Joshua Coffin, a time dilated spaceman, remembers Earth almost a century ago. He visits a fifty-plus-floor tower that used to be surrounded by trees and gardens with a city on the horizon. Now the city has engulfed the tower:
"...with mean plastic shells of tenement. In another generation, this would be Lowlevel." (2, p. 16)
The encroachment of the city reminds us of the history of Kith Town in another future history by Poul Anderson.
The Terrestrial population has doubled in Coffin's absence. Theron Wolfe prefers to stay in his fiftieth-floor apartment although most well-off Citizens are nomadic. The classes that usually stay in one place are Guardians with their estates or the masses too poor to move.
Earth sounds like a place to leave if you can which is what Coffin and Wolfe will discuss.
3 comments:
Though that's also a case of the dangers of straight-line extrapolation. It now looks as if the world population will peak and begin to decline within my lifetime... and I was born in 1953.
China's population is declining now, for example, which would have been inconceivable when I was born, and would have mentally required some catastrophe to explain.
Meanwhile, unfortunately, a catastrophe is coming anyway.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
China did suffer a catastrophe: the triumph of Mao Tse-tung and his Communists in the Chinese civil war ending in 1949. The spectacular brutality of the one child only policy imposed by the regime (along with many others) seems to have been what began that population decline.
Ad astra! Sean
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