Tag Archives: Overpopulation

Are There Too Many People on the Internet?

Online photo of a Zoom meeting of a book group.

Sometimes it’s too much.  Do you ever feel that way?  . 

You look up a book at Goodreads or LibraryThing, and realize that thousands of people are reading it, thousands have already read it, and thousands more want to read it.

If so many readers are reading it at the same time, does that mean that individuals are interchangeable?  And are we still sharing our love of books, or creating a database that enables AI and marketers to “read” readers?  (No, we’re fighting the good fight: individuals matter.)

And I am a fan of consumer reviews, whether at blogs, vlogs, or book forums. And I prefer outspoken reviewers to shills, though I am trying to tone down my candor a bit here.

It is the authors themselves who are nervous about book sites. They complain about hatchet jobs, and I cannot blame them. Yet I have found brilliant reviews of Doris Lessing’s experimental novel The Four-Gated City, and Lawrence Durrell’s lush, lyrical, strange tetraology, The Alexandria Quartet, at book sites.  It makes you happy to be on the internet after all.

So, yes, these are my people.  On a simple level, that might or not be true. 

Because so many of my favorite blogs have disappeared. Did anyone find out what happened to Dovegreyreader?  And a longtime friend deleted her blog after moving into an ALF. I begged her to keep it, but she said it was “just a lot of old opinions about books.”  I often thought of her when I blogged that year and was puzzled that she no longer commented. And then I found her obituary.

I miss the writer Robert Hellenga, who kindly agreed to a Q&A interview. He sometimes commented at my blog. But he died in 2020, the year his last novel, Love, Death & Rare Books, was published. He was an excellent novelist and a kind person.

I’m not writing for anyone in particular any more.  I stay in my corner of the blogosphere and write for myself,

There are millions of people on the internet. Did Charlton Heston say, “I am a human being!”? (Planet of the Apes?) “Soylent Green is people!” he definitely said in Soylent Green, a movie about overpopulation. (Soylent Green was very loosely based on Harry Harrison’s novel, Make Room! Make Room!, which I wrote about here.)

Charlton Heston in “Soylent Green”

N.B.  The Numbers:  According to Pew Research,  96% of Americans use the internet.  And the U.S. Census Bureau says there are approximately 340,110,988 Americans. 

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

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.