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    Make Room! Make Room!
    Make Room! Make Room!
    Make Room! Make Room!
    Ebook289 pages

    Make Room! Make Room!

    By Harry Harrison

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A detective hunts down a killer in a dystopian, overpopulated NYC in this classic science fiction novel that inspired the film Soylent Green.
     
    Originally published in 1966, Make Room! Make Room! imagines a world at the end of the twentieth century where Earth is so overwhelmed by rampant population growth that it teeters on the edge of self-destruction. In New York City alone, thirty-five million people are squeezed into its packed boroughs, scrambling like rats for the world’s dwindling resources. The only food available is a product called soylent. And while the government tries to maintain order, the rich get richer and the poor stay underfoot.
     
    Finding a killer in this broken world is one hell of a job. But that’s exactly what Det. Andy Rusch has been assigned to do. If he can stay alive long enough, he might just solve the biggest case he’s ever been on—unless humanity finally fulfills its promise and destroys itself first.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJul 1, 2010
    ISBN9780795311659
    Make Room! Make Room!
    Author

    Harry Harrison

    Harry H Harrison Jr. is a bestselling writer with more than 3.5 million books in print. He has been the subject of two documentaries. His books have been listed on the New York Times and Book Sense list of bestselling non-fiction trade paperback books for over ten years. They are also available in some thirty foreign countries.  

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    Reviews for Make Room! Make Room!

    3.5/5

    329 ratings26 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This book is about a hellish future New York (1999!) in which the world has become massively overpopulated and crime and disease are rampant. There's not much food or water. The movie Soylent Green was made from it, but in the book soylent is just a soy-lentil patty. It had a little science fiction, a mystery and some romance in it. Cars are useless and people live in them. Pretty cool.
    • 3/5
      In 1966, Harrison published this tale of the New York City of 1999. Unrestrained population growth and gluttany of natural resources have led to a world packed to bursting with people. There are riots over cracker crumbs, you have to pay up-front to get a job, and people live packed like sardines. The novel follows a few characters: Andy Rusch, a detective assigned to solve the murder of a politically-connected racketeer, and Billy Chung, whose panicked attempt to make money end disastrously. The real thrust of this story is on the city, and the pathetic lives of those living in it.

      The strength of this novel is in the little details: the sliver of grey soap Andy uses every morning, the unremarked use of slates (presumably because there is too little paper for every-day use), the way Andy has never tasted whiskey before (because grain is too precious), someone being proud of going to the "full three years" of school. Harrison writes the slow grind of scarcity and being constantly surrounded by other people so well that I found myself getting tense every time I opened the book.

    • 4/5
      A really good and thought provoking read!
    • 4/5
      Such an interesting book! This is the book that the movie "Soylent Green" was based on.It was written in 1966 and set in the future "1999"! Well, we're pretty far past that so it was kind of cool to think what the author, in 1966, thought the future was going to be like.Well, in this future there was no birth control. For religious reasons, birth control was not allowed so population growth went crazy. Therefore, the 344 million people living in the United States did not have enough food, water, clothing, medicine, or places to live. And, for some weird reason, they were still trying to vote down a bill that would allow some kind of birth control. It was really awful to see how people lived, or tried. There was a story thread about a cop, one of the main characters, who was trying to solve a murder case, and that kept the story moving.I just thought it was interesting to see the "future" through eyes of the past.
    • 3/5
      I always seem to expect more from these classics than I get from them. This one is okay... kinda... it is very dry and we don't actually care that the whole world is starving to death (well, all of NYC is anyway)... the characters are all a bit of a jerk and the female character trades on her sex to get by. Oh, sure, this is par for the course, but I always prefer when authors put some work into character development and have women be something other than independently mobile sex toys, or, perhaps, slothy neglectful mothers.I guess Harrison's underlying premise is that overpopulation would starve out humanity (because "someone"/"the MAN" bans birth control) and, while that might have been an issue in the 60s, nowadays it is more likely that we will starve out humanity by virtue of genetic modifications, disease and toxic water contaminiation... End result = the same, but process of getting there mildly different. (only mildly though because it is still "someone"/"the MAN" who puts their profits from fracking and oil pipelines ahead of clean water, for example).Anyway, I am glad I read it and can accept that it is a product of its era, driven by the concerns of that era. I won't be looking for more books by Harrison though.
    • 4/5
      Good story despite being too preachy.
    • 4/5
      I really wouldn't call Make Room! Make Room! suspenseful. It is more of a postcard glimpse of an overpopulated future. The format here is future-noir, the dialog is unfortunately cliche, and the scope is that of a long-form short story, rather than a fully-fledged novel. I love the idea of reimagining NYC, though; the streets are the same, but where they lead is completely alien. For that reason, it falls into the same category as the film Escape from New York. In the end, though, Harry Harrison has quite fully developed a society and its laws. Whether this alone is enough to tell a compelling story is for you to judge!
    • 3/5
      Not a bad book. Well written...but about as dry as a box of stale crackers. The story was interesting....moral to the story.... LIFE SUCKS deal with it and move on.
    • 4/5
      This is another novel set in the future (1999, written in 1966), looking at the effects of over-population. The New York of 1999 has a population of 35 million, one tenth of the population of the United States, in a world where the population is 7 billion (what is actually became a little later in 2011). Most of the population of New York (the only part of the world we see in the novel) lives a hand to mouth existence, the economy has collapsed through almost complete depletion of resources, and even water is rationed for most of the year. This is the backdrop to a well written novel in which the details of the everyday life of police officer Andy Rusch and those with whom he associates in his work and private lives form the focus of the narrative. The plot based around the hunt for a murder suspect (who is known to the reader, but not to Andy and his colleagues) seems fairly incidental, and the collective condition of the city's inhabitants is really the central character as such. The book was the rough basis for the cult film Soylent Green, made in 1973 starring Charlton Heston. The food substitute soylent appears in the novel, though without the dramatic impact seen at the end of the film. A good read and a worthwhile addition to the dystopian/speculative fiction genre.
    • 4/5
      A most interesting read, not at all like I remember the movie "Soylent Green". I'm going to have to watch it again to refresh my memory. The overwhelming message of the book is over population. The origin of "Soylent Green" is never mentioned.
    • 4/5
      This book really bears no resemblance to the movie "Soylent Green." The biggest twist of the movie (Soylent Green is people) does not happen in the book. Really there's very little mention of Soylent Green at all. Mostly this is about overpopulation. It seems quaint now in that it's 1999, there are 7 billion people on Earth, and everyone is doomed. It's 2013, there are 7 billion people, and while things aren't all peachy keen they aren't that bad. I suppose Harrison didn't take into account how technology can affect the equation, allowing more resources to be found and those resources to be used more efficiently. Basically he just seems to have projected forward using 1960 technology, which is a problem in writing science fiction.

