The politics of abortion (and the hazards of fictional prognostication): The Crack In Space, by Philip K. Dick (yup, him)

 When the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs, I decided I needed to go back and re-read this old classic by Philip K. Dick, which is one of his actual novels.  Dick was better known for his short stories, and if we're honest, his short stories and novellas tended to be better because what was most compelling about his writing was that he would have an idea, and with a short story or novella, he had just enough room for the idea, in and out.  With a novel, you need characters, plot development, and all that.  Those were never his specialties, and if we continue to be honest, the quality of prose in science fiction improved in the 1980s and 1990s.  Still, Dick had some fascinating ideas, and the Dobbs ruling had me thinking back to The Crack In Space.

Here's the deal.  It is 2080, and the Earth is overpopulated because Malthus will never go out of style as a plot point.  What are people doing when they cannot get jobs, support themselves, and such?  They go into suspended animation to be unfrozen... maybe sometime?  Most of these people-- "bibs"-- are "Cols," short for "Colored."  Big racial component to what's going on.

Did I mention that the first version was published in 1964, and the novel itself in 1966?  We'll come back to that.

Anyway, the racial divide in 2080 looks very much the same as the early 1960s.  No progress whatsoever.  And for all the fashion of claiming that America has seen no racial progress, in real-world 2022, those who make such claims have neither lived nor studied the actual world pre-civil rights.  The Crack In Space is a window into that world.  Just... projected into 2080, predicated on the idea that there is (would have been) no progress.

Instead of America having elected its first black president in 2008, its first black candidate is running in 2080.  Jim Briskin, and he is trying to find a way to manage the population problem, and all those people-- "Cols"-- in suspended animation.

The only other thing happening to deal with the population?  Abortion isn't just legal, it is encouraged.  Keep in mind, 1966 is pre-Roe.  But, with a population crisis, and a racial tinge to it, hey!

All of this is the background to the "crack" itself.  A doctor, who is stealing organs from people in suspended animation, takes his "Jiffi-scuttler" in for repair.  What's that?  It's a teleporter.  During the repair process, a repair person finds a crack in it, which leads to an alternate universe where Sinanthropus (Peking man) won out.  How technologically advanced are they?  It's complicated, and they may have weird powers, but the Earth in their universe has plenty of space and resources, so at first, it looks like a solution to the population problem, until everything goes to shit.

This plays amid Briskin's presidential campaign, where he tries to use the crack as a promise to solve the population crisis, the incumbent-- Schwarz-- gets in on the action, and then the owner(s) of a space brothel make everything go haywire.

That owner(s) would be someone(s?) who actually require(s?) a "they" pronoun!  In 1966!  George Walt.  That's George, and Walt.  Twins.  Two bodies, one head, but two different consciousnesses in that head.  They are George Walt, and they are the villain(s?).  They fuck up everything, until Briskin sets it right.

OK, so is this the Philip K. Dick thing to read?  No, and I'll try to refrain from pointing out all of the places it deviates from political realism.  There's the notion of Briskin just promising the AG slot to some gumshoe, completely ignoring Senate confirmation, there's walkin' around the streets and going on dangerous missions with no protection, when you're the goddamned presidential nominee, and... OK, this isn't the point.  It is interesting to note that Dick wrote Briskin as the Liberal Republican nominee, and the Democrats were still officially the States' Rights party (again, 64/66), but mostly readers would notice the failures of technological and social prediction.  Broadcast tv!  Ha!  And their vidphones?  Yeah, our smartphones beat those to hell.  Add in the predictions of racial politics and... well, this is why authors rarely do near-future predictions anymore.

So let's turn to abortion.

Publishing in 1966, Philip K. Dick wrote about a future in which abortion is not only legal, and not only accepted, but encouraged because Malthus.  OK, fine, for those who have forgotten, Thomas Malthus was an early English economist who predicted doom doom DOOM by projecting population growth from the trends at the time, and food production from trends at the time.  Assuming then-current trends, population would outpace food production, at which point, humanity was doomed, but we passed the time of our demise long ago.  Malthusian predictions tend to fail because they assume current trends, fail to account for technological development, and so forth.  Regardless, Dick proposed a future society encouraging abortion as a solution to the Malthusian problem, and you can decide for yourself where that fits relative to Haldeman and The Forever War, in which the government first encourages, and then engineers everyone to turn gay.

That's another topic, though.

Abortion by necessity, and necessity dictating social and political acceptability.  In some ways, it makes more sense than China's one-child policy, and the social and political bar required to implement it is lower, but if one accepts the idea of a Malthusian limit, then what happens if humanity starts to reach it?  There is plenty of sci-fi out there about it, and here's some, tangled up in racial politics and class politics.

At the individual level, one of the reasons women sometimes have an abortion is that they weigh the burdens of trying to raise a child.  It would be crass to put that all down to money, but raising a child is a lot.  Add Malthusian burdens and you create a society-wide increase in those costs, but not uniformly distributed.  Moreover, the world described by Dick is not just one of uneven distribution of resources, which is inevitable, but one that projected the racial divisions of the pre-civil rights world forward, turning the abortions & suspended animation thing into an enterprise bordering on eugenics.

Dick didn't come out and say it quite that bluntly.  The politics of 1966 wouldn't let him, but the novel was a kind of radicalism for its time.

Abortion, though, wound up playing very differently.  Remember, Dick published in 1966, and at the time, it wasn't a defining left-right issue, so he could write a novel that was in many ways an indictment of racial division, while thinking about abortion in a much more complex way.

He presents abortion as, in some ways, an individual choice that solves a financial burden, but a burden with few other resolutions because of a society-wide problem, which falls disproportionately on "Cols," making the encouragement of abortion something eugenic-like, even if it is still a "choice."  If this sounds familiar to anyone, that may be because Margaret Sanger actually was a eugenicist.  Is that, itself, an argument against abortion?  No, but it is an observation made by the pro-life side when arguing against abortion.  It's a secret eugenicist plot, because Margaret Sanger!

Who... yeah, was a eugenicist.

That kind of observation, and thinking about abortion in any kind of complex way, is verboten now because everything must be dumbed down for the sake of polarization and tribal warfare, but in '66, Dick could actually write about the interrelationship between population, economics, choice, abortion, race, and have the end be... a lack of real resolution because real problems are hard to solve.  But here's some ugly stuff to contemplate.

But we're not supposed to do that anymore.

Personally, I like a book with complex ideas and no easy answers.  Kinda like life.

Toe, the title track from The Future Is Now.