Science Meets Fiction

As a companion to this week’s episode of A Reader’s History of Science Fiction, I wanted to take a closer look at the science behind one of the books I’ll be talking about: Logan’s Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson.

In Logan’s Run, the world combats overpopulation by euthanizing everyone over the age of 21—a society completely by and for the youth. You may be thinking that number is wrong, but if you are, that’s probably because you’re thinking of the movie. In the movie, which is quite a bit better known, everyone is killed at 30 years old.

I want to take a look at the book, though, because a society where everyone is under 21 seems extreme and unworkable, even though they define adulthood to start at 14. But the really strange part is that Nolan and Johnson write that the youth massively dominated the world’s population before the revolution. As they write in the opening lines to the book:

The seeds of the Little War were planted in a restless summer during the mid-1960s, with sit-ins and student demonstrations as youth tested its strength. By the early 1970s, over 75 percent of the people living on Earth were under twenty-one years of age. The population continued to climb—and, with it, the youth percentage. In the 1980s, the figure was 79.7 percent. In the 1990s, 82.4 percent. In the year 2000,—critical mass.

Logan’s Run was published in 1967, when the fears of overpopulation were at their peak, and at the same time (at least in America), youth activism was becoming a major political force. Nolan and Grayson extrapolate this to suggest that the population boom of the 50s and 60s would lead to a massive rise in the youth population that would give them the power to take over the world.

…But 82.4%? Really?