This Crowded Earth Book

This Crowded Earth is one of the early entries in the overpopulation subgenre. It begins with Harry Collins in that far-future year of 1997, and follows him through various adventures to 2065.

Harry is one of the growing number of people who can't stand the over-crowded cities. He lives in a cramped bachelor's apartment -- he could upgrade to a larger one if he'd get married, but he'd also have to add an hour to his commute each way, bringing the total to six hours. One day he suffers a mental breakdown and is sent to a bucolic clinic in the country, where he soon enters a relationship with a nurse.

Or so he thinks. A doctor at the clinic approaches him with the truth -- the "nurse" is another patient who was instructed to deceive him in order to start a tryst. They're both, in fact, part of an experiment to solve the over-population problem. The doctor is apprehended by the Powers That Be at the clinic, and Harry is told the man's a nut. But soon his "nurse" disappears and he ends up in a relationship with another ... and then another ... and another.

Bloch plays coy about what exactly the experiments are about, but we eventually learn that they're part of a project to end overcrowding by breeding midget babies.

Harry escapes and tries to lead a new life working on a ranch, but as the midgetization of the human race begins, he feels the need to do something. Unfortunately, no dashing sci-fi hero is he, and he ends up in jail for several years, while a race-war between the "yard-sticks" and older generation brews.

Harry's story is interspersed with vignettes showing what's going on in the rest of the world. These events are interesting enough that it's a shame Bloch didn't spend more time on them. This Crowded Earth is in the nether-zone between novel and novella, as defined by the Hugo Awards, but it easily has enough plot for a full-scale epic.

As an early example of the over-population sub-genre, there are some interesting aspects to Bloch's treatment of the subject. For one thing, he supposes that science and technology are able to overcome all problems of scarcity except space, so there are no famines or energy shortages. The problem society faces is that people don't want to live in such dense populations.

And even though reality has proven over-population predictions wrong, there is a lot that has come true -- while the suburbs of DC don't stretch to Gettysburg yet, it's not as outrageous an idea as when Bloch wrote it fifty years ago, and his depiction of people not even knowing the names of their neighbors is true in many modern suburban developments. The description of rush-hour in over-crowded cities was obviously intended to be satirical, but it's a joke that just isn't funny anymore.