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.