60s and 70s were decades plagued by social and global problems and that fiction created a catharsis for the readers buying it. this trend became a hysteria about technology in the 80s and 90s.

the books that correctly predicted the future from that era did not sell well, and are now waiting to be rediscovered. it will take some time, i would argue only now are the visionary futures from the 1900s-1950s being re-read and discussed, they seem fresh because unlike their contemporaries which predicted robots and aliens, ray guns, time machines and atomic wars - those authors gave a more fitting picture of the future, mundane, gradual totalitarianism but subtle and inoffensive, they discussed multipolarity and the small scale wars and unstable geopolitical tensions we have. they saw consumerism as the driver for economic growth but also the death of small enterprise and overall they painted a pleasant physical future but an unpleasant psychical one.

>>23390064
The were just listening to ruling class groups like the Club of Rome

>>23390224
This.

Also, you still never know what will happen in the long-term. So-called “schizos” claim the world’s ruling class are trying to depopulate us precisely because of this claimed fear of theirs of world overpopulation that goes back at least for decades, but that aside, if that doesn’t happen, world population growth rates are still insane, especially when compared to about what the population was the last century, and what the estimated population was about a hundreds of thousands of years before that.

“It took around 300,000 years of human prehistory and history for the human population to reach a billion and only 222 years more to reach 8 billion.” https://www.axios.com/2022/11/14/global-population-8-billion-data-world-humans-un
(Supposedly, although such academics’, scientists, and NGOs’ claims may indeed be biased, flawed, of uncertain methodology to make such claims, and/or propaganda.

But, anyway, given these alarmists have at least SOME points right, give it a few more decades, and then MAYBE you’ll have your John-Brunner-future-dystopia then. The technological and social advancements we made that allow an unprecedented amount of people to breed and survive who may not have otherwise, as well as the simple law of the exponential growth of populations (say someone has just two kids, and each of those kids has on average at least two kids, and each of their kids has on average at least two kids, etc.) and things start getting wonky. Besides the real possibility of all the energy/fossil fuel consumption required to sustain this growing population (at least at the high standard of living in the West as well as some of increasingly Westernized powerhouses like Russia/China/India and satellites, compared to less developed places), plus the possibility of this leading to resource depletion of such energy sources + catastrophic effects on the climate and astounding amounts of pollution. In fact, Brunner already presciently somewhat predicted some of this in another books, with the average citizen wearing masks for horrific pollution in another novel “The Sheep Look Up”, at least for citizens in the most industrialized and polluted towns of nations like China and India, where this already goes on. If you want to see elements of the postmodern overpopulated dystopia, look at some of these worst places in China and India already.

>>23390484
Example of what I was mentioning (again, this situation of overpopulated citizens wearing masks for pollution exactly paralleling what goes on in another Brunner novel, “The Sheep Look Up”, written decades ago)
Etc.

Are science-fiction writers, or John Brunner specifically, prophets? No, definitely not, they clearly get stuff wrong sometimes or even many times. But their creative extrapolation of trends they already see in the real world, and whatever research into and knowledge of hard and soft sciences they have, sometimes might allow them to creatively and accurately predict elements of the future. They may exaggerate it or shoot way over the mark, but sometimes there’s those nuggets which are eerily prescient.

>>23390064

armies and think tanks hire sci fi writers to come up with scenarios now

The classic cures for overpopulation are war, famine, and disease. But that would ruin the overpopulation genre's fun.