Novels with a focus on demographic transition-driven decline1 are sadly rare in Western SF. The correct response is to complain loudly that kids are staying off my lawn. However, it’s hard to come up with a list of books about a subject which very few Western authors—Charles Stross aside—find interesting. To paraphrase my uncle Don’s former wrestling opponent, “You read the books you have, not the books you might want or wish to have at a later time.” Novels featuring low population Earths depopulated for reasons other than demographic transition are easy enough to find.
Here are five examples.
Cemetery World by Clifford D. Simak (1973)
Starflight allowed humans to leave Earth for other worlds. The Final War provided them with a good reason to do so. Ten thousand years after the Final War, Earth is one vast Wisconsin, a rustic wilderness in which humans are few and far between. One might think, therefore, that the planet was insignificant. Not so.
Earth will always be the world from which humanity sprang. It is therefore the sacred soil in which humans across the galaxy wish their mortal remains interred. Mother Earth, Incorporated provides funerary services to the galaxy. This provides them with steady income—income not to be disrupted by excessively curious visitors like Fletcher Carson and his free robot companion, Elmer. Not to worry! There’s always room in the cemetery for two more long-term occupants.
Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre (1978)
Earth destroyed itself with war and resource depletion, but not before founding the colonies that would become the Sphere. The thriving worlds of the Sphere feel no gratitude towards Earth. Instead, they leave the barren, underpopulated world to scrabble for survival.
Snake is a wandering Healer who uses bio-engineered snakes to minister to Earth’s sickly. The communities of desolate Earth are almost as isolated from each other as from the stars. A tragic misunderstanding costs Snake her precious Dreamsnake. The exotic snake is irreplaceable…almost. It may be that Center, the lone surviving city of note on Earth, might be able to replace the slain Dreamsnake. If only Center were not nearly as disinclined to trade with outsiders as the Sphere is disinclined to trade with Earth.
Knight Moves by Walter Jon Williams (1985)
A core-world alien, Snaggles, studies the social evolution of various carbon-based intra-skeletal species. Humanity’s past falls within its remit. Humanity’s present, however, is an inconvenience. Billions of humans interfere with field work. Therefore, Snaggles makes a deal with Doran. Doran can provide his fellow humans with immortality and vast power if they take his one-way tickets to habitable exo-planets. Most humans find the offer attractive. By the modern era, Earth has ten million humans left on it.
Because contact with colony worlds is limited to light speed travel and communication, Earth enjoys quiet stagnation. Now, however, a disruptive element has appeared. Lugs are herbivores seemingly native to an alien world. At first glance, they’re remarkable only in that there seems to be no reason why they would have evolved their particular suite of adaptations under their current conditions. The explanation only raises more questions: the lugs, only as bright as hamsters, have somehow managed to master the art of superluminal teleportation. This is a trick which if duplicated could utterly reshape human civilization.
Xenozoic Tales by Mark Schultz (1986 and onwards)
Who could have predicted that rampant pollution, excessive resource exploitation, and the occasional catastrophic war could have drawbacks? Not humans, whose lack of foresight is rivalled only by their unearned confidence. Confronted by cataclysmic disasters, a handful of lucky humans retreated to underground cities. They hid there for half a millennium.
When humans finally did reemerge, they found Earth transformed. Lifeforms not seen for a hundred million years had reappeared. Why this might be is a mystery.2 Current circumstances present humanity with a choice: somehow learn to live in an alien environment alongside dinosaurs and far more exotic species or repeat earlier mistakes. If they do, this time humanity may face extinction.
Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn (2017)
The Fall swept away multitudes. Where there were once enough people to fill vast cities, now there are only scattered hamlets. Humans being social animals, however, the remnants swiftly formed new communities. The Coast Road is one such. While far poorer than America before the Fall, the Coast Road uses the resources it has as equitably and sustainably as it can.