      The narrative doesn't really advance much from the beginning to the end, but I suppose that was largely the point. There is no deus ex machina to save everyone or anything like that. Overall it was entertaining even without the cannibalism.

      That is all.
    • 5/5
      Unexpected gem of a different kind from the author of Deathworld and Stainless Steel Rut. How depressing though. The book is totally fresh despite all the geopolitical changes from the time it was written.
    • 3/5
      The book that the movie "soylent Green" is based on. As usual the book is much better ( although I really liked the movie too )
    • 5/5
      This is my horror group's pick for November. I got a first edition copy from the library. The book was $3.95 The dust jacket talks ad nauseum about this "realistic novel of life in 1999"... and the "frighteningly realistic novel" and that "none of the realistic elements have been invented." Can you say overkill? I knew I was going to hate it.And then someone mentioned that this book was the inspiration for the film Soylent Green and I saw the story from a new perspective. Even though the only thing I remember about that movie is Charlton Heston's anguished yell that "Soylent Green is... (oh, come on, you know)", that alone sparked my interest and I devoured the book.Harrison's writing is simplistic and very straightforward but DAMN, he is powerfully descriptive. I could feel the crush of humanity, the millions pressing close to the point of suffocation. I could almost smell the stench of garbage and decay. The story has a claustrophobic air about it and it is amazingly powerful. So, in spite of myself, I'd have to say that yes, it really IS rather realistic... and scary as hell. I LOVED it.
    • 4/5
      Those familiar with the famous film adaptation of this novel - Soylent Green (1973) - who then read the book won't recognize much as far as plot goes. Make Room, Make Room was Harry Harrison's literary warning of the dangers the global society faces from overpopulation, told through the events experienced by New York City detective Andy Rusch leading up to the beginning of the new century in the year 1999.It's easy to point out failed predictions in books written about future dates that have since come and gone, and those willing to criticize Harrison's work will find plenty to point and laugh at. His estimated population of New York City reaching 35 Million by 1999 is off by about 28 Million, although he fares better with his prediction of the global population reaching 7 Billion, only being off by a billion on that one. But of course, these weren't intended to be accurate predictions as much as an exaggerated worst-case scenario based on very real and tangible concerns, such as the eventual depletion of natural resources, the gradual man-driven destruction of the environment, and as the title of the book implies, just trying to make room for an ever-expanding population. Harrison deftly explores the myriad of variables that come into play in such a dystopian future by focusing on the human element through a handful of characters whose lives intersect under these potential conditions. Unlike the film, which injects a corporate espionage driven plot to make the end of the human race a bit more palatable, Harrison's focus is on how people act and react in such extreme environments, and how desperate political and societal attempts at maintaining some semblance of order can often exacerbate the situation even further.It's a shame that Make Room, Make Room is known primarily through it's film adaptation, as Harrison's treatment of the subject matter reaches a depth that often goes unappreciated by the comparison.
    • 4/5
      This was a much better dystopia than I expected—dark and gritty, just the way I like them. It is dated and not just in that it takes place in the far future of twenty years ago. Despite having some attitudes that were radical for its time, it is full of gender stereotypes as well as sprinkled with some racist terms for the Chinese that I'd just as soon neither read nor remember. Despite its flaws, I find it interesting that the book addresses that which we have still failed to fully grasp: the single most effective thing we can do to reduce our carbon footprint is to reduce our reproduction. Make less babies. Despite everything, access to birth control is still denied, often quite deliberately, to women. In some places, it is entirely unavailable, and even in those places where women are freer, we still must fight to maintain our access. Reproduction is still viewed so strongly as a sacred right that one cannot even discuss the concept of incentivizing people to have less children without responses of horror and approbation. Of additional note, this is one of those extremely loose book-to-film scenarios. Even if you've never seen Soylent Green, there's one thing you know about it, and that isn't even in the story. Don't come into this book expecting the movie. Furthermore, this isn't scifi. I'm not sure why lots of folks expect it to be. Maybe because the movie is? Regardless, it's not. It's byline is in fact "A Realistic Novel of Life in 1999", so it was never even intended to be.
    • 3/5
      Make Room, Make Room by Harry Harrison is the basis for the movie Soylent Green. The novel and the movie are, however, very different. They both have a premise, in that, due to regulations and birth control being illegal, there are too many people, and there is a murder. That is where they diverge. Where as in the movie the man killed is the businessman responsible for the cannibalistic Soylent Green, in the novel the man killed is a gangster. The Cop assigned to the case spends the entire time bemoaning the futility of police work in a giant city but he is pressured by his superiors to find the killer. When he finally solves the case and is catches the murderer, he is demoted and punished for spending so much time on it and not other cases, even though he was ordered to. Cannibalism is not mentioned in the novel and has nothing to do with the plot. The movie is a sensational piece of speculative fiction with elements of horror; the novel is a sensationalist dystopian piece that Harry Harrison uses as a platform for his own political agenda. Not that he is wrong. Besides it’s still a good book and an enjoyable read, if a little bit dry and dated
    • 3/5
      This is a dystopic novel about what happens when the amount of people far outnumber the resources available. I went in expecting a freaky-ass horror book and found it to be more of a screed about the importance of birth control and resource management. (It was the basis of the movie Soylent Green, but the ingredients of soylent green in the book and the movie are quite different. In the book, soylent is just “soy” and “lentil.” The fact that I kept waiting for it to be made of something else based on my limited knowledge of the movie led to my disappointment with the book.)THE BASIC STORYNew York City in 1999 (which was quite far in the future when the book was written in 1966) is miserable and overcrowded, with more than 35 million people competing for scarce resources. The plot focuses on a handful of characters: Andy Rusch, an overworked police officer trying to solve the murder of a rich man (the only kind of murder that gets investigated); Billy Chung, a desperately poor boy who has resorted to robbery to feed himself; Shirl, the attractive, young mistress of the murdered rich man who uses her looks and sex to survive; and Sol, Andy’s roommate and “eldster” (senior citizen) who rants about why society has degenerated The narrative switches between these four main characters—showing how they must struggle to survive in a world where there are too many people and not enough food, water and space.MY THOUGHTSI’m sure this book was more shocking and futuristic when it was written in 1966. Today, it feels a bit dated. Yet I think the message—humans must be careful with their management of the planet’s limited resources—is still timely. I suspect that a future world where we’ve exhausted our natural resources would be as miserable and horrible as the one described in the book. However, since I went in expecting more of a horror kind of read, I was disappointed when what I got was more of a political statement disguised as a novel.The social commentary is not subtle. Sol exists solely to rant about the government and the need for birth control. Shirl represents how the rich will still live well despite the rest of the world barely having enough to eat. Andy is the “regular” guy who works hard and barely catches a break despite doing everything right. Billy represents the lengths people will go to when pushed to their limits. The writing is serviceable and plain; the author’s intent is to get his message across, not to create lovely sentences.I think my expectations definitely affected my opinion of this book. And, after seeing the previews for Soylent Green, I suspect I won’t be watching it. (It looked incredibly cheesy.) Still, I admire Harrison’s environmental views and foresight; the world he imagined might still come to pass one day, and we’ll all be sorry if it does.
    • 4/5
      By the eve of the millennium Earth's population has exploded. New York City alone supports 35 million. There's not enough food or water, the rivers run dirty and the air is barely fit to breathe, and fossil fuels have long since been exhausted. And yet, birth control is a controversial concept that causes fear among the majority of the people, who revile it as "baby killing." Andy Rusch, a good cop trying to make his way in a city that is able to provide less and less for him, is assigned a pointless investigation--in addition to his regular job of working the riots that break out regularly in the wake of ever more severe food and water rationing--into the murder of a local black market wheeler-dealer. In the process, he inherits the bad guy's sweet gal, but that's about all he gets…aside from hungrier, thirstier, and more and more tired.Make Room! Make Room! is a dystopian novel about a future world that in the baby-booming fifties and sixties must have seemed to loom just around the corner (anybody remember the "Stop at Two" campaign?). Thankfully, Harrison's direst predictions have not come true, although his portrayal of the obstinacy of the human race in the face of inevitable misery is chillingly believable. Harrison's prose style is matter-of-fact, devoid of too much invented jargon or futuristic talk. And although in some ways Make Room! Make Room! might seem dated--I don't think there's much fear of overpopulation anymore, at least not in the First World--with just a few tweaks--climate change, anyone?--the story is all too believable.
    • 3/5
      This is the book that the film science-fiction film Soylent Green is loosely based on. The two stories are very different, however. Both are set in an overpopulated New York in the near future. In the film, the story is about the police investigation into the murder of an executive of the corporation that makes the synthetic food stuff, Soylent Green and has one of the most memorable twist endings I remember in a film. In the book there is also a murder, but the story is very different and less important than the Harrison’s description of daily life in New York. Harrison was writing a warning to his readers about the dangers of unchecked population growth and resistance to birth control , and there is a bibliography at the end of the book. I don’t think the book has dated terribly well. Much of the population growth that Harrison feared has happened, but with few of the consequences that he had feared. Nonetheless, the book makes for uncomfortable reading as he describes the daily fight to live in a city with little food, unreliable sources of power, and insufficient accommodation. The plot, however, is poor, and the filmmakers were right to change it. The ending in the book has nothing of the shock power of the film version.
