Using fiction to highlight the issue of overpopulation

Posting the first time on Reddit. I came to this issue in the course of research for my novel, The Hydra, which deals with the issue of human overpopulation. It was in the course of doing the research that I became aware of just how significant this issue is, and how close to crisis point we have come.

I guess I don't need to convince the readers of this forum of the urgency of the issue, as you probably already know as much as I. What I would like to talk about though, is the communications challenge. When I go outside the groups of informed environmentalists who are lobbying for sensible population control measures, I am always struck at just how ignorant most people are that there is even a problem here. There is a misplaced sense of trust that the planet will sort itself out, or else perhaps just a sense that the scale of the problem is so great, it is simply too large for us to think about.

And so I believe that communication is the most important thing we can do right now. It is in this light that I want to conduct the marketing for my novel, because I think that fiction has enormous power to reach people in a way dire warnings simply do not. Screaming at people to 'wake up' will do little, but presenting them with a human story, I think, can do a lot.

In my story, a man engineers an infertility virus and spreads it around the world, causing an infertility pandemic that eventually spreads to 90% of the world's population. He is caught and put on trial, and the story is the story of his trial. Of course there are characters, suspense and even romance, which make it a 'page turner', but fundamentally it will be the trial scenes that will interest people here most: the arguments for and against population control measures and of which kind.

You can take a look at the book here: http://smarturl.it/hyd and I would request that anyone who might be interested reading, please get a copy. Also, please tweet and spread the message to people you know who might be interested in this subject. Thank you very much.

Regards,

Graham Stull @grahamstull