The system works because officials work hard to ensure that it does. Enid and Tomas are two such officials, investigating potential lawbreaking such as illicit childbirth, hoarding, and murder. If a crime has been committed, they deliver judgment. This sounds straightforward, but as the violent death that draws them to the village of Pasadan demonstrates, sometimes facts can be clear but the truth can be very hard to determine.
***
No doubt for every example I can provide, Tor.com’s collective readership can name a dozen, each one possibly a better choice than the five I selected. Comments are, as ever, below.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and the Aurora finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, is eligible to be nominated again this year, and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Put simply, birth rates are declining. When birth rates are lower than death rates, something seen in nations across the world (the main exceptions being the various African countries where fertility rates remain high), the long-term consequence is that population will begin to decline, as is currently the case in Japan. Stross’s “Saturn’s Children” offers one logical extrapolation—by the time the novel is set, humans are completely extinct—but that’s not the only way in which authors could write about a world experiencing a long-term population decline driven only by people deciding not to have kids.
[2]One possibility is that Mark Schultz liked drawing dinosaurs as much as he liked drawing vintage automobiles, also a prominent feature of “Xenozoic Tales.” Readers may be more familiar with Schultz’s work under the title “Cadillacs & Dinosaurs.”
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep – depopulated Earth as most humans have left for space.
The Postman, by David Brin. Connecting scattered, isolated communities with the symbol of a post office uniform and the reality of actual mail transit.
Califia’s Daughters, by Laurie R. King as Leigh Richards (King is better known for her Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series and some mysteries/thrillers). Postwar, a virus has wiped out most men. The remaining men are protected by fierce women warriors. One of the warriors has to travel to investigate a potential threat.
Of course John Varley’s Eight Worlds setting is too well-known to be worth mentioning here.
3: Is it, though? The most recent 8Wv2 novel was 4 years ago, and the one before that was almost a quarter century ago. Varley’s current circumstances — heart atttack, then a bypass, then Covid, then pneumonia, then pleural effusion, then Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease — seem like they’d be a serious impediment to delivering another book soon, although apparently he’s taking another run at Gas Giant, a trunk novel from the long long ago.
_The Book of the New Sun_, of course. The depopulation isn’t foregrounded, but it’s absolutely there if you look.
I bounced hard off Dreamsnake and never gave it a second try, because the precipitating incident required the protagonist to be either breathtakingly careless or very stupid.
Doug M.
Empty World (1977), by John Christopher.
A plague scours the world clean of almost all humans. The only survivors are a few kids under the age of 14 or so.
Seems like Captain Trips on steroids as far as its depopulating effects go.
If the Eight Worlds books are too well known to mention, then how about Station Eleven? :)
Actually, one of the best stories about a depopulated Earth I know is “Watershed”, by James Blish, the last segment of The Seedling Stars, in which the “Original Humans” who have left Earth long before return, only to find that they must reseed the ruined Earth they left behind with Adapted Humans who can tolerate the altered biosphere.
I’m not sure this counts, but there’s also Wildside by Stephen Gould. The depopulated Earth is an alternate Earth, accessible from the ranch of the main protagonist, teenager Charlie. Humans never developed in the alternate Earth, so it’s filled with wildlife and resources, and there’s no pollution, no despoiling. How do you use it, and protect it?
Cordwainer Smith’s “Instrumentality of Mankind” future timeline has Earth severely depopulated following the “Ancient Wars” (presumably, nuclear exchanges during late 20th century) with the exception of China. Even as society recovers, the ability to colonize the galaxy draws off population so that Earth remains sparsely populated far into the future.
Honourable mention to several recent Transformers animated series which, despite being (at least partially) set on modern-day Earth, can’t show more than four or five humans in total, simply because CGI is expensive.
Clarke’s Childhood’s End doesn’t feature a depopulated Earth during most of the book, but it sure heads in that direction.
Craig Harrison’s The Quiet Earth was the first thing popping into my head.
For the longest time, I wasn’t even aware of the existence of this book even though I’d seen the movie based on it.