    • 3/5
      (Original Review, 1980-08-19)Pournelle's virulently infectious optimism is severely misplaced. Other people have already pointed out that his strategy involves the probable abandonment of Earth and the bulk of its population (what-the-hell, they're just gooks anyway); I'll just add that even RAH [2018 EDIT: Heinlein] saw this approx. 30 years ago (in FARMER IN THE SKY a character acknowledges that even with the huge ships in use they can't possibly take off more than a fraction of the population increase -- or absorb it in a colonial world; they're simply hoping to have some racial survival after Earth is ruined).Addressing the question of a breakthrough:There are a number of intended-to-be-humorous laboratory "rules" which many computer people are familiar with even though they are less applicable in the terminal room (I got a full dose of them because I used to be a chemist). Aside from the 1001 permutations of Murphy's Law, there are such gems as "First draw your curves; they plot the data." and "Don't just believe in miracles--rely on them." I contend that this latter is what JEP, JSOUTH, etc. are in fact doing because a technological breakthrough fits many of the usable definitions of a miracle, of which the most important is unpredictability under known physical laws. It's all very well to treat such laws as temporary and superable obstacles in research, but to expect/ to defeat them is foolish.Looking at the specific example of THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS, there is proposed a particularly miraculous breakthrough: the transmutation of lunar rock into food and water. (I suspect that Heinlein may have been deliberately Biblical at this point, since by other evidence he's quite familiar with that overrated book.) The computer which assumed any such breakthrough in even the most optimistic current modeling system would be thought squirrely, and Mike himself admits that he is looking for a breakthrough on the order of 50 years (i.e., 5-500 years, says Weinreb) away --- and he expects cannibalism (not given this breakthrough) in less than 20 (*).Without more statistics than can conveniently be transmitted, I'm not prepared to accept either of his simple models ("dogmatic" or "enlightened"). Malthus' food production model was in fact optimistic. Granted, certain technologies (hardly breakthroughs either; most are over-application of ancient practices) have increased productivity per acre, but such gains have been near zero in recent years --- in fact, we have to keep producing new insecticides (and sometimes herbicides) to keep pest populations under control as they evolve to deal with current methods. I find the figures recently given for rate of loss of arable land quite credible, especially in view of this month's SMITHSONIAN, which carries an article from someone surviving on a farm that is useless according to current high-technology agricultural standards; the best estimates show a loss of 3 to 5 feet/ of topsoil, the accumulation of over a hundred millennia, in the past 150 years. Nor have I seen any challenges to the assertion of the 1959 edition of the World Book encyclopedia, hardly a gloomy publication given the date and audience, that since the arrival of white men in America the countrywide average depth of topsoil has gone from 9" to 6".The gas diffusion model of innovation, like many simple models, leaves out a few important factors --- such as the fact that laboratories require substantial amounts of space. Technologists would hardly be immune to the debilitating effects of population pressure --- does anyone believe that a researcher in the world of MAKE ROOM, MAKE ROOM would be as effective as one now, given the effects of poor nutrition, bad air, simple lack of personal space, etc.? (The geniuses in cubbyholes have commonly been those who worked best alone.) Statistics suggest that despite our slowly increasing population this country is producing fewer and fewer people capable of contributing to even the basic drudgework of research from which a breakthrough is most likely to come.Recall that the first portion of the industrial revolution in Britain had relatively little to do with farming --- I wouldn't be surprised if any increase in the rate of population increase could be attributed to the fact that Britain was producing more manufactured goods which could be traded for food (my recollection is that Britain has been a net importer of food for some time). In any case we are now dealing with a qualitatively different problem; it was trivial, then, to say that if food could be harvested faster and stored better there would be less spoilage, but the total loss today in the fields and in storage (especially if we discount spoilage of grain stored for several years because of policies which encourage the continued production of unusable surpluses, further removing trace nutrients from the land) is small.I would suggest that believers in ultimate salvation by technology consider the modern tomato as a measure of that potential salvation. Bred to a consistent size and ripening time and to a consistency suitable for mechanical harvesting, it is picked green and gassed to make it turn red (which does/ not/ ripen it); the result is something not worth the energy to throw it out. The problem with any technological "progress" is choosing the parameters; as SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN pointed out 6 1/2 years ago the traditional choice in energy has been to spend a lot of [energy] finding new sources and very little conserving.It is not surprising that science fictioneers should take guidance from Malthus, he provided a simple mathematical relationship between population (exponential growth, or geometric as he put it), and food production (constant growth). Such a formula is extremely useful since it can be applied to any society or time. Oh, for younger days before I was awakened from my dogmatic slumbers. I too once believed that the world was becoming overcrowded, and that poverty, starvation, disease, and war were due in large part thereunto. Historical study, current observation, or theoretical considerations (if you're a pure Marxist or pure capitalist at least) show things are not so simple. Starting arbitrarily with a million, let us construct a list of areas containing a million people ordered by density. Let us do likewise with 10 million, 100 million, 1 billion, and downwards too if you like.Correlate this with starvation. It won't. Likewise historically.The practical and theoretical joker is Malthus' food production model. I suggest that he was observing the beginnings of exponential growth in productivity, and not having a model for it (as he did for reproduction), he assumed linear growth. Seventy years ago, conventional wisdom would have insisted on unlimited exponential growth. Today, in spite of only minor, if any, setbacks, it is stylish to insist on low and immediate absolute limits.Let me suggest another model, seemingly unrelated: that innovation transfer can be considered as a gas diffusion process. (**) This would indicate that in order to increase our production, we require a denser if not a greater population. I think this was true in the jump from hunter-gatherer to agricultural. It would be interesting to try to figure out whether the population increased before or after the start of the industrial revolution in G.B., but I suspect they didn't keep good enough statistics. (Exercise for the reader - try to apply this model to the difficulties of central and southern Africa in their attempt to industrialize, or even feed themselves).I'm glad J.E.P. put in his ounce of gold on the recent doom and gloom model before I got in my 2 cents (which would have been on the Club of Rome LIMITS TO GROWTH model anyway). I have a question though, how does one model breakthroughs anyway?I just had an ironic thought. I got to this point via RAH, and now I'm on the other side of prof's position in THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS. There, if you recall, prof. forced Mike to predict famine in n years (where n was a small integer), as opposed to Mike's original position which included a technological breakthrough. The rest of the plot stems from this prediction.I personally am not expecting doom (although I am/ hedging a few bets) --- unless the people who believe that there just isn't a problem at all get their way.Eat, drink, and be merry, Astragen (2018 EDIT: My moniker from back then…](*) I recall at least 3 different numbers given (of which at least 2 must be wrong) but all of them were under 20 years).(**) I ought to credit somebody, but I can't remember the name.[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.]
    • 5/5
      I loved the movie Soylent Green and I found this book....I LOVED IT! The chilling plot still remains, if not just barely there and even though I enjoyed it, but it is quite depressing. Read it if you love dystopia novels and suspense.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Make Room, Make Room was the basis for the important 70's SF movie Soylent Green. However, the story line is very different and especially the climax from the film is completely absent in the novel. About the novel then: it is a typical dystopian science fiction novel, in this case based on the dire predictions of the Club of Rome. It is 1999. The worlds population has exploded and only New York city houses 35M people. All oil has long been burned up and all transport is primarily done with manpower. Room and food are extremely scarce. The society under these conditions is vividly depicted from a man-in-the-street perspective. The quiet depressing atmosphere is quiet convincingly depicted. Especially the lack of perspective and the resulting feeling of being trapped was well put across.Of course, in hindsight, it's always easy to ridicule a prediction that turns out off the mark, but in this case I repeatedly felt that Harrison was just doing the numbers wrong. It's just plain incredible to me that society would deteriorate so badly in just 30 years. And this seems an important aspect of near-future SF: you have to be able to believe the scenario. Example: the current population of the USA is not much less than the suggested 350M in the work. It's just not convincing that a country as large as the USA would house several families in a room under the depicted circumstances with so much room available.Also, many loose ends remain untied at the end. Whatever happened to Billy's obsession with Shirl after his only glimpse of her? What about Judge Santini and his liaisons with the underworld?All in all, Make Room, Make Room is an entertaining read, but it is certainly not on par with 1984 or Brave New World. I actually think the film is better (remarkable in itself).

