Tag Archives: climate change

An Overpopulated New York:  “Make Room!  Make Room!” by Harry Harrison

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Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel, Make Room!  Make Room!, was the inspiration for the movie, Soylent Green.  The film, however, is only loosely based on Harrison’s many-faceted novel.

Make Room! Make Room! is a good-bad book. The ideas are brilliant, the writing uneven. Harrison has essentially written a treatise, disguised as a novel, on the consequences of overpopulation. Set roughly in 2000 in New York City, one of several overpopulated American cities, this dystopian novel describes the food shortages, water shortages, oil shortages, and climate change that lead to riots, looting, and crime. 

Only the rich have cars, because of the oil shortage. People walk or take pedicabs. They line up with jugs and cans for water and ration cards for food.  When the farmers upstate destroy the water pipelines to the city, the New Yorkers have no water at all.  Fortunately, some got the tip and were able to fill up the bathtub with water. But it’s every man for himself.

Harrison’s characterization is his strong point. The main character, Andy, a stalwart police officer, can barely find time to nap. The portrayal of Andy’s never-ending, exhausting toil is poignant and horrifying.  He and his colleagues break up riots; the problem is that panic and stampedes result. Andy is called in on his day off because the Eldsters (the equivalent of the Gray Panthers in the ‘60s)  are stirring up violence. Later, there is a riot when a rumor is spread that a store has received a shipment of a kind of veggie steak is available.  (Not Soylent green, by the way. That’s only in the movie)

Harrison’s stream-of-consciousness has a hard-boiled, detective-novel tone.

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 seeming 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 are being driven crazy by the weather.

Everyone fights to survive, and it’s easier to do this with a companion. Andy’s roommate, Sol, is an Eldster who rides a stationary bicycle to power the fridge; Chang, an impoverished Asian-American teenager, commits a murder during a burglary and is on the run; and Shirl, the mistress of the murdered mobster, had lived with the mobster for the air conditioning and the luxuries: she wouldn’t mind a life of poverty now — if it weren’t so lonely.

This is a very disturbing book, because of course what Harrison wrote about has come about or is about to come true. Environmentalists preached about overpopulation in the 1960s, and it is obscene that we/they (whoever is in control) continued on this destructive trajectory. And may I just add: I’M PRO-CHOICE AND I VOTE!

This is a novel of ideas, not to be read for the style.  But Harrison does predict the future, i.e., the heat, the drought, the drying up of rivers and lakes…

He and the other science fiction writers knew what was happening. Too bad people underrate the genre.

My favorite SF book on the destruction of the environment is Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. I also highly recommend Frank Herbert’s Dune.

John Gardner, Stupid Times, and “Jason and Medeia”

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“These are stupid times, intertwined bombast and bullshit whipped to a fine fizz.” – John Gardner’s Jason and Medeia

What could be more pertinent to our times than this bitter quotation from John Gardner’s Jason and Medeia (1973), an epic novel in verse?  Gardner’s retelling of the classical myth reflects the politics, literary eclecticism, and feminist issues of the 1960s and early 1970s – and now our own. As a power couple, Jason and Medeia are a failure.  Jason is a brave hero and a spellbinding storyteller; she is a powerful witch, an adoring wife, and devoted mother. Madly in love with Jason, Medeia committed nefarious deeds, including murder, to  help Jason achieve his questionable heroic goals.  Without her magic, it could not have been done. And she has not wavered in her love for him.

Jason is now an ambitious politician having a midlife crisis. Midlife crises come earlier in antiquity, with a shorter life span: Jason was perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties when he decided to leave Medeia to marry a princess in a prestigious family. This power move was a very bad idea, because men and women have equally bad ideas, and few couples make worse decisions than these two. 

Poetry is not Gardner’s forte, and this novel is far too long , but that quotation haunts me. It is just one damned stupid thing after another in the 2020s.  In the twenty-first century, the greatest challenge is climate change, which is barely addressed, despite the rising temperatures, pollution, wildfires, droughts, storms, and water shortages that will eventually kill the planet.

Politics is not my field, and I read as little about it as possible. But here are some amateur observations:  the red states are like mini-republics, with an agenda to ban books, cut funds to education, promote guns, even recommend that teachers arm themselves, and ignore an uptick in Covid cases (the evidence is found in the waste-water).

