babies in world-building
Jul. 7th, 2010 09:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliOne world building error that I find as often in SF as in fantasy: many, many, many writers neglect to figure out Where Babies Come From and Why It Matters.
Now, in fantasy you can with suitable application of magic get yourself out of the situation where sky-high infant mortality and short life-expectancy. This, however, merely gets you into the situation you often find in SF. You still need the 2.1 children per couple to keep up with replacement rate.
Some writers weasel out of it with immortality. And I do mean weasel out of it. Though there are other reasons for immortality in fiction -- some aesthetically sound, others not -- I have read works in which it was blatantly obvious that the reason people were immortal was to justify draconian population control measures. SF writers boasted of having foreseen the population crisis decades before it was taken seriously outside SF; SF writers not only did not foresee demographic collapse, they are not writing about it even now that it is not only taken seriously outside SF but actually occurring.
Indeed, some of them have population control measures in societies that would be suffering demographic collapse even without such measures. Beta Colony, for instance, tracks most closely to a Western Europe welfare state minus the lumpenproletariat, which means it would, logically, have a sub-replacement birthrate. Yet it forces people to attend classes to be licensed to have a child, and then you have to pay to have a second, and still more to have a third -- all of which, naturally, would depress the rate still farther. This would only work if people have an obsessive desire to have babies. Yet no one evinces such obsessive desire. Cordelia's reflections on the possibility of having a child are not very certain about it, and she doesn't reflect that she's odd, that most other people structure their lives about the possibility.
And most people would structure their lives about it if desperately wanting to have babies was the condition of reproduction, and within very few generations. Philoprogentiveness would be selected for, whether it was a genetic or cultural factor. And selected for rather in the manner that hunger is selected for. When children can be accidents, sex drive will cope with a lack of desire for them, but when they have to be planned, it can't do it alone. (Which will not be all good for children. Battered children are more likely to be planned than non-battered children. They have the kid to fulfill their desires, and if the kid doesn't fulfill them -- whap.)
This is why contraception does not completely change women's relationship to childbearing. The children still have to be born, or society will collapse within -- well, within a lifetime.
To completely change it, you would have to have artificial conception and incubation and mandatory sterilization of everyone -- probably with mandatory abortions for the accidents. And then there is the little question of how the children get raised. . . .
Update: I am now screening comments to this to prevent its going off on tangents. Even non-tangential things will get unscreened as I have time to deal with them.
Now, in fantasy you can with suitable application of magic get yourself out of the situation where sky-high infant mortality and short life-expectancy. This, however, merely gets you into the situation you often find in SF. You still need the 2.1 children per couple to keep up with replacement rate.
Some writers weasel out of it with immortality. And I do mean weasel out of it. Though there are other reasons for immortality in fiction -- some aesthetically sound, others not -- I have read works in which it was blatantly obvious that the reason people were immortal was to justify draconian population control measures. SF writers boasted of having foreseen the population crisis decades before it was taken seriously outside SF; SF writers not only did not foresee demographic collapse, they are not writing about it even now that it is not only taken seriously outside SF but actually occurring.
Indeed, some of them have population control measures in societies that would be suffering demographic collapse even without such measures. Beta Colony, for instance, tracks most closely to a Western Europe welfare state minus the lumpenproletariat, which means it would, logically, have a sub-replacement birthrate. Yet it forces people to attend classes to be licensed to have a child, and then you have to pay to have a second, and still more to have a third -- all of which, naturally, would depress the rate still farther. This would only work if people have an obsessive desire to have babies. Yet no one evinces such obsessive desire. Cordelia's reflections on the possibility of having a child are not very certain about it, and she doesn't reflect that she's odd, that most other people structure their lives about the possibility.
And most people would structure their lives about it if desperately wanting to have babies was the condition of reproduction, and within very few generations. Philoprogentiveness would be selected for, whether it was a genetic or cultural factor. And selected for rather in the manner that hunger is selected for. When children can be accidents, sex drive will cope with a lack of desire for them, but when they have to be planned, it can't do it alone. (Which will not be all good for children. Battered children are more likely to be planned than non-battered children. They have the kid to fulfill their desires, and if the kid doesn't fulfill them -- whap.)
This is why contraception does not completely change women's relationship to childbearing. The children still have to be born, or society will collapse within -- well, within a lifetime.
Herein lives wisdom, beauty, and increase;
Without this folly, age, and cold decay:
If all were minded so, the times should cease
And threescore year would make the world away.
Without this folly, age, and cold decay:
If all were minded so, the times should cease
And threescore year would make the world away.
To completely change it, you would have to have artificial conception and incubation and mandatory sterilization of everyone -- probably with mandatory abortions for the accidents. And then there is the little question of how the children get raised. . . .
Update: I am now screening comments to this to prevent its going off on tangents. Even non-tangential things will get unscreened as I have time to deal with them.
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no subject
Date: 2010-07-08 02:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-08 03:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-08 03:31 am (UTC)State-mandated welfare is another different method.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-08 03:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-08 03:54 am (UTC)This tends to lead to faulty world-building.
Beta Quibble:
Date: 2010-07-12 06:46 am (UTC)Add that to the uterine replicator, effective psychological control ala Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality and an active lifespan double that which modern Westerners enjoy now and nearly all Beta's children are, effectively, raised by their doting grandparents - the bare minimum needed to fill the gaps left by the immigration policy.
Beta Colony works because the tech is there and the ruthless techno-socialist despotism is there. What interests me is not so much any serious gap in world building (it's not) but that very few people consider Beta Colony a dystopia...
