Fiction Reviews

Make