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novel - Identify story: Overpopulation problem causes people to live one day a week


This story is about a man that is able to live every day of the week, while everybody else has a single day of wakefulness assigned to them. Due to overpopulation, each human spends 6 out of 7 days of the week in stasis, and has jobs assigned to them in daily shifts. 1/7 of the population works on Monday. 1/7 works on Tuesday, & so on. The main character has found away to circumvent the process and illegally live out his days consecutively by skipping the stasis program that is imposed on the general population and by working a different job everyday. Can somebody name this scifi story?



Answer



It's DayWorld, by Philip José Farmer. It's the first in a series, followed by Dayworld Rebel and Dayworld Breakup.


Here's a brief excerpt from the Wikipedia article on the first book:



The story is set in a dystopian future in which an overpopulated world solves the problem by allocating people only one day per week. For the rest of the six days they are 'stoned,' a kind of suspended animation. The novels focus on a man, Jeff Caird, who is a daybreaker, someone who lives more than one day a week. He is not like most daybreakers; he belongs to a government defying group called the “Immers”. The Immers are a very large and powerful group that works to create a better government. Not all Immers are daybreakers, so to get messages and information from one day to the next, they have daybreakers, like Jeff, to work in every day.




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