Re: Beta Quibble:
Date: 2010-07-12 09:51 pm (UTC)Re: Beta Quibble:
Date: 2010-07-15 01:34 am (UTC)Sorry my friend--I've probably re-read the series too often--I'll grant you your point on any individual title. But Ms. Bujold has stated that the Nexus books are meant to work on two levels: to contain enough "fun" and info to enjoy each individual story on it's own, but to also exist as a self-contained whole which will be greater than the sum of its parts.
Re: Beta Quibble:
Date: 2010-07-15 02:37 am (UTC)Re: Beta Quibble:
Date: 2010-07-22 04:04 am (UTC)Sorry - I don't follow: which thoughts?
Re: Beta Quibble:
Date: 2010-07-23 01:56 am (UTC)Re: Beta Quibble:
Date: 2010-08-03 03:14 am (UTC)Uterine replicators are only 200 years old in the universe, and it's about 3000 AD, so we've got 600-800 years of colonization to explain without it. OTOH France and the Nordic countries are having upticks in birthrates, and among the highest in Europe, so enough social democracy may in fact be what you need. But yeah, to get colonial-high birth rates we need somewhat different culture or circumstances than simple extrapolation makes likely.
Bujold's also said that she does worldbuilding on an as-needed-for-story basis, and that she reserves the right to Have A Better Idea. I haven't seen her say what you attribute to her, that sounds more like Babylon-5.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-02 11:44 pm (UTC)I've read that that difference is entirely explained, statistically, by the economic difference. Widows tend to be better off than single or divorced mothers.
But your general point is a good one. Clarke's _Imperial Earth_ did have a peaceful demographic decline, though. Of course, it had various colonies at the same time. o_O
no subject
Date: 2010-08-03 01:52 am (UTC)And I seriously doubt that even if it is, the economic status is a coincidence.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-08 06:10 pm (UTC)John Wyndham, The Chrysalids -- okay, it's a post-holocaust setting, but population is still dropping because of anti-mutant hysteria.
World Without Women, by Day Keene and Leonard Pruyn -- a plague wipes out virtually all women and sterilizes most of the survivors.
I'm sure there have been others. Possibly including Five to Twelve, by Edmund Cooper, but the world-building and genetics and other science in that are so vague and so screamingly nonsensical that it's hard to be sure.
I acknowledge, though, that they all required some outside agency, not just wealth and readily-available contraception.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-08 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-10 02:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-09 03:09 am (UTC)1. Don't have sexual intercourse.
2. Have the woman be already pregnant.
The second one was, in various times, cited as a way a woman could be unfaithful and still ensure that her children were all her husband's. But not exactly preventing children as such.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-02 09:33 pm (UTC)Well, the SF writers who use Eurabia as part of their settings have some inkling of this issue, although mostly to facilitate being scared of Muslims. and immigrants. And brown people.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-03 12:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-03 03:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-03 04:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-03 04:47 am (UTC)Tom Kratman has Eurabia as part of the background to Caliphate (http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1416555455/1416555455.htm?blurb)
As I recall, Eurabia also turns up in Dan Simmons' Olympos pair, in which we learn that in the past, the cowardly French paid off the scary scary numerous Muslims with weapons of global destruction (That series also has humans or near-humans reduced to about 300,000 people).
Also from Simmons, there's this. (http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2006_04.htm)
no subject
Date: 2010-08-05 03:07 am (UTC)But consider Japan, also facing serious demographic collapse.
and, of course, writers can always do with it what they did with overpopulation to make it more dramatic: exaggerate, exaggerate.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-02 10:24 pm (UTC)Cite?
The thing that gets to me is cyberpunk-- there doesn't seem to be enough safety to take care of infants or small children, and no one seems to notice it as a problem.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-03 12:20 am (UTC)The percentages that were planned: 91% vs. compared to 63%.
Also, the battered children's mothers went into maternity clothes months earlier than the control group's.
Safety
Date: 2010-08-03 12:30 am (UTC)Re: Safety
Date: 2010-08-03 07:38 am (UTC)Re: Safety
Date: 2010-08-05 03:13 am (UTC)Re: Safety
Date: 2010-08-10 02:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-03 02:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-05 03:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-05 03:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-05 03:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-03 03:48 pm (UTC)I partly disagree -- quite a few SF writers take "people want to have few to no children" for granted, but societies described invariably also have very long lifespans, so little or no demographic collapse occurs. Peter Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds, and of course Larry Niven come to mind. I am not aware of any book besides "Saturn's Children" where demographic collapse is taken to its ultimate conclusion.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-05 03:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-04 04:09 am (UTC)About Beta Colony's demographics, it's worth noting that the technology available to the Betans allows for significantly altered reproductive patterns. As Cordelia mentions after the soltoxin assassination attempt, the Betans would need only a acraping of cells to create perfectly viable sex cells, the uterine replicators providing after that better-than-natural environments for the young. These innovations, along with the vastly extended active lifespans of Betans--Kareen Koudelka thinks her 50-something parents look like Betans in their 70s--and you've got a vastly extended time period for biological parenthood, perhaps almost twice as long as the 15-45 window common in most developed countries with early 21st century reproductive technologies.
Too, Betans' gender equality will work to the society's favour. As
no subject
Date: 2010-08-05 03:09 am (UTC)And those techniques will also ensure that people put off having children because they think they can always do it, until they realize it's Too Late.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-05 04:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-05 04:02 pm (UTC)