Not Enough Space

I recently noted how Arthur C. Clarke wrote the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'd previously thought it was a novelization, and avoided it. Actually, Clarke and Stanley Kubrick were working on their film, and Kubrick suggested Clarke write the novel so they could base what they were doing on it.

Kubrick had a lot of input, causing Clarke to tear out his hair, since Kubrick kept turning down the latest version. It was finally published just before the movie came out. Money-wise, it was the smartest thing Clarke ever did, since the book has been selling ever since, and his association with the movie has ensured his reputation.

So I've just read the book. It was written in the mid-60s, and Clarke was not only telling a story (one where things are clear, as opposed to the movie), but trying his best to extrapolate what the actual 2001 would be like. Sometimes he's surprisingly accurate, but in the biggest thing--space travel--he's way off. Sf writers just didn't understand how bulky and expensive it would be. And since there's nothing out there worth getting (within reach), we've had only limited space flight since the moon landing.

But you go in knowing that. More interesting is the occasional bit that's wrong in ways Clarke probably never would have guessed. In particular, this paragraph, fairly early on, caught my eye. It's a passage about a problem the world had been having since the 1970s:

Though birth control was cheap, reliable, and endorsed by all the main religions, it had come too late; the population of the world was now six billion--a third of them in the Chinese Empire. Laws had even been passed in some authoritarian societies limiting families to two children, but their enforcement had proved impracticable. As a result, food was short in every country; even the United States had meatless days, and widespread famine was predicted within fifteen years, despite heroic efforts to farm the sea and to develop synthetic foods.

Back in the real word, I'm not sure if all main religions endorse birth control, and we don't have two billion in China (or any empire of theirs, unless you want to throw in India). Furthermore, it looks like China had some success limiting their number of children--it may be hard to stop something like drug use, but kids are easy to keep track of.

But the heart of the paragraph is the threat of overpopulation. Clarke probably didn't think his speculation was particularly brave. In the 60s, the world's population hit 3 billion, and there was plenty of starvation. To be fair, Clarke gets the numbers right--the population did rise to 6 billion by 2000 (and is not that far from 7 billion today). What he didn't figure was humans would come up with better ways to grow food, so that people would be better fed than ever. The world's human population has always been hitting up against the starvation ceiling--we would have had 6 billion people thousands of years ago otherwise. But plenty of the smart set in the 60s were predicting widespread starvation, even in the West. The trend seemed obvious, but, for the last 40 years anyway, hasn't happened.