A commenter above mentions John Christopher’s Empty World, but that’s merely the most extreme example from Christopher. Setting YA sci-fi in a more or less depopulated Earth was his stock in trade, and probably contributed strongly in that way to the template for a lot of the dystopian YA fiction we’re seeing so much of these days.
I’m just going to note in passing that “depopulated earth” is almost the exact premise that my first two SF novels, “Singularity Sky” and “Iron Sunrise”, riffed off. (No, I am not going to write a third in that series.)
“Living Space” by Isaac Asimov has the severely overpopulated “prime” earth settling its population family by family on unpopulated “alternate” earths. Until they run into another alternate overpopulated earth that is trying to do the same…
(Perhaps this doesn’t count because the destination planets are unpopulated (never inhabited) and not depopulated?)
How about L. E. Modesitt’s Forever Hero Saga – Dawn for a Distant Earth, The Silent Warrior, and The Endless Twilight? My interpretation is that Earth had an ecological catastrophe after inventing FTL drive – there are lots of human populated worlds that look to Earth as the mother planet, an empire decides to restore Earth to her former glory (or at least make it reasonably habitable for human beings again, instead of the marginally that it is at the beginning of the trilogy). Needless to say, complications ensue.
Then there’s Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Realtime, where a handful of time and/or space travelers [1] find that the entire rest of humanity vanished, and they never learn why.
[1] Forward only and STL only, in that order.
Clifford D. Simak also gave us A Choice of Gods. A strange force, that turned out to be the Mind of the Galaxy, took most of humanity away from the Earth except for a few scattered people and some tribes. We only know about a small part of North America, but extrapolate on your own. These few remaining humans are immortal and gain powerful telepathic and teleportational abilities. Meanwhile, humanity’s robots / androids are left to their own devices, and they build, a device. This machine is a supercomputer that can communicate with the Galactic Mind. Read it to find out about what happens when the displaced humans try to return to Earth (hint they weren’t killed off) and want the mind powers of those who remained behind. Oh, and Clifford gives us an alien in the book who appears as a, literal, can of worms.
The Last Castle.
Jack Vance.
I think the Dan Simmons’ book Ilium and Olimpos have a depopulated Earth. Not entirely sure it counts as depopulated because of demographic changes but there is no ongoing apocalypse or post-apocalypse society.
@21: The depopulation was courtesy of a biological weapon that killed *everyone* who was not in one ethnic group (specifically the one its makers were targeting; apparently they had a sign error).
@13: My first thought too. Personally I think the movie was better than the book.
There’s also Emergence by David R. Palmer, in which a virus kills almost everybody and the survivors are mostly or entirely (I forget which) posthuman. Notable for being written from the viewpoint of a tween/teen girl who is extremely intelligent and has superhuman senses AND is a tween/teen girl, so she makes mistakes you would expect from people at that stage.
There’s a classic short story with a very racist air that ends with a heartbroken mother musing that she’ll have to name her son Eddy “for short.” Can’t remember the title right now.
Robin Hobb’s only SF novel, as by Megan Lindholm, Alien Earth, is due an honourable mention at least, as the Earth is depopulated, its population having dispersed across the galaxy. The action is set among the scattered descendants of Earth, and sundry other beings, as they attempt to redeem their heritage. Well worth reading.
The Emberverse series (questionably SF, depending on how you feel about Alien Space Bats) depopulates the world fairly radically at the beginning, with the collapse of technological civilization and the ensuing mass starvation. While it gets steadily less empty throughout the rest of the books, as survivors adjust to the new world and start finding other groups of survivors/expanding into the empty areas, it seems unlikely to return to pre-change population densities any time soon.
Roger Zelazny’s This Immortal (originally serialized as “…And Call Me Conrad”) shared the 1966 Hugo for Best Novel with Dune, so it certainly merits mention here. We’re given an Earth depopulated by nuclear holocaust and a main character serving as tour guide for an alien to the Terran remains
For varying degrees of emptiness Earth Abides, The Chrysalids, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Epilogue, Winter of the World, Vault of the Ages, ….
