“Buy land—they’re not making it anymore!” So the real estate saying goes. Of course, a moment’s contemplation reveals that this is either misleading or irrelevant. We possess ways to make more land, or at least create its equivalent. Science fiction being science fiction, authors have imagined methods whereby the effective land area of a planet could be increased without leaving said planet.
Here are five.
Tall Buildings
Perhaps some Cro-Magnon muttered “they’re not making any more caves,” justifying why they just murdered a family of Neanderthals for their cave. Even then, the claim would have been inaccurate. Humans and their kin have been building shelters for a very long time. Multi-story buildings are an ancient variant and each floor adds to the effective land area available for human use.
2012’s The Tower provides a notable example. One hundred and eight stories tall, the titular building dominates the Korean cityscape surrounding it. The exemplary structure offers nearly every amenity Korea’s wealthy could desire for a lavish Christmas Eve celebration… save for a functional fire suppression system above the 60th floor. What could go wrong?
The Tower is a spiritual successor to the venerable The Towering Inferno, without Inferno’s effervescent sense of optimism. I’ll note that it’s super easy to remember the names of all of the surviving characters by the end of the film.
Climate Change
We tend to see rapid, dramatic climate change as calamitous, threatening as it does to destabilize our agriculture and weather while facilitating gratuitous citations from certain dreadful SF novels I could name. However, ice ages expose land shelves, while greenhouse Earths have more clement Antarcticas. My gut feeling is that ice ages are a better bet for a net increase of useful land, but I have not run the numbers.
The visionaries featured in John Jacob Astor IV’s 1894 A Journey in Other Worlds plan to engage in extensive climate engineering. The Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company is busily engaged in exactly what the name suggests, correcting Earth’s obliquity from 23 degrees to zero, thus increasing land useful to Americans and perhaps the lesser nations before America sweeps them aside. The project turns out a great success!
The architects celebrate by going on safari: travelling to alien worlds to kill every animal they can.
Astor had an eventful life of which writing novels was but a small part.1 His contemporaries might have focused disapprovingly on his scandalous 1909 divorce and the second marriage that soon followed. I prefer a positive perspective: Astor remained happily married to second wife Madeleine Talmage Force for the remainder of his life.
Shell Worlds
Shell worlds are the logical extension of high-rises, tower blocks, arcologies, and their ilk. Trantorforming the entire landmass (or for the ambitious, the oceans as well) amplifies effective land area by as many floors as one cares to add. A single planet might offer its inhabitants as much area as a small galactic empire… all within a day or two’s travel.
Brian Stableford’s The Realms of Tartarus trilogy—The Face of Heaven (1976), A Vision of Hell (1977), and A Glimpse of Infinity (1977)—offers a modest example. Having polluted the Earth’s surface beyond toleration, humanity invested eleven thousand years building a vast shell above the tainted land. Humans rarely think of the spoiled land below their visible perfect world… a mistake, as the conditions imposed by the shell on the realm below it turn out to be ideal for accelerated evolution amongst species long forgotten by humans.
The Realms of Tartarus also serve as an example of something that’s worth an essay: a culture that managed to maintain the same goal for about as long as humans have possessed agriculture. It is an inspiration for everyone who struggles to keep a project alive for a mere decade or so.
Time Shares
One could effectively increase land area and related resources by limiting the duration during which each human made use of them. Various means offer themselves—hibernation, stasis fields, and the like—and while we do not know how to do any of them, that’s not an issue for SF authors!
Philip José Farmer’s 1971 “The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World” features a world so overpopulated that the government mandates universal suspended animation for six of every seven days. Tom Pym is awake only on Tuesdays. Jennie Marlowe, with whom Tom is smitten, is awake on Wednesdays. What are the two lovebirds to do?
A simple note left by Tom for Jennie or vice versa outlining their plans would have been a very good idea. Characters in stories like this have never read “The Gift of the Magi.” Readers for whom this short tale was insufficient will be pleased to know it inspired the Dayworld tetralogy of novels, each volume of which is somehow even more dire than the previous.
Smaller People
One can effectively increase the area available by reducing human stature. There are many ways humans could be made smaller. Some are plausible. Some are humane. In real life, the method used should fall into both sets. Once again, authors are not so limited.2
By the time readers meet Matthew Dilke, protagonist of Lindsay Gutteridge’s 1971 Cold War in a Country Garden, he has been shrunk to one-three-hundredths of his original size. From his perspective, the world is now three hundred times larger… including all of the predatory insects with whom Dilke must now contend. Nevertheless, miniaturization offers a solution to overpopulation3 and a valuable tool in the Cold War.
