alt Hacker NewsBlade 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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throw310822 • today at 1:55 PM
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.
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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).