Adding onto @17’s Modesitt mention, I’d go with Adiamante.
Reminds me of some of the short stories of William Sanders. Some kind of bio-weapon got loose, and the only survivors are people who had some ancestry from American Indigenous peoples.
It never goes into any detail about the wider world, but the former USA is sparsely populated. South and Central America must have quite a few people in them, but the rest of the world would be pretty empty, I’d think.
My first thought upon seeing the title was Cemetary World, and voila, there it was. And I recently read that a reprinted Xenozoic Tales anthology should be available soon, so good timing on that.
James Alan Gardner – League of Peoples universe?
I’d say that the Earth we see in Le Guin’s City of Illusions is quite depopulated.
The later volumes in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy are set on an Earth depopulated via an atomic war.
In the second volume of Jim Hines’ Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse series we visit Earth depopulated due to plague turning humans into bloodthirsty zombies.
And there is Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series with Earth depopulated due to climate collapse, but all of the stories take place everywhere but Earth ;-).
And also by Simak, there’s that amazing story where Earth gets seriously depopulated because everybody wants to emigrate to the surface of Jupiter, where life (after the required body modding) becomes a continuous ecstasy of sensual experience.
In “Star Rangers” by Andre Norton, not only has almost everybody left Earth, but its location has been lost to history so that by the time our heroes crash land there, they have no idea that they are on Earth. It isn’t until the very end of the story that the protagonists (and the readers) figure out that they have come back to Terra of Sol.
In HM Hoover a Children of Morrow and Treasures of Morrow, the Death of the Seas causes the extinction of nearly. all oxygen breathing animals die to oxygen depletion. Ventures later the only human survivors known are the techno-utopian town of Morrow, a smaller colony of Morrow, and a primitive brutally authoritarian village that worships an ancient ICBM. Naturally when Morrow and the village meet, things will go swimmingly, right?
The forced depopulation of Earth by the Robots.
Isaac Asimov.
Diaspora.
Greg Egan.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore (and subsequent novels in the trilogy)
I’m not sure if they fit the criteria but the Long Earth series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter was at four titles last I noticed. When people learn how to leave Earth easily and cheaply, they do, heading out to unpopulated Earths and leaving the original planet behind.
And , since there are both books and comix /graphic novels, Joss Whedon’s Firefly series. The book stories occur during the same period as the TV series. In the current Boom!Comics sequel series, the Serenity crew, including Zoe’s teenage daughter, end up on Earth-That-Was finding it has recuperated nicely in the past 500 years and that there is a remnant human population.
As a wilderness seeking kid, the wind-sighing-in-trees loneliness of Cemetery World’s opening descriptions of a depopulated pastoral Earth affected me deeply.
Looks like no one has mentioned an obvious and brilliant one though. One of the first and very impressive descriptions of a depopulated future Earth: the utterly desolate far future of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine! The vivid imagery of a tideless, waveless dead ocean…the setting sun a bloated red giant. Strong imagery!
Does Planet of the Apes count? It was certainly depopulated of Homo Sapiens….
Jenny Islander @23: Eddie for Short by Wallace West?
Zola @@@@@ 38
Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore (and subsequent novels in the trilogy)
As I recall, it’s only the US in The Wild Shore that is (somewhat) depopulated; the rest of the world carries on (and keeps the US isolated).
And though I haven’t read Pacific Edge, The Gold Coast doesn’t take place in a depopulated US, let alone a depopulated world.
Okay, I’m a little embarrassed to be the one that mentions Blish’s “Cities in Flight” wherein “oakies” using their “spindizzy” technology take whole municipalities into space, leaving a decimated and worn planet behind. And then there is A.D. Foster’s “With Friends Like These…” . I can’t recall all of the short story plots but in one there is an Earth populated by humans so advanced they’ve rendered the planet into an extensive park-like environment.
Going off to Japanese manga (although both also have anime adaptations), There’s ‘Girls Last Tour’ and ‘Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou’.
