Imagine cities with blackened air, where men, women and children gasp for breath. Imagine a countryside with almost no trees. Imagine endless droughts, dust storms and raging forest fires. Imagine a world of astonishing scientific achievements but so overpopulated and ravaged by its excesses that it hangs on the brink of total collapse. This is the world that confronts us... only a few years from now.
Thus reads the blurb on the inside sleeve of Strieber and Kunetka's eco-thriller, and to be fair to the publishers, if anything they understate the scenario. In the year 2025, many well-loved species of animal and plant have become extinct: technological brilliance exists alongside destitution for the majority of the world's population: and society itself is buckling under the strain, with short-term marriage contracts, weird forms of individualism and a huge and authoritarian Tax Police.
Into this ugly situation at the edge of the abyss steps a man calling himself Dr Gupta Singh, head of the Depopulationist International. Gupta Singh's proposed solution is very simple: the voluntary exposure to suicide of one-third of the world's population. On a fixed day, every human being on the planet (or at least in those countries who have voted Depopulationist) will be allocated a tablet. One third of those tablets will be fatal, resulting in perhaps two billion or so dead. So desperate has life on earth become, however, that most of the world's societies have already embraced this manifesto, the US and Great Britain being the main exceptions. In the States, veteran journalist John Sinclair believes Singh's policy to be a disastrous one and determines to run a process on him known as conviction, a sophisticated computer-aided psychological audit of an individual that reveals their innermost thoughts and motives over a period of time. Sinclair's reputation is high thanks to his greatest case, no less a person than a previous US president who when faced with the details of Sinclair's conviction chose suicide, such was his disgrace. But Singh is a cunning operator, and once Sinclair has committed himself to auditing the Indian with a view to conviction, fights back ruthlessly through the same mesh of computer networks, systematically cutting away the support of Sinclair and his three associates until from a position of affluence and power the four find themselves hunted fugitives, on the run not only from Singh but also the authorities, chasing through the seamy underside of the 21st-century technological dream to a showdown with the head of the Depopulationist International and his hidden agenda.
US writers Strieber and Kunetka had one other bestseller in the eighties, Warday, a similarly hypothetical scenario set in the near future. Since then I had heard no more of them until I found Nature's End in the local library. The style of the two books is very similar: the story is narrated in the first person by two or more characters, and a lot of scientific and political research obviously went into the books. Like all such literature, some predictions ring truer than others. Features of the story such as the huge computer networks were interestingly made by the authors a few years before the explosion of the World Wide Web, and if anything the power of these networks may be understated except towards the end of the book. A little less certain is the dire state of the earth in 2025. While there is certainly no room for complacency, particularly regarding global warming, it should be borne in mind that Nature's End was written during the Cold War in the heyday of the Reagan years, when some of his senior officials seem to deliberately flout environmental concerns. Since then we have had the growth of the CITES treaties, the recognition that there are major problems and the international protocols at Kyoto to reduce global emissions. Hopefully Nature's End will stand as a warning against complacency rather than a herald of the shape of things to come.
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