What demography realities and issues have inspired fiction writers?

Demographic realities and issues often inspire fiction writers who imagine future dystopias. La demographie de l’extrême: quand la fiction anticipe l’avenir de la société [Taking demography to extremes: fiction that anticipates the future of society] considers literary works that drew quite early on what have become current demographic issues: overpopulation, environmental or climate-related migration, problems related to aging populations, and others. 

Retired INED researcher Jacques Veron studies the problematics of population as it relates to the environment and development; he is also interested in the history of demography and populations. 

Retired INED researcher Jean-Marc Rohrbasser specializes in the history of statistics and demography.

Our intention was to compare demographic developments as imagined in works of fiction—Demografiction, to use the term coined by Anton Kuijsten (former professor of demography at the University of Amsterdam)—with current demographic realities or possible future ones.

In fiction works that fall into this category—and there are many more of them than we expected at the outset—demographic trends and developments are often taken to extremes. What demographic develops are used as matter for fiction? The science-fiction writer John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968) depicted an explosive rise in demographic growth, while in The World Inside (1971), Robert Silverberg imagined rampant urbanization and Margaret Atwood, in Oryx and Crake, a devastating epidemic. Moving from science-fiction to the general category of fiction, we can cite John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, which shows the degree to which climate-related migration can prove difficult and painful for population groups seeking a new life. 

One example is Green Sun, by Kent Hanson (2018) (the novel-based film became a cult movie). This work of fiction depicts an extreme situation imagined on the basis of non-fiction reports on world demographic growth. A spectacular rise in population and urbanization in New York City, dooms New Yorkers to live in an utterly ravaged, rundown environment where they undergo a drastic food shortage. What events may have inspired it? We can cite the anxiety caused in 1968 by alerts from the Club of Rome and the 1972 Meadows report stressing the dangers of unlimited demographic and economic growth. But the Green Sun catastrophe has not happened, even though high population growth rates have been a major challenge for many societies.

In an entirely different context, Richard Matheson in his short story “The Test,” published in 1954—well before demographic aging became a major preoccupation for modern societies—imagined systematically testing individuals’ intellectual aptitudes above a certain age. The sanction for failing this particularly humiliating test was none other than euthanisia. A terrifying vision of end-of-life management—and, needless to say, an entirely unacceptable approach today. 

Without a doubt the most fully imagined and detailed dystopia is still Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, written, I wish to recall, in 1932. But what struck us as the grimmest fictional work—Jean-Michel Truong’s novel Eternity Express (2003)—also deals with aging. The author establishes a parallel between the Holocaust and the programmed elimination of older people, an act legitimized by way of well-informed financial calculations. In the framework of a “senior residents delocalization law,” agreements have been signed between the Union (we may assume it’s the European Union) and China stipulating that China will receive the Union’s baby-boomers. A special travel agency is in charge of luring them to what look like paradisial “retirement villages.” Well-off older people are put on highspeed Paris-to-Moscow trains, where they transfer to the Trans-Siberian and ultimately the Trans-Mongolian railway and find themselves in China welcomed with music and champagne. They are then immediately exterminated.

However, other, less ghastly dystopias, such as Jean Dutourd’s 2024 (a nod to George Orwell’s 1984) take off—sometimes with humor—from other demographic issues, such as what a childless world might be like.