A delicate balance

 The first two anthology stories have been written and been submitted.  This week I've moved onto writing the story for the third anthology.  This one has proved something of a challenge.   It has to be a positive story showing how tech has allowed us to save the planet.

I wanted to show the Earth in a century's time, when the global warming crisis has passed.  The trouble was, I couldn't exactly keep to the brief, because I don't believe that shiny new tech alone will be enough for us to survive the climate crisis we're in.

The elephant in the room driving climate change is that there are too many humans on the planet.  And we're not willing to think about limiting our breeding.  Or even to label it as breeding, despite the fact that it's the way we describe the reproduction of every other species in the planet.

I decided to go all-out in this story, and present a world where there were legal limits to the number of children any one person can breed.  I know from experience that immediately one entertains the possibility of limits people get hysterical.  They usually accuse you of eugenics.  The picture I wanted to paint in that story was one where limits had been introduced despite the hysteria, but fairly.

I wanted to show in my story the domino effect which drastically reducing the human population would have on the Earth.  I wrote a blog post a few weeks ago about having to make a decision a minute, and this story turned out to be the same.

Fewer people means they need less stuff, which means the end of mass manufacturing,  Fewer people plus more working from home would probably mean the end of mass transport, and the prevalence of pool cars for hire whenever people needed one.  

I could see hundreds of changes which would happen as a result of that one decision to dramatically reduce the human population.  The challenge was showing them on the page.  My first attempt at the story was a massive info-dump, no more than a long list of things which have changed.  What I needed to do was weave this information in between my character actually doing something.

It was a delicate balance weaving the action of the piece, the dialogue between the characters, and my main character's rich internal dialogue in with the information paragraphs.  The piece is very reflective, and the plot minimal.  It's basically: population scientist walks in the forest, goes to work to listen to the complains of people who want to exceed their breeding limits, then comes back to the forest to reinforce why those limits are needed.

I'm not at all convinced the story will get a good reception, but it is what it is, and it too has now been submitted for its anthology.