I cannot have been the only audience member who wondered why Thanos didn’t simply shrink everyone in the universe to half their original volume. I joke! Obviously in a universe that has an Ant-Man, miniaturization was an option, but Thanos wanted a method that killed untold trillions of entities because Thanos is a jerk.
These are but five ways authors can use to effectively increase the amount of land available to us. No doubt there are more. Feel free to make the case for your favorites in comments below.
- Astor imagined a “vibratory disintegrator,” which turned out to be considerably less awesome than I had hoped.
- Not the first outing for miniaturized humans. See films about miniaturized people. I’m trying to think of written works about tiny people and if you exclude brownies and similar folkloric examples, perhaps the first would be Gulliver’s Travels. Tell me about others in comments, please.
- Ideally, not because the ants ate all the tiny people, although I am certain the ants will give that the good old college try.
I am reminded of McBroom’s Wonderful One-Acre Farm, a book I think I got at a book fair about forty five years ago and as far as i know I never read.
I owe you thanks! I was trying to think of this book just the other day and supposed that it had something to do with James and the Giant Peach, for want of any better ideas. But it was definitely McBroom’s.
Read it. The series was my first exposure to a lot of cryptids. :)
My childhood doctor’s office stocked the McBroom books in their waiting room; I remember them well.
Tiny people: the inhabitants of the generation ship in Brian Aldiss’ Non-Stop are smaller and live, IIRC 4 times as fast, if that counts…
Living faster seems like the opposite of what you’d want for a generation ship.
Slight spoiler.
It was on the return trip, things having gone wrong on arrival.
On the theme of shell worlds, David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo: The Middle Kingdom comes to mind.
Iain M. Banks, “Matter”. The Culture people even call them “Shellworlds”, have a catalogue of the ones they’ve found.
Smaller people? Try microscopic, as in Surface Tension by James Blish.
My mind always goes to Silverberg’s _The World Inside_ when the topic of ever-taller buildings comes up. It manages to paint a picture of a future society that does not generally consider itself dystopic, and actually functions pretty well most of the time, even if some aspects of it shock our sensibilities. (Even the plight of the exploited farming population is cast more as a case of culture clash, the farmers don’t seem too bothered by their lifestyle either, even if they don’t think too highly of the city-dwellers.) There’s no hell-toss or disaster at the end, no clear condemnation of such an aberrant lifestyle. Just…people live differently.
Alas, Silverberg really, really, couldn’t follow the full meaning of “exponential increase”; he was imaginging eternal high-speed growth (having at least six kids was strongly encouraged) was possible with clever farming and aquaculture and so forth, but the number of kids encouraged meant the “doubling time” would be barely 10 years, and resource crisis wouldn’t take a half century.
There’s also moving sideways in time to Earths without humans.
Pratchett and Baxter’s Long Earth series was concerned with just that.
Didn’t Asimov do a short story collection, ‘Earth is Room Enough’, where every story was a different approach on this topic? Hadn’t thought of it in ages, but your post reminded me one of the stories was where there were infinite possible Earths, and you stepped into the alternate-reality portal, gave it your “address” and went to your own private Earth (guaranteed to be uninhabited, has wrong climate).
Found it. (Fawcett Crest, $0.75, copr. 1956) . It’s all SF stories that happen on Earth, but only “Living Space” is about “room enough” via alternate-worlds.
Notable, though, is “The Fun They Had”, a kid from around our time, wistful that kids used to all go to a school together and play together and learn together, instead of having “teaching machines” show them lovely animated lessons customized to the individual.
20 years before small computers had every educator trying to invent exactly that for the following 40 years. If they could have succeeded, the pandemic would have been a breeze for schools….
The title “Living Space” is a great bilingual pun that foreshadows the ending, too.
Smaller humans show up in 1970s Saturday morning program “The Lost Saucer” by the way.
If I recall correctly, that’s a good example of SF that predicts the technology with great care, but assumes that the social model won’t change, and that kids will be doing computer based learning at home under the supervision of a mother/housewife who isn’t trying to work a full time job at the same time.
“The Fun They Had” was endlessly reprinted in school readers. I’m not sure if it was in a sincere spirit of “see how good you have it?” or an expectation that the captive audience would appreciate it for irony. (Though I’ve assumed the intent was basically a grass-is-greener theme.)
I believe he did.