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Like so many others, I came to this book because of the movie Soylent Green. The movie's a standard-issue 70s Hollywood dystopia: it's grotesquely sexist, its plot builds to a climax (whereas the book builds to an anticipated climax at the new millennium, which it deliberately never delivers), and it centers on a hero (an honest cop) fighting a wicked corporation (the Soylent company). Structurally, the movie could be anything, were it not for its famous anthropophagous punchline.That punchline's "missing" in the book because it would make no sense within the book's future logic. Distaste for birth control delivers humans to this grotesque population boom. The book itself literally becomes a birth control tract towards the end, with Sol--like Harrison himself, a WWII vet and former sniper--hammering in what we should have already figured out: the problem is the respect for human life itself. In this world, with its outsized and unjustifiable desire for more humans, it's impossible that the sanitation people would convert humans into meat. The film missed that point, and, in fact, by frightening us with a world that doesn't respect human life, runs exactly counter to the book's own logic.The film fails the book too because it turns its cop into a hero. The book's cop is just a piece of a larger broken machinery in a novel with a Dickensian social panoply, but without a Dickensian resolution or rescue. Among all these folks, our cop's forced to try to solve a murder of some Irish mafia boss, and when he finally does, no one cares. That's essentially the plot, and it makes no real difference at all. We're in a straightforwardly structuralist world.Still, I'm not recommending the book. Not the movie either, which is even worse. Harrison's produced a period piece where welfare keeps the poor alive, women long to keep a home and cook for their men, and New York is mostly white. It gives us the same broken down inner city that we have in, say, The Forever War, Death Wish, Escape from New York, Adventures in Babysitting, or The Out-of-Towners, with no sense of what would come: that property values themselves, combined with declining real wages and welfare cuts and increased police and prison funding to protect the rich, would transform most of Manhattan itself into a gated community. If you want good science fiction without a hero, read Adam Roberts' New Model Army.
    • 4/5
      A nightmarish vision of a future New York in which overpopulation has resulted in starvation and people living practically on top of one another, this is the novel that inspired the movie Soylent Green. For the first half of the book or so, the two are so alike that the novel reads like the screenplay. But then they diverge, and I think overall the movie's plot was more coherent and interesting. Toward the end of the book, the author begins lecturing, through his character Sol, about the salvation of birth control (illegal in his imagined future), which comes across as quaint and a bit simplistic to modern readers. An interesting read in the sub-genre of dystopian fiction, but not a great one.

