DOWNSIZING

'''DOWNSIZING. Alexander Payne, director and co-script''', with Jim Taylor. Stefania Cella, production design. Norway, USA: Paramount Pictures, Ad Hominem Enterprises, Annapurna Pictures (production) / Paramount Pictures (US distribution), 2017. 135 minutes. For various variant titles, including Pequeña gran vida in Mexico and and Petit format in French for Canada, see IMDb.

(Social) science fiction is that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings. — Isaac Asimov "Social Science Fiction" essay (1953), section V

DOWNSIZING could have been a candidate for an epitome of Asimov's social science fiction in its purest form of the One Big Lie: i.e., taking pretty much current society and showing the impact upon it of one significant scientific/technological development, in this case a procedure that reduces human beings and other multicellular beings to literally Lilliputian size, hence in a different kind of literal way reducing the reduced people's carbon footprint and weight/drain upon the environment. For good and for ill, DOWNSIZING is long, up to additional things, and is as much Asimov's "social fiction" as social S.F. — moralizing on current industrialized society through its slightly fictionalized society.

Relevant here are the images of the diminution process, where people are put in groups into a very large machine and reduced in size. See also for the various largely self-contained, largely autonomous towns of the Smalls, finally ending up in an almost-entirely unseen underground city for the Smalls to wait out up to eight thousand years of human-caused environmental collapse on Earth. If we believe this group makes it through — and the rest of the human population does not — the technology of "Downsizing" will have preserved our species from extinction.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 24Dec17