Girls Last Tour is about two girls slowly exploring a mostly empty post-post-post-everything world. The world was generally covered with cities on cities on cities, and at some point turned to war, and after that… well, I think they only come across a couple of people before they reach the end of their travels, and an AI or two? it’s a bit fuzzy.
The other series, nicknamed YKK, isn’t actually set in Yokohama – but it is in Japan. In a world where the seas have risen, technology has advanced, but the human spirit is more winding down than anything else, the android Alpha runs her coffee shop, waits for her owner to return from his travels, and contemplates life present and past in the ruins of Japan.
@44, I believe that’s the title story.
@33, you’re thinking of the CITY stories — which I would have picked before Cemetary World, but this is James’s space.
Fred Hoyle’s October the First Is Too Late finishes in a far future which hopes it has managed to get out of the boom-and-bust cycle that wrecked several previous world-wide civilizations.
Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars is set about a billion years in the future, when the seas are dried up, the Moon has been dismantled before falling on us, and a billion people live in the only known city, Diaspar — but only 10 million are incarnate at one time: the rest are resting in the memory banks, being revived in 100,000-year cycles. Somehow the only other city, far enough away that Diaspar has forgotten it, has managed to keep our style of humanity going all this time, but it’s also not huge.
Shorter works:
John Brunner’s “Badman” posits a world which has decided that big cities are trouble; the roving titular Badmen are tasked with keeping communities below a certain size — and incidentally provide someone to hate (which Brunner considered a necessity) in place of fellow community members.
C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Education of Tigress Macardle” is an edge case; an exceptionally stupid president signs a bill requiring that all would-be parents spend practice time with a baby-sized robot operated by a sadistic child-hater. Edge case because the depopulated US is then colonized by the PRC, which was responsible for the bill.
PS: “intra-skeletal”? Do you (or Williams) mean “endoskeletal”?
Brian Aldiss’s “Greybeard” has an Earth depopulated by mass sterility caused by nuclear tests. It actually feels close to a demographic-transition scenario, but writing when he did, he evidently needed something more dramatic to bring it about.
While the Earth isn’t the main location in “An Unkindness of Ghosts”, The generation ship was escaping an uninhabitable Earth. Anything more would be spoilers.
I’m shocked that it took until @36 until somebody mentioned Asimov’s works.
The English YA writer Janet Edwards has a fairly good ongoing series (with a couple of sub-series), the Earth Girl series, set on and around a mostly depopulated earth (where the only people still around are those with a medical syndrome that precludes their leaving through a portal system). She also has a separate and somewhat chilling (in a quiet sort of way) series set on a mostly depopulated earth where most humans live in arcologies, policed by telepaths: the Hive Mind books. Her style is interesting – much cooler than those of most YA authors, though still dealing with some of the same tropes – and she’s gradually digging deeper into the philosophical issues in the novels, although I sometimes wish she was less gradual.
Worlds Apart – second of the books in Joe Haldeman’s Worlds series, features an earth that rapidly depopulated itself due to a bio-weapon unleashed in the war at the end of the first book. I believe that with really few exceptions (generally concerning Human Growth Hormone related issues such as Acromegaly (sorry if I misspelled), all the humans above a certain age died. The book generally deals with the people who dwell in space trying to develop and distribute a cure that uneducated (and rapidly developing their own mythos) children can and will use. While simultaneously turning New New York into and interstellar spacecraft.
I have absolutely nothing meaningful to add, but I just needed to express that Knight Moves sounds absolutely bonkers. On my to-read list for sure.
George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides. All it takes is one little plague.
Possibly the earliest example is After London by Richard Jeffries.
Just starting the article, and the first line “Novels with a focus on demographic transition-driven decline are sadly rare in Western SF” jumped out at me. No, that’s not sad at all, because demographic transition-driven decline is a stupid concept. It’s never happened anywhere in the world and it’s never going to happen in any significant way. Populations could decline due to low birth rate for centuries before we get back down to a decent balance of human biomass to the rest of the world, and if populations ever do get low enough that it’s actually maybe a problem, it’s REALLY easy to create a baby boom. Free daycare, free higher education, subsidies for parents, bit of propaganda, high taxes on contraceptives, Bob’s your uncle.
