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 per cent 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 per cent.
In the 1990s, 82.4 per cent.
In the year 2000—critical mass.
The Prologue provides a quick snap of the historical context which informs the conceit of this story. It was written in response to siren sounds of alarm over the post-war Baby Boom. Fears were being prompted that if this explosion in population should continue unabated—and in this era before Roe v. Wade and the feminist re-emergence of women en masses into the workplace there was little reason to suspect there would be a reversal of the trend any time soon—a Malthusian crisis would soon be looming in which there were simply too many on the planet for the relatively finite access to resources to be suitable adequate to feed, clothe and shelter.
An extremely controversial non-fiction treatment of this issue appeared in print the very next year. Thanks to an appearance by the author on the hugely popular Tonight Show with Johnny Carson two years later it then became a major best-seller which fueled both the paranoia over the population explosion and the controversy over suggestions being made in The Population Bomb by author Paul Ehrlich on how to face the coming crisis. Of course, as things turned in the 1970’s, the Baby Boom reversal was in full effect long before the novel’s year of critical mass.
They beheld the world.
The final realization of the computer age. A direct extension of the electronic brains at Columbia and Cal Tech in the 1960s, it was a massive breakthrough in solid-state technology. Computer was linked with computer in ever widening complexity.
President Curtain was the first to suggest that the Thinker be moved from Niagara to the Crazy Horse Caverns, and with the death of the Republican Party in 1988 the Crazy Horse bill was passed without opposition. Estimated final cost: twenty-five billion dollars. The old had built it; the young would use it.
As a science fiction novel making predictions about the future, Logan’s Run manages to get a lot wrong while at the same time getting one thing right that surprisingly few others managed to do. For instance, by 1988, the Republican Party was only just beginning to make its move toward complete minority domination of the government in which they could get their nominees elected President who actually got fewer votes than their opponent. In addition, the whole premise that it would be the very young who were running the government could not be farther off base as three different times since the record for oldest man elected President has been broken three times since the book was published.
On the other hand, the mention of Columbia and Cal Tech working on interconnected communication between computers may well be the earliest reference to historical reality of the development of the internet in fiction. And as the narrative progresses and it becomes clear to just what extent the massive web of interconnected computers run the entire world, the novel also becomes perhaps the earliest to predict the devastating power over humanity that artificial intelligence would one day exert.
Young America accepted this bold new method of self-control, and the Thinker was programmed to enforce it. Eventually all remaining older citizens were executed and the first of the giant Sleepshops went into full-time operation in Chicago. One thing the young were sure of; they would never again place their fate in the hands of an older generation.
The age of government by computer began.
The Thinker is the all-powerful, self-correcting computer program in charge of running things. Consider it the story’s equivalent of Google. The execution of senior citizens is the book’s equivalent of the nightmare that wakes up Mitch McConnell in a cold sweat before he goes back to sleep secure in the knowledge that such a thing would never happen under his watch. Sleepshops are the novel’s equivalent of the much more dramatic carousel plot replacement in the film version of the novel; it is basically like the suicide booths on Futurama. And Chicago, of course, would be the city where the youth power movement of the 1960’s died with the scenes of violent clashes with the police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. For a relatively obscure unread novel, Logan’s Run is a story packed with relevance to its time as well as to our time with its sublimely simple prediction that one day computers—at the time unavailable to anyone but rich corporations and the government—would be running the country.