I may steal the “Thanos-knock-off shrinks the Earth’s human population 5% per day. How long does it take the capes to work out what’s happening?” for a ttrpg.
Yeah, Thanos was a shortsighted idiot, in just about every way possible…And from what the movie showed, so were most of his people. Killing off half of every species would doom a fair number of them to extinction from lack of genetic diversity right off the bat…And massively upset whole ecosystems by removing half of an already fairly scarce predator population. But the worst part is that it was at best a temporary solution, since the ones left behind are still going to reproduce.
I personally think that ringworlds or dyson spheres are the way to go…that way you maximize the available land in a star system. A more short term solution would be space stations, moonbases, or enclosed cities on either venus or mars.
Transplant it to the competition, and see how Kandor responds when they discover they’re being made *even smaller*.
But I’m sure driving a few million tiny potential demigods over the edge will end well for whoever does it.
Little Black Rule: in Traveller, worlds that can produce and maintain gravity generators and want high populations tend to go in for megascrapers. Whether or not they turn into hellscapes depends on how cyberpunky whoever’s designing the world is feeling.
Similarly, humans engineered to thrive in low gravity – often called Lunarians – like to do the Dutch one better, and roof over the craters of small vacuum worlds (hopefully with something impossibly strong) and fill the underspace with atmosphere.
Regarding part 2: Jules Verne did it earlier, in 1889 “Sans dessus dessous“, or The Purchase of the North Pole or Topsy-Turvy in English. People in that book want to fire a huge gun to straighten the axis of rotation of Earth.
Brian Stableford also wrote the Asgard trilogy (Journey to the Centre, Invaders from the Centre, The Centre Cannot Hold, also known as Asgard’s Secret, Asgard’s Conquerors and Asgard’s Heart) which features a shell world with more than two levels…. many, many more than two layers.
And of course there’s Colin Kapp’s Cageworld novels, in which every planet in the solar system is, well, supplemented by a Dyson sphere occupying its orbit. I’m not entirely clear where all the structural material is supposed to come from, but eh well.
There was also a Fantastic Four storyline involving a Walt Disney style entrepreneur who kidnapped the Human Torch in order to use his nova flame to heat up the Earth’s core and make the Earth expand. If you have read the FF issues in question, you know that the whole thing is a lot less sensible than I’m making it sound.
In Cageworld, I believe they were effectively mining the Oort cloud for material for the first few spheres (and possibly further clouds beyond it, the protagonists had no information about this). Could not find the later books in the series so not aware if this was clarified beyond book 2! They also tried all sorts of other tricks – people who can live in inhospitable environments (eg amphibious folks) people who live underground (so a shell could be utilised in 3-D) and so on.
For some reason it feels like China Mieville’s The City and the City should be included under this topic, but I’m not sure what label to put on it. Selective Blindness as a Strategy for Maximizing Real Estate?
I suppose “Ghosts”, “Truly Madly Deeply”, and something or other with Bruce Willis offer a sort of a way to accommodate extra people in accommodation of limited size.
Greg Egan’s recent _Scale_ takes place on a bizarre alternate Earth which has ecosystems that exist at several wildly different scales.
All ecosystems exist at wildly different scales.
On the shrinking front, at one of the scale is T.J.Bass’s nebbish in Half Past Human and The Godwhale, and at the other end is the pantropised human of James Blish’s Surface Tension.
I haven’t read it yet but Permutation City has a quote on the cover as follows: 50 million people in a chip.
It *definitely* counts. So does _Diaspora_ in a somewhat different way, and _Schild’s Ladder_ in another way, and for that matter _Border Guards_ and oh just everything not immediate-near-future Egan has ever written.
Colin Kapp’s “Manalone” is what happens after humans have been made smaller – not miniaturised, just reduced to maximum of 1m or so – and it sort-of stops working. Ish.
Shh, that’s supposed to be secret… I think. I mean, I didn’t get it.
On an Island in the Sun is a Harry Potter fan fic where Harry is goaded by his classmates into raising a volcanic island in the Pacific to create his own micro-nation. It starts out a little silly and gets more and more ridiculous as the story progresses.