And of course the moment a society that suppressed our natural tendency to procreate and somehow for cultural reasons couldn’t break out of that when it needed to, started to fall apart . . . it would stop reproducing the social conditions suppressing procreation and we’d start multiplying again.
I would second Janet Edwards’ Earth Girl books as interesting and well worth reading. I particularly liked young people coming to Earth to do archaeological digs on cities e.g. New York.
A lot of cool books mentioned already.
I wonder, do post-apocalyptic books automatically count? One I have in mind, Hiero’s Journey by Sterling Lanier, is set thousands of years after a nuclear war. And the thing is, there seem to be fair numbers of people about, but clearly the population level is far, far below the old days of huge cities and high technology, and there’s a lot more wilderness.
Almost everything mentioned has been pretty solidly science fiction. But there’s also The Dying Earth stories by Jack Vance, which clearly involves an Earth with far fewer people than in modern times.
There’s this one Larry Niven short story that’s an extreme case–this BIG spaceship has its star drive go wrong and kind of work backwards, and where they initially think they’ve traveled to somewhere so far they don’t recognize the stars, they’re actually at Earth so far in the future that the sun is a white dwarf and earth is empty and tidally locked. They end up using the ship’s drive to spin the world, hoping to unfreeze the atmosphere on the dark side and get some air.
Finally, very definitely in this category is The Nitrogen Fix, by Hal Clement, in which something catalyzed all the oxygen in the atmosphere to combine with nitrogen, leaving no air to breathe and a remnant human population using scuba-like gear or heavy genetic engineering.
@Ivo: I think that Simak story is “Desertion”. One of my favorites as a kid.
There are a number of fantasy setting so filled with ways to die I wonder how they have people at all.
Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny.
Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds.
The original Bobiverse trilogy by Dennis E Taylor (first book: We Are Legion, We Are Bob) is set during an ongoing depopulation of Earth caused by climate change and war. One of the story lines centers on finding usable colony planets and sustaining life on Earth until emigration.
I would add the much under rated Kate Wilhelm, and “Where late the sweet birds sang”
Andre Norton’s Star Man’s Son (aka Daybreak 2250 AD) might fit. I don’t recall if it takes place on a decimated Earth or decimated world.
It’s still a good read.
In this general area, The Genocides by Thomas Disch may be the best, utterly depressing book I’ve ever read.
@51: Some of us gave up on Asimov when he started to try to tie together two different universes (galactic empire and its lead-up, and robots). OTOH, I should have remembered some of the earlier works; IIRC, Earth is significantly depopulated by atomic wars before the events of Pebble in the Sky and The Stars, Like Dust. Did he later claim that was really the robots?
And I forgot to mention one that I just looked up for other reasons:Steven Vincent Benét’s “By The Waters of Babylon” (aka “The Place of the Gods”). Written before World War II, as were Nelson Bond’s Meg-the-priestess stories, although not nearly as old as @56’s cite (1885, says ISFDB).
The Greatwinter Trilogy by Seam McMullen posits a population catastrophe perpetrated by whales who forbid humans coming closer to the ocean than a certain distance. Also something destroys any machine over a certain size. Set in Australia, and very entertaining.
C.A, Fletcher’s A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World is about a depopulated (actually, just about empty of humanity) Earth. The reason for the collapse of the world’s population is never really given – it’s a catastrophic rise in infertility, but that is never really explained, and the book is set after two or three generations of population decline, narrated by the offspring of an isolated family. A good read.
Also The Morgaine Cycle, four novels by C.J. Cerryh. A paladin, of sorts, travels from world to world breaking the bonds that connected them, but also permitted a threat to infect many worlds. Humanity has spread across many worlds, which by the time she starts her work seem to have mostly become feudal holds. Told from the POV of her terrified assistant, If I recall.
