Do you know who wrote the novel Psycho which Alfred Hitchcock adapted to film? Neither did I, until I checked upon Robert Bloch, the author This Crowded Earth. Turns out he did, and he also wrote episodes for the original Star Trek series and won several awards for his novels. Yet another writer I never heard of until I checked what science fiction books are available at Libirivox.org. This crowded earths was one of them and I was happy to listen to it
The book covers the long life of Henry Collins, who at the beginning seems like a typical person in a really overcrowded world. And when I mean overcrowded I am talking about having virtually no space to walk, eat, work, live, never-ending traffic jams and staying in line forever for every little thing. Bloch did a great job of describing a suffocating future like that, caused by simple overpopulation. The solution (SPOILER ALERT) is to make people smaller. Through experimentation this medical project comes a reality, although at a price as the half size or smaller people will have to regularly inject themselves with meds to function properly. They also live shorter lives. And as expected they hate the tall people, who call them yardsticks. The feeling is sometimes mutual so eventually a civil war breaks out between them.
What does all this have to do with Collins? He inadvertently ends being the father of the first small person. After he has a nervous breakdown, because unlike his most compatriots he cannot cope with life in such a close quarters to so many people, he finds himself in a sanatorium on the luscious countryside. He gets healed, because it is remote and undisturbed. In the process he impregnates woman, who just offer themselves to him. But then he discovers, at the pushing of an investigative journalist the secret experiments the babies made here are exposed to.
I won’t retell all the details of the story, his escape from the sanatorium, his years a a cowboy and as a prisoner, the civil war, the efforts of some wise men to create cooperation between the warring sides… Let me just warn you that the idea of working together for humanities future be your small or big doesn’t exactly workout as one would hope. But the book is an exciting depiction of how life could turn out be if we keep breeding like we do and how solutions planned for not long enough perspective can create more problems.