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    • 4/5
      I don't really know what I expected from this book, not having read it before or seen the film, but having seen clips or articles of people talking about it. It was a brilliant dystopian picture, totally believable, horrible yet not too horrible. I had somehow got it into my head that cannibalism would be involved and was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn't - it was the sheer numbingness of the daily grind that was the real horror... I loved that Andy was forced to spend time solving a case due to political reasons, and (mild spoiler alert) at the end, as so often happens in corporate life if not political life, the people above forgot why he had been put on the case in the first place...

    Book preview

    Make Room! Make Room! - Harry Harrison

    PROLOGUE

    In December, 1959, The President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, said: This government… will not… as long as I am here, have a positive political doctrine in its program that has to do with this problem of birth control. That is not our business. It has not been the business of any American government since that time.

    ***

    In 1950 the United States—with just 9.5 per cent of the world’s population—was consuming 50 per cent of the world’s raw materials. This percentage keeps getting bigger and within fifteen years, at the present rate of growth, the United States will be consuming over 83 per cent of the annual output of the earth’s materials. By the end of the century, should our population continue to increase at the same rate, this country will need more than 100 per cent of the planet’s resources to maintain our current living standards. This is a mathematical impossibility—aside from the fact that there will be about seven billion people on this earth at that time and—perhaps—they would like to have some of the raw materials too.

    ***

    In which case, what will the world be like?

