The Population Explosion
The ideas informing the central conceit of this novel—mandatory death upon reaching the age of twenty-one—were conceived during the single greatest period of population growth in recorded history. Familiarly known as the post-World War II “Baby Boom” it was a period beginning about a year after soldier en masse returned home following the defeat of the Nazis in Europe and Japan in Asia. The spike in population was so extreme that it produced a number of studies issuing dire warnings about the incapacity for resources to meet up with the increasing demand. What the writers of the novel could not foresee was that within just a decade of the novel’s 1967 publication, the birth rate would essentially flatline at the bottom edge of the boom and in the process dampen all the fears of the population explosion being uncontainable.
Malthusian Economics
Although not directly mentioned, the circumstances of the novel represent an extreme adoption of a solution to a problem initially proposed by British economic Thomas Malthus. Malthusian economic theory is a quite controversial concept based on the idea that population will continue to grow at a rate faster than the growth of the raw materials necessary to provide for them. Thus, Malthus proposes, natural disasters like famine and man-made disasters like war are necessary evils to maintain equilibrium. At its most extreme, Malthusian principles would forward some sort of large-scale euthanasia in order to maintain this equilibrium such as that which forms the centerpiece of the narrative.
The Coming of the Internet
The prediction of the coming of the internet is not just alluded to, but directly confronted at its point of origin. The narrator describes how researchers at Columbia and Cal Tech in the 1960’s had made breakthroughs in computer technology which allowed computers around the world to be interconnected with each other. Eventually, this web of complex computerized technology is used to solve the problem of the exploding population in the guise of that which it becomes known as: the Thinker, a self-repairing infallible system that basically governs the entire planet and runs the scheme by which everyone agrees to the systemic implementation of their own self-destruction.