If we’re including fanworks, a Minecraft mod called Lucky Block includes a bow that can be used to create land. That is, when you release an arrow, there is a chance that an effect called Meteor will create, with a loud boom, a line of stone that follows the trajectory of the shot and hangs in midair until you manually break the stone. If you are firing at something, you will get a shorter line of stone that ends in a large lump of stone and an adjacent crater. This is meant to be a dramatic surprise to your opponents and possibly also to you, because the same bow may produce a crowd of hostile monsters, a fire, a stream of water, a mass of cobwebs, forty additional arrows, or a surprised chicken; you don’t get to pick which effect you get. But the point stands that you can, theoretically, use the thing to bridge an enormous chasm–or, if you are willing to spend an hour doing nothing but shooting, create land where there wasn’t any.
Another fan work would be the Friendship is Magic fic “Rites of Ascension”, in which Discord crippled the efforts of the alicorns to fight him by making the planet bigger. Since the various nations the alicorns led were not also enlarged, this isolated them so he could defeat them piecemeal, (until he faced a certain pair of sisters).
Genesis “Get Em Out By Friday “It is my sad duty to inform you of a four foot restriction on humanoid height”
In Zelazny’s “The Eve of RUMOKO” (included in My Name is Legion So Don’t Call Me Conrad), the anonymous hero becomes involved in a plan to poke holes in the Earth’s crust and create new volcanic islands like Surtsey. The experiment is a win-win, from the Malthusian perspective, killing a bunch of people and creating new territory for others to live, both decreasing demand and increasing supply of habitable land. Not everyone was happy about it, though.
My first thought on seeing the title was “Interest a super-duper-powered alien intelligence enough that it will coalesce all the asteroids into a new planet” (Fredric Brown, Rogue in Space. I do not recommend this book as it’s the most … narrowminded … of his SF — fits right in with the normativeness of his mysteries/thrillers.) That sounds like it’s outside your description — except where do people live while you’re turning the planet into a shell as in your third example?
Did anyone put the strategy of diking the mouth of an inlet and pumping out the water into a book before the Dutch put it into large-scale practice, reducing the Zuider Zee to the IJsslemeer and Markermeer? (The practice on a smaller scale predates codex-form books according to Wikipedia, but this project has Scope.)
I read “pumping out the water into a book” and I thought you were getting metafictional.
Andre Norton’s “Forerunner Foray” portrays accommodation, a castle I think, possibly a defence on a wall, which is beset by bad weather and reinforced by psychically controlled… slugs or something. It’s alien and weird.
I think the novel of the first “Star Trek” movie portrays the Mediterranean ocean as converted – back? – to dry land.
Ku is a legendary “very small continent” – apparently mentioned once, in “Eric” – on Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld”. Ku sank under the sea in a mere thirty years. What people did about that is not described in detail.
To refer to the original topic, perhaps it grew in the telling.
Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe series uses the creation of pocket universes as a way to provide more real estate and preserve Victorian Era values against rampant, vulgar postmodernism. But if your pocket universe is not big enough, one nuclear bomb can spoil your whole day.
I have fond memories of discovering the further adventures of the Lilliputians in “Mistress Masham’s Repose” during my Golden Age of Science Fiction -ie, 1969, although it had languished unread on my parents’ bookshelf until one long boring rainy weekend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistress_Masham's_Repose
Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God?
We could also increase space on the inside- Journey to the Center of the Earth style.
And Greg Bear’s Blood Music!
What about floating cities? They are seriously considered in reality and seem plausible. Surely there are speculative fiction works about them; can anyone provide interestng examples?
In “Stargate: Atlantis”, Atlantis is an Ancient city, um, in another galaxy. And underwater – but not by much. About the first thing that human, um, archaeologists do is to return it to the surface.
I quote from Wikipedia describing Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” – there is “the Raft, a huge collection of boats containing Eurasian refugees” as a single floating city on course towards North America. It’s a while since I read the book and I don’t remember if the Raft had as much of an onboard culture as “Titanic” did in the film of that name.
I’m not sure about plausible. Nothing lasts so long in sea water.
Well, whales do. The “island which is a life form” trope, I don’t know if it’s in the original “Arabian Nights” stories, but I think I saw one in a Sinbad film on TV. And J.R.R. Tolkien wrote one in rather comical verse. And, was it Baron von Munchausen who described a thriving community of people living inside a whale? Perhaps not “thriving”.
You don’t need scifi for this. Just look at the Marina district in San Francisco or the airport in Hong Kong, we create new land routinely.
I’m reminded of Bob Silverberg’s “Urbmons” (Urban Monads), buildingd hundereds (and hundreds!) of stories tall in which people live their entire lives, never venturing down to the ground, which is increasingly devastated, or “outside” (except for one rather depressing short).
The novel that comes to mind is “The World Inside”, which is a series of shorter stories about urbmon life.