    MONDAY, AUGUST 9, 1999

    NEW YORK CITY—

    —stolen from the trusting Indians by the wily Dutch, taken from the law-abiding Dutch by the warlike British, then wrested in turn from the peaceful British by the revolutionary colonials. Its trees were burned decades ago, its hills leveled and the fresh ponds drained and filled, while the crystal springs have been imprisoned underground and spill their pure waters directly into the sewers. Reaching out urbanizing tentacles from its island home, the city has become a megalopolis with four of its five boroughs blanketing half of one island over a hundred miles long, engulfing another island, and sprawling up the Hudson River onto the mainland of North America. The fifth and original borough is Manhattan: a slab of primordial granite and metamorphic rock bounded on all sides by water, squatting like a steel and stone spider in the midst of its web of bridges, tunnels, tubes, cables and ferries. Unable to expand outward, Manhattan has writhed upward, feeding on its own flesh as it tears down the old buildings to replace them with the new, rising higher and still higher—yet never high enough, for there seems to be no limit to the people crowding here. They press in from the outside and raise their families, and their children and their children’s children raise families, until this city is populated as no other city has ever been in the history of the world.

    On this hot day in August in the year 1999 there are—give or take a few thousand—thirty-five million people in the City of New York.

    PART ONE

    1

    The August sun struck in through the open window and burned on Andrew Rusch’s bare legs until discomfort dragged him awake from the depths of heavy sleep. Only slowly did he become aware of the heat and the damp and gritty sheet beneath his body. He rubbed at his gummed-shut eyelids, then lay there, staring up at the cracked and stained plaster of the ceiling, only half awake and experiencing a feeling of dislocation, not knowing in those first waking moments just where he was, although he had lived in this room for over seven years. He yawned and the odd sensation slipped away while he groped for the watch that he always put on the chair next to the bed, then he yawned again as he blinked at the hands mistily seen behind the scratched crystal. Seven… seven o’clock in the morning, and there was a little number 9 in the middle of the square window. Monday, the ninth of August, 1999—and hot as a furnace already, with the city still embedded in the heat wave that had baked and suffocated New York for the past ten days. Andy scratched at a trickle of perspiration on his side, then moved his legs out of the patch of sunlight and bunched the pillow up under his neck. From the other side of the thin partition that divided the room in half there came a clanking whir that quickly rose to a high-pitched drone.

    Morning… he shouted over the sound, then began coughing. Still coughing he reluctantly stood and crossed the room to draw a glass of water from the wall tank; it came out in a thin, brownish trickle. He swallowed it, then rapped the dial on the tank with his knuckles and the needle bobbed up and down close to the Empty mark. It needed filling, he would have to see to that before he signed in at four o’clock at the precinct. The day had begun.

    A full-length mirror with a crack running down it was fixed to the front of the hulking wardrobe and he poked his face close to it, rubbing at his bristly jaw. He would have to shave before he went in. No one should ever look at himself in the morning, naked and revealed, he decided with distaste, frowning at the dead white of his skin and the slight bow to his legs that was usually concealed by his pants. And how did he manage to have ribs that stuck out like those of a starved horse, as well as a growing potbelly—both at the same time? He kneaded the soft flesh and thought that it must be the starchy diet, that and sitting around on his chunk most of the time. But at least the fat wasn’t showing on his face. His forehead was a little higher each year, but wasn’t too obvious as long as his hair was cropped short. You have just turned thirty, he thought to himself, and the wrinkles are already starting around your eyes. And your nose is too big—wasn’t it Uncle Brian who always said that was because there was Welsh blood in the family? And your canine teeth are a little too obvious so when you smile you look a bit like a hyena. You’re a handsome devil, Andy Rusch, and when was the last time you had a date? He scowled at himself, then went to look for a handkerchief to blow his impressive Welsh nose.

    There was just a single pair of clean undershorts in the drawer and he pulled them on; that was another thing he had to remember today, to get some washing done. The squealing whine was still coming from the other side of the partition as he pushed through the connecting door.

    You’re going to give yourself a coronary, Sol, he told the gray-bearded man who was perched on the wheelless bicycle, pedaling so industriously that perspiration ran down his chest and soaked into the bath towel that he wore tied around his waist.

    Never a coronary, Solomon Kahn gasped out, pumping steadily. I been doing this every day for so long that my ticker would miss it if I stopped. And no cholesterol in my arteries either since regular flushing with alcohol takes care of that. And no lung cancer since I couldn’t afford to smoke even if I wanted to, which I don’t. And at the age of seventy-five no prostatitis because…

    Sol, please—spare me the horrible details on an empty stomach. Do you have an ice cube to spare?

    Take two—it’s a hot day. And don’t leave the door open too long.

    Andy opened the small refrigerator that squatted against the wall and quickly took out the plastic container of margarine, then squeezed two ice cubes from the tray into a glass and slammed the door. He filled the glass with water from the wall tank and put it on the table next to the margarine. Have you eaten yet? he asked.

    I’ll join you, these things should be charged by now.

    Sol stopped pedaling and the whine died away to a moan, then vanished. He disconnected the wires from the electrical generator that was geared to the rear axle of the bike, and carefully coiled them up next to the four black automobile storage batteries that were racked on top of the refrigerator. Then, after wiping his hands on his soiled towel sarong, he pulled out one of the bucket seats salvaged from an ancient 1975 Ford, and sat down across the table from Andy.

    I heard the six o’clock news, he said. "The Eldsters are organizing another protest march today on relief headquarters. That’s where you’ll see coronarles!"

    I won’t, thank God, I’m not on until four and Union Square isn’t in our precinct. He opened the breadbox and took out one of the six-inch square red crackers, then pushed the box over to Sol. He spread margarine thinly on it and took a bite, wrinkling his nose as he chewed. I think this margarine has turned.

    How can you tell? Sol grunted, biting into one of the dry crackers. Anything made from motor oil and whale blubber is turned to begin with.

