Many works of science fiction raise demographic questions which find an echo in current questions, explains demographer Jacques Véron in La Matinale on Thursday. Demographic fiction, which appeared in 1999, studies how novels anticipate current and future demographic issues.
A number of literary works have addressed demographic issues such as the growth of the world population, urbanization, the birth rate, aging, migrations… by pushing their developments to the extreme to imagine formidable consequences. This is the observation drawn by the demographer Jacques Véron in his book “The demography of the extreme – When fiction anticipates the future of societies”, written with the philosopher Jean-Marc Rohrbasser.
“We cannot trust these stories because they are novels of anticipation, but there are things that come true and which push us to be sensitive to all these questions,” he notes in La Matinale .
Birth issues
Thus the question of birth rate, with imposed birth quotas or, on the contrary, the encouragement of births, is often present in works of fiction. “In “The Mad Seed” by Anthony Burgess, there is the notion of a pregnancy quota,” he says. A woman at the beginning of the novel loses her child. But she is not allowed to have another child since she has exhausted her pregnancy quota. “This story actually brings to mind the birth quotas imposed in China during the one-child policy,” analyzes the demographer.
“There are many elements that resonate with situations today. To what extent are States entitled to impose this or that policy and what margin of maneuver should individuals have? These are central questions, very well analyzed in the novels and which arise in reality,” concludes Jacques Véron.
Comments collected by Aleksandra Planinic
Adaptation web: lan
