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My Mother is trying to remember a book she read in what she believes to be the late 90's and early 2000s.

She claims it featured a story about astronauts who traveled out to space to find a new planet to populate, due to overpopulation of the Earth. Earth's overpopulation had caused the leaders to put birth control of some sort into the water in order to prevent any more babies from being born, but considering people couldn't have babies, by the time the astronauts returned (preserved in hypersleep or something of that sort,) the population had died out due to not being able to reproduce.

My Mom's birthday is coming up and if I could get her a copy of this book (she wants to re-read it,) I'd be thrilled! I just need to figure out what the name of it is. If you can help please do!

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    Your question reminded me of this one, but that's not about the same book, is it?
    – Mr Lister
    Commented Apr 11, 2013 at 18:51
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    There's a story like this by IIRC John Wyndham with soem slightly different deatils; the human exploration ship leaves Earth to find more room for humanity, and one of the crew has a friend who is researching telepathy so people can communicate better and thus live on a crowded world by reducing violence through understanding. When the ship returns, telepathy is seen among animals ( A pride of lions ambushes a deer in a way only telepaths could ) and a human immune to it explains that humanity did gain mental powers . . . and died off because of it "Who can fall in love with themselves?"
    – Covertwalrus
    Commented Jun 29, 2015 at 6:17
  • Covertwalrus - That would be "The New Wine'", but it was by John Christopher not John Wyndham.
    – Mike Stone
    Commented Jan 26, 2018 at 21:59
  • Thank for the correction, Mike Stone! :)
    – Covertwalrus
    Commented Mar 31, 2018 at 5:13

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Is it Inferno by Dan Brown?

It is discovered Brooks didn't puncture the bag; it was water-soluble and had dissolved one week earlier in the cistern waters, meaning that the whole world has already been infected.

The plague that Zobrist created is revealed to be a vector virus that randomly activates to employ DNA modification to cause sterility in one third of humans, thereby reducing population growth to a more stable level. Sinskey and Brooks decide not to try to reverse Zobrist's actions, Brooks pointing out that doing so would be difficult and hazardous even for someone like Zobrist and Sinskey acknowledging that Zobrist had a point about the dangers of overpopulation.

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    Note that this doesn't seem to lead to the end of the human race.
    – DavidW
    Commented Mar 13, 2020 at 0:40

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