John Brunner’s novel was ‘Stand on Zanzibar’, not ‘Last Stand on Zanzibar’ and wasn’t mainly about overpopulation (though overcrowding in the cities is one major theme). Set in 2010, it’s an interesting exercise to read it and compare with present reality. The world population that could in theory ‘stand on Zanzibar’ (an update from the old saying that the entire world population could stand on the Isle of Wight) is seven billion or so, about what it really is now.

The most important middle-class fantasies are in the genre of ‘cosy catastrophe’ where the working class dies.