Some of the censorship issues are almost too cartoonish to believe:  two Moms for Liberty in Florida  called the police to report “porn” in a  high school. The porn proved to be  a Y.A. fantasy novel by Jennifer Armentrout, Storm and Fury, in the school library. Since the fantasy novel is about gargoyles, it is impossible to take this incident seriously.  But one of them  compared the book to Playboy, and demanded the arrest of two school librarians.  No arrests were made that day.  

Now if they could harness that energy to ban guns, I’d join them.

As Donald Barthelme said, “Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.”



Why the Planet Can’t Be Saved

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Something positive for the planet!

Last week, we pulled over at a rest stop. Sheet lightning was flashing and the wind was so strong it shook the car. We sat in our shuddering car wondering what to do. A woman in a car beside us looked out her window anxiously.

We couldn’t save her, we regret.

No one could save us, either.

This is the way it’s going to be.

Storms come up suddenly. Furious storms, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes.  We’ve never seen so many.

This week, it’s raining. Everybody has water in the basement. Everybody hopes it won’t flood, though there has been terrible flooding this spring in Nebraska and western Iowa.

After 2030, climate change will be irreversible. But it could be reversed now. Remember the hole in the ozone layer?  NASA and other agencies around the world have fixed it by phasing out the industrial production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). They signed an international agreement in 1987.

Now, we need to stop burning  fossil fuels.  We need to go VERY green.  Yet there’s resistance to green energy like wind turbines (which spoil the landscape or kill the birds, according to rich men of different political parties, among them Trump (it spoils the view on his Scottish golf course), Robert Kennedy, Jr. (it spoils the view on Nantucket or wherever), and Jonathan Franzen (who worries about the birds, which will all be dead if we don’t change to green energy).  There is similar resistance to  the huge solar farms:  rich people in a gated community in Virginia oppose them because the solar panels spoil their view.

HERE’S WHAT HUMAN BEINGS CAN DO:  Every time you DON’T drive you help.  Take the bus or bicycle. According to the EPA, motor vehicles  cause 75 percent of carbon monoxide pollution in the U.S.   And yet people cannot make the connection that driving is killing the planet.  They blithely move to the ex-urbs, which means even MORE driving. And the next generation is being trained to do the same. The driving age here, if you can believe it, is 14.

We have all known for decades that walking, bicycling, and mass transit are good alternatives to driving.  After a lifetime of NOT driving a car because of environmental concerns, I begin to wonder why I’ve done it. I despair over the stupidity and greed of human beings.  But what about the plants and animals?  Yes, they are worth saving.

Drivers do not want you to save the planet.  Pedestrians and bicyclists are viewed not as role models but as eccentrics IN THE WAY.  Drivers become more and more hostile:  road rage.  A car hit my husband  last year (the driver veered suddenly left into the bike lane) and broke my spouse’s collarbone and punctured his lung.   A car also hit the Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for governor last year (I voted for him) on his bicycle and he will not walk without a walker for six months.

In the Netherlands, drivers are trained to watch out for bicyclists.  The New York Times said last October that they’re trained in a maneuver called the Dutch reach.:

When you are about to exit the car, you reach across your body for the door handle with your far or opposite hand. This action forces you to turn toward the side view mirror, out and then back over your shoulder to be sure a bicyclist is not coming from behind. Only then do you slowly open the door.

This is one of many things which should be stressed in the U.S.

So now we’ve almost killed the planet, you might as well read a dystopian novel.  I strongly recommend John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, which I wrote about here at my old blog, Mirabile Dictu.  In this terrifying post-modern SF classic,  pollution has rendered the U.S.  a wasteland.  The poisoned air blows into Canada and sometimes across the ocean to Europe (sound familiar?);  everyone is sick; antibiotics no longer work; fleas and rat infestations in houses and apartment house can no longer be controlled because they are immune to poison; the acid rain in NY is so bad that you need to wear plastic outside; the water is poisoned (there are frequent “no-drink water” days); intelligence levels are dropping (lead in the air and water); a virus causes spontaneous abortion; the oceans are so polluted that people vacation in Colorado rather than California; and big businesses are profiting by selling air filters, water filters, etc.

John Brunner was prescient.