    Now you begin to sound like a naturist, Andy said, washing his cracker down with cold water. There’s hardly any flavor at all to the fats made from petrochemicals and you know there aren’t any whales left so they can’t use blubber—it’s just good Chlorella oil.

    Whales, plankton, herring oil, it’s all the same. Tastes fishy. I’ll take mine dry so I don’t grow no fins. There was a sudden staccato rapping on the door and he groaned. Not yet eight o’clock and already they are after you.

    It could be anything, Andy said, starting for the door.

    It could be but it’s not, that’s the callboy’s knock and you know it as well as I do and I bet you dollars to doughnuts that’s just who it is. See? He nodded with gloomy satisfaction when Andy unlocked the door and they saw the skinny, bare-legged messenger standing in the dark hall.

    What do you want, Woody? Andy asked.

    I don’ wan’ no-fin, Woody lisped over his bare gums. Though he was in his early twenties he didn’t have a tooth in his head. Lieutenan’ says bring, I bring. He handed Andy the message board with his name written on the outside.

    Andy turned toward the light and opened it, reading the lieutenant’s spiky scrawl on the slate, then took the chalk and scribbled his initials after it and returned it to the messenger. He closed the door behind him and went back to finish his breakfast, frowning in thought.

    Don’t look at me that way, Sol said, I didn’t send the message. Am I wrong in guessing it’s not the most pleasant of news?

    It’s the Eldsters, they’re jamming the Square already and the precinct needs reinforcements.

    But why you? This sounds like a job for the harness bulls.

    "Harness bulls! Where do you get that medieval slang? Of course they need patrolmen for the crowd, but there have to be detectives there to spot known agitators, pickpockets, purse-grabbers and the rest. It’ll be murder in that park today. I have to check in by nine, so I have enough time to bring up some water first.

    Andy dressed slowly in slacks and a loose sport shirt, then put a pan of water on the windowsill to warm in the sun. He took the two five-gallon plastic jerry cans, and when he went out Sol looked up from the TV set, glancing over the top of his old-fashioned glasses.

    When you bring back the water I’ll fix you a drink—or do you think it is too early?

    Not the way I feel today, it’s not.

    The hall was ink black once the door had closed behind him and he felt his way carefully along the wall to the stairs, cursing and almost falling when he stumbled over a heap of refuse someone had thrown there. Two flights down a window had been knocked through the wall and enough light came in to show him the way down the last two flights to the street. After the damp hallway the heat of Twenty-fifth Street hit him in a musty wave, a stifling miasma compounded of decay, dirt and unwashed humanity. He had to make his way through the women who already filled the steps of the building, walking carefully so that he didn’t step on the children who were playing below. The sidewalk was still in shadow but so jammed with people that he walked in the street, well away from the curb to avoid rubbish and litter banked high there. Days of heat had softened the tar so that it gave underfoot, then clutched at the soles of his shoes. There was the usual line leading to the columnar red water point on the corner of Seventh Avenue, but it broke up with angry shouts and some waved fists just as he reached it. Still muttering, the crowd dispersed and Andy saw that the duty patrolman was locking the steel door.

    What’s going on? Andy asked. I thought this point was open until noon?

    The policeman turned, his hand automatically staying close to his gun until he recognized the detective from his own precinct. He tilted back his uniform cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.

    Just had the orders from the sergeant, all points closed for twenty-four hours. The reservoir level is low because of the drought, they gotta save water.

    That’s a hell of a note, Andy said, looking at the key still in the lock. I’m going on duty now and this means I’m not going to be drinking for a couple of days…

    After a careful look around the policeman unlocked the door and took one of the jerry cans from Andy. One of these ought to hold you. He held it under the faucet while it filled, then lowered his voice. Don’t let it out, but the word is that there was another dynamiting job on the aqueduct upstate.

    Those farmers again?

    It must be. I was on guard duty up there before I came to this precinct and it’s rough, they just as soon blow you up with the aqueduct at the same time. Claim the city’s stealing their water.

    They’ve got enough, Andy said, taking the full container. More than they need. And there are thirty-five million people here in the city who get damn thirsty.

    Who’s arguing? the cop asked, slamming the door shut again and locking it tight.

    Andy pushed his way back through the crowd around the steps and went through to the backyard first. All of the toilets were in use and he had to wait, and when he finally got into one of the cubicles he took the jerry cans with him; one of the kids playing in the pile of rubbish against the fence would be sure to steal them if he left them unguarded.

    When he had climbed the dark flights once more and opened the door to the room he heard the clear sound of ice cubes rattling against glass.

    That’s Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that you’re playing, he said, dropping the containers and falling into a chair.

    It’s my favorite tune, Sol said, taking two chilled glasses from the refrigerator and, with the solemnity of a religious ritual, dropping a tiny pearl onion into each. He passed one to Andy, who sipped carefully at the chilled liquid.

    It’s when I taste one of these, Sol, that I almost believe you’re not crazy after all. Why do they call them Gibsons?

    A secret lost behind the mists of time. Why is a Stinger a Stinger or a Pink Lady a Pink Lady?

    I don’t know—why? I never tasted any of them.

    I don’t know either, but that’s the name. Like those green things they serve in the knockjoints, Panamas. Doesn’t mean anything, just a name.

    Thanks, Andy said, draining his glass. The day looks better already.

