Blade Runner is a very interesting exception, while depopulation has become common in speculative fiction these days having it as part of something from the 80s was pretty rare. I don't know when the overpopulation/depopulation switch flipped in fiction, but I think it was pretty recently.

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mnw21cam a day ago | parent | next [-]

Isaac Asimov's Daneel Olivaw series of books had the overpopulated Earth alright, but it also had spacer colonies on distant planets that very much kept their populations at a sensible level and were magnificently wealthy in comparison because of it (and robots).

	▲	iririririr a day ago \| parent [-]
		there's a short story, which i think is Asimov's, about a probe reaching earth. and it only detects two life forms in a fully automated planetary extraction mechanism. And those two are forever occupied trying to struggle the remaining half from one another.

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throw310822 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Blade Runner the movie looks anything except depopulated. Well, excluding the vast empty building where Deckard lives. The city is enormous and literally blowing up gigantic amounts of energy and pollution; the streets are packed with people, languages, and clutter of all types (a PKD obsession). In some ways it is fully within the overpopulation zeitgeist of the times.

	▲	jayd16 a day ago \| parent [-]
		It's just LA to be honest. Busy everywhere but also downtown is full of empty buildings and you still need to commute from Glendale even if you're an LA detective running down replicants. Ads are talking up off world colonies in Texas. No traffic though, so that's where it's fiction. Really though the entire fiction relies on the contrast of inventing slaves in giant, monstrous firms while still having plenty of forgotten underclass, huddling in the lower ruins. Deckard is middle class, commuting from his empty suburb to prop up the system.