Make Room! Make Room!

Oddly enough, I kinda expected something hokey before I read this, but instead, I just got a dystopian nightmare of overpopulation.

This isn't unexpected or a bad thing. After all, I've seen Soylent Green and felt the huge impact of the scene where the old man Saul mouths the BIG SECRET through the plane of glass. I remember the riots, the pressure, the senseless violence, and the massive levels of injustice AND stupidity that brought us to this state.

And yet, after reading this novel, that sense is more visceral, more realistic, and a lot less sensational. Yes, there's massive injustice. Just look at the Squatter law that gives priority to squalid massive families regardless of any consideration, or the way no detective is able to do show more his job because life is already worthless.

For '66, this nightmare world that has used up all resources by 1999 and has ignored or actively fought all birth control or warnings, has resorted to sticking its head in the sand.

Sound familiar?

Well, fortunately, our modern world is getting well-adjusted to living with less... and less... and some technologies are letting us live with a bit less squalor than predicted in this novel... and a New York City of 35 million in the novel is pretty damn close to what some cities are reaching now, true, but the quality of life is NOT as bad as predicted in Harrison's novel.

Of course, in some ways, the violence, the poverty, and the cultural clamp-downs are WORSE in our world. It's odd to see our 7.7 billion people displayed against the novel's measly 7.0 billion. And yet... it's interesting because most of the world is a dustbowl and the only place to safely live .. on the dole .. is the big cities, so everyone migrates there.

I'm just saying this is a really fascinating world-building exercise. I love books that predict or fail to predict in really big ways. :)

Does anyone want any meat flakes? It's just snails... right? Yum, yum. show less

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 show more 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. show less

Above all else, this book is great at creating a central mood that dominates the setting and your mind while reading. It's dark, disgusting, claustrophobic, and corrupt. A mild mystery and cop drama was a great way to explore this mood. I enjoyed the general sense of apathy from most of the characters over the circumstances of their lives, and the ending really reinforced the general feeling of hopelessness that mounted through the book.

That all being said, I do think that Harrison used an extremely heavy hand to deliver his rather singular message against overpopulation. The character that serves as his mouthpiece throughout the book goes on several unnecessary pointed triads about contraceptive and overpopulation, that brought me out show more of the flow of the plot and the mood.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with this book. It dipped a little into the pulp end of fiction, but was deeply immersive and depressing. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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. show less

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3401847.html

I read a lot of Harrison's funnier novels when I was younger - the Stainless Steel Rat books, Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, The Men from P.I.G. and R.O.B.O.T. and Bill, the Galactic Hero. None of them is terribly deep. So I was really surprised by how much I got out of Make Room! Make Room! - the future New York (in 1999, rather than 2022) is just as convincingly realised on the page; if anything a bit more so, and the plot is frankly more interesting. Harrison's New York is a more diverse place that Soylent Green's, but just as desperate; Shirl is more fully realised as a character; the initial murder is an burglary gone wrong rather than a conspirracy; the state is less inhuman, but show more society is worse. There was a real heart and soul to Harrison's writing that was completely new to me from this author, and I might look out for some of his other more serious books. show less

Fortunately for Harry Harrison, the future is implausible. He makes the same mistake in this novel that so many others make when talking about populations - the most recent major example I recall is Thanos' plan from the Marvel comics/movies to prevent disaster from overpopulation by simply cutting the population in half.

That is NOT HOW THAT WORKS. Density =/= overcrowding and you can fit a lot of people on this planet... assuming you have the logistics to get resources to them, and preserve those resources. With this amount of people there should be more than enough farmers, manufacturers, producers, technicians, transport workers, and everything else needed to support them. The risk is not a lack of resources, it's in people not show more getting those resources. Such as, for example, a couple of people hoarding massive, massively disproportionate amounts to themselves at the expense of everyone else.

It is, however, a pretty engaging story. He successfully paints a picture of a very bleak, very hopeless future. The book seems to have two main moral messages, one implicit and one explicit. Implicitly, hell is when people don't cooperate for each others' good. Explicitly, maybe creepy religions shouldn't be forcing their weird ideas onto the rest of us - specifically, certain religions that blatantly lie and misunderstand what birth control is and how it works.

It has flaws. The first half makes it seem like this is a detective story but that kind of peters out to nothing by the second half, a waste of time for the reader and the protagonist both. The character POV flipping in the first few chapters doesn't sustain through the book - I thought at first we'd get something structured like how G.R.R. Martin did his Song of Ice and Fire books, but no. It takes basically the entire book to get to what the point of the story might be, otherwise it feels like just a meditation on this terrible overcrowded future. Also, Harrison is generally best known for his lighter and/or comedic stories - if you came in expecting some black comedy like Deathworld, don't, there is barely a joke to be had in this book.

Pretty good, despite me screaming mentally for most of it THAT IS NOT HOW THIS WORKS. But I think I'll stick to the Stainless Steel Rat. show less