    He went into his room and took his gun and holster from the drawer and clipped it inside the waistband of his pants. His shield was on his key ring where he always kept it and he slipped his notepad in on top of it, then hesitated a moment. It was going to be a long and rough day and anything might happen. He dug his nippers out from under his shirts, then the soft plastic tube filled with shot. It might be needed in the crowd, safer than a gun with all those old people milling about. Not only that, but with the new austerity regulations you have to have a damn good reason for using up any ammunition. He washed as well as he could with the pint of water that had been warming in the sun on the window sill, then scrubbed his face with the small shard of gray and gritty soap until his whiskers softened a bit. His razor blade was beginning to show obvious nicks along both edges and, as he honed it against the inside of his drinking glass, he thought that it was time to think about getting a new one. Maybe in the fall.

    Sol was watering his window box when Andy came out, carefully irrigating the rows of herbs and tiny onions. Don’t take any wooden nickels, he said without looking up from his work. Sol had a million of them, all old. What in the world was a wooden nickel?

    The sun was higher now and the heat was mounting in the sealed tar and concrete valley of the street. The band of shade was smaller and the steps were so packed with humanity that he couldn’t leave the doorway. He carefully pushed by a tiny, runny-nosed girl dressed only in ragged gray underwear and descended a step. The gaunt women moved aside reluctantly, ignoring him, but the men stared at him with a cold look of hatred stamped across their features that gave them a strangely alike appearance, as though they were all members of the same angry family. Andy threaded his way through the last of them and when he reached the sidewalk he had to step over the outstretched leg of an old man who sprawled there. He looked dead, not asleep, and he might be for all that anyone cared. His foot was bare and filthy and a string tied about his ankle led to a naked baby that was sitting vacantly on the sidewalk chewing on a bent plastic dish. The baby was as dirty as the man and the string was tied about its chest under the pipestem arms because its stomach was swollen and heavy. Was the old man dead? Not that it mattered, the only work he had to do in the world was to act as an anchor for the baby and he could do that job just as well alive or dead.

    Christ but I’m morbid this morning, Andy thought, it must be the heat, I can’t sleep well and there are the nightmares. It’s this endless summer and all the troubles, one thing just seems to lead to another. First the heat, then the drought, the warehouse thefts and now the Eldsters. They were crazy to come out in this kind of weather. Or maybe they’re being driven crazy by the weather. It was too hot to think and when he turned the corner the shimmering length of Seventh Avenue burned before him and he could feel the strength of the sun on his face and arms. His shirt was sticking to his back already and it wasn’t even a quarter to nine.

    It was better on Twenty-third Street in the long shadow of the crosstown expressway that filled the sky above, and he walked slowly in the dimness keeping an eye on the heavy pedicab and tugtruck traffic. Around each supporting pillar of the roadway was a little knot of people, clustered against it like barnacles around a pile, with their legs almost among the wheels of the traffic. Overhead there sounded a waning rumble as a heavy truck passed on the expressway and he could see another truck ahead parked in front of the precinct house. Uniformed patrolmen were slowly climbing into the back and Detective Lieutenant Grassioli was standing next to the cab with a noteboard, talking to the sergeant. He looked up and scowled at Andy and a nervous tic shook his left eyelid like an angry wink.

    It’s about time you showed up, Rusch, he said, making a check mark on the noteboard.

    It was my day off, sir, I came as soon as the callboy showed up. You had to put up a defense with Grassy or he walked all over you: he had ulcers, diabetes and a bad liver.

    A cop is on duty twenty-four hours a day so get your chunk into the truck. And I want you and Kulozik to bring in some dips. I got complaints from Centre Street coming out of my ears.

    Yes, sir, Andy said to the lieutenant’s back as he turned toward the station house. Andy climbed the three steps welded to the tailgate and sat down on the board bench next to Steve Kulozik, who had closed his eyes and started to doze as soon as the lieutenant had left. He was a solid man whose flesh quivered somewhere between fat and muscle, and he was wearing wrinkled cotton slacks and a short-sleeved shirt just like Andy’s, with the shirt also hanging over the belt to conceal the gun and holster. He opened one eye halfway and grunted when Andy dropped down beside him, then let it droop shut again.

    The starter whined irritably, over and over, until finally the low-quality fuel caught and the diesel engine slowly thudded to life, shuddered and steadied as the truck pulled away from the curb and moved east. The uniformed policemen all sat sideways on the benches so they could catch some of the breeze from the truck’s motion and at the same time watch the densely populated streets: the police weren’t popular this summer. If anything was thrown at them they wanted to see it coming. Sudden vibration wracked the truck and the driver shifted to a lower gear and leaned on his horn, forcing a path through the swarming people and hordes of creeping man-powered vehicles. When they came to Broadway progress slowed to a crawl as people spilled over into the roadway next to Madison Square with its flea market and tent city. It was no better after they had turned downtown since the Eldsters were already out in force and heading south, and were haltingly slow in getting out of the truck’s way. The seated policemen looked out at them indifferently as they rolled by, a slowly surging mass: gray heads, bald heads, most of them with canes, while one old man with a great white beard swung along on crutches. There were a large number of wheelchairs. When they emerged into Union Square the sun, no longer blocked by the buildings, burned down unrelentingly upon them.

    It’s murder, Steve Kulozik said, yawning as he swung down from the truck. Getting all these old gaffers out in the heat will probably kill off half of them. It must be a hundred degrees in the sun—it was ninety-three at eight o’clock.

    That’s what the medics are for, Andy said, nodding toward the small group of men in white who were unrolling stretchers next to the Department of Hospitals trailer. The detectives strolled toward the rear of the crowd that already half filled the park, facing toward the speaker’s platform in the center. There was an amplified scratching sound and a quickly cut-off whine as the public address system was tested.

    A record-breaker, Steve said, his eyes searching the crowd steadily while they talked. I hear the reservoirs are so low that some of the outlet pipes are uncovered. That and the upstate rubes dynamiting the aqueduct again….

    The squeal from the loudspeaker dissolved into the echoing thunder of an

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