Kudos to those who mentioned Dan Simmons’ Ilium. Excellent sci-fi, wildly entertaining. Basically centuries from now the “Post Humans” (i.e. self made Greek Gods) keep the “Old Style Humans” on Earth down to a workable 300k population. They are essentially childlike, tended to by the artificial Voynix.
Does Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend deserve an honorable mention?
@57: Is “demographically-driven” necessarily voluntary? I would have thought a drastic decline in fertility due to disease or other rapid change might count as well. It also seems to me that your argument assumes that significant numbers of people want to procreate, or that birth control is hard to get. And hasn’t New Zealand tried the approaches to increase birthrate that you suggest? How has that worked for them? It may be too soon to tell. Perhaps you’re right that a culture would try to turn that around, if only so that they can outnumber whoever they believe is “the enemy,” though.
As always, I look at the responses and realize that I haven’t read much more widely than a lot of the people who post here. It’s too bad I never find time to look at these columns before so many people have already made the only suggestions I’d have made.
In particular, I was impressed that someone besides myself knew David Palmer’s Emergence; I believe Palmer only wrote one other novel, and I have both somewhere. Sterling Lanier wrote two Hiero books, I believe, and I have them both somewhere; am I wrong to think they involved a terraformed Mars?
James P. Hogan’s Echoes of an Alien Sky is on this theme; the people of Venus send an expedition to Earth, find ruins, and try to figure out what happened to the long-gone race that used to dwell there.
Three: 2008’s Tracking, the sequel to Emergence, is available from Ring of Fire Press.
I think Menace Under Marswood (1983) is unrelated to the Hiero setting. Although I also thought there were two Marswood books so clearly I am at least a little confused.
@72 There is a separate book called, um, Menace under Marswood which involves a terraformed Mars. I don’t think it was all that great. And there’s a sequel to Hiero’s Journey– “Unforsaken Hiero”. But it’s not nearly as good. “Hiero’s Journey” itself, though, is just awesome, brimming with fun and imagination and tension, fast-moving plot, setting dripping with personality. But it’s definitely set on earth–one touch I loved was that the main character is from the prosperous “Metz Republic”, descended from the Metis, because fringe groups like that tended to survive nuclear war a lot better.
@32 City of Illusions, indeed.
I’d sure love to see Planet of Exile/City of Illusions on a big screen, appeals to me more than an avatar ii.
Always Coming Home, Ursula LeGuin.
I really enjoyed these:
Z is for Zachariah by Robert O’Brien
Emergence by David Palmer
Walter M. Miller Jr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. Population greatly reduced due to nuclear war. Rediscovery/reinvention of technology leads to a repeat.
Keith Laumer’s Earthblood Roan discovers that pure Humans are very rare in the galaxy. He eventually makes his way to Earth, to discover almost nobody lives there and those who do are crazy and hold parties during which they destroy remnants of their history.
Robert A. Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy. IIRC it has a similar plot to Earthblood. Both feature a young protagonist that’s enslaved, gains freedom, and lands on a depopulated Earth.
J.S. Morin’s Project Transhuman series (AKA Robot Geneticists). All that is left of Earth are six robots with human personalities uploaded to them literally during the final minutes of the existence of all life on Earth due to the alien invaders remaking of the biosphere to suit them. The robots have successfully counter-attacked and driven the invaders away (this is detailed in one of the later books). Since then they’ve made more robots and given them personalities mixed from parts of the minds of the original six. Their goal is to Terraform Earth to the point where they can re-create Humans. Tensions arise between robot factions who want to never re-create Humans, those who want to re-create them exactly as they were, and those who want to create new Humans that are “improved”, and missing physical traits they consider to not be good. Body hair? Ick! Get rid of useless things like the appendix. Make them more disease resistant, stronger etc. A faction that’s working in deep secret wants to make new humans for their own nefarious purpose – they want to *be* humans by making organic bodies to transfer their personalities into.
@70 edlibr: definitely the Morgaine series. We should also include CJ Cherryh’s Mri (Faded Sun) books, in which we read of abandoned planets and an all-but-extinct humanoid race.
Engine Summer by John Crowley.
The Dancers at the End of Time trilogy by Michael Moorcock.
What about Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, with a post asteroid strike world, and of course there’s Doomsday Book by Connie Willis set in a true depopulation event ( the Black Death) not to mention her story The Last of the Winnebagos where it’s not human depopulation but canine…
Let’s try Edgar Pangborn’s Tales of A Darkening World series (“Davy”, “The Judgement of Eve” and “Still I Persist in Wondering”) for a start. Also, a book written, I think, by Greg Egan in which portions of the earth appear to be abandoned or are inaccessible due to the use of quantum computers to operate telephone systems. The computers have caused the reality of the users to diverge from that of the non-users. They don’t occupy the same planet anymore. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of the book.
No one’s mentioned John Crowley’s Engine Summer (1980)? This is very literally a novel of “demographic transition-driven decline”. Humans have been bio-engineered so that women can’t get pregnant unless they take a specific pill. Then, for vaguely-described but probably-unrelated reasons, civilization slowly collapses, “not with a bang but a whimper”. The novel itself is set in a post-civilization time where the remaining tech artifacts are seen as holy relics and humans are slowly dying out as not enough people choose to have children, even though the fertility-pill is still being produced by one tribe that retained the knowledge.
This is a sad and wondrous and beautifully-written book, one of my favorite novels of all time. It’s hard to describe clearly what makes it so amazing, particularly not without spoilers. Suffice it to say that some of the future tech built before the fall is very strange and powerful, and neither the narrator nor any other survivors entirely understand it but it’s crucial to understanding the story.
@57: When human instincts meet sex robots, the human population is likely to crash. So will the sex robots. Wikipedia on availability: “There are ongoing attempts.”
Houellebecq’s ‘The possibility of an island’, I liked a lot this mix of sci-fi and existentialism, in which future earth seems very depopulated, possibly consequence of low natality rate.
How about John Ringo’s Council Wars series? Set way in the future, mankind is ruled by a technocratic council, but is dying out mostly through ennui. Some members of the council decide Something Must Be Done to get the birth rate up, and we get a collapse of society…followed by civil war between the council members.
New Zealand movie: The Quiet Earth.
Tideline. Elizabeth Bear
There is a Fredric Brown story “Knock” the entirety of which can be written here. “The last man on earth sat in a chair in a room. There was a knock on the door.”
Jerome Bixby and the TZ episode “It’s a good Life”.
Pohl’s Fermi and Frost.
Harlan Ellison “I have no mouth but I must Scream”.
Tipteee’s The Screwfly Solution, The Last Fight of Dr. Ain, Houston Houston Can you read?, Time Sharing Angel, And I Awoke on the Cold Hill Side.
@86: If I recall correctly, humankind isn’t even dying out. Complete reproductive freedom has led to a drop in the birth rate, but statisticians have demonstrated that the number of people who want to raise babies is never going to drop below cultural viability, much less species viability. But somebody decides that because people won’t do what he wants when he wants them to do it, he must compel them to do it, and his chosen method kills a lot of people.
(For “people” read “women.”)
Z for Zachariah
William Gibson’s The Peripheral and Agency are set in an earth significantly depopulated by “The Jackpot.”
Chasing the Phoenix and The Postutopian Adventures of Darger and Surplus by Michael Swanwick
Andrea Hōst’s Touchstone series begins with a 17 year old Australian who while walking home from school finds herself on an unpeopled planet. The first book, Stray, is free for US Kindle readers.
Eart Abides, by George Stewart, pub.1949. Cannot help but think of it as the starting point for this story concept in modern SF. Another good one in this concept is Golden Space by Pamela Sargent in which human immortality leads to a decimated human population and, among other things, the creation of fantastical new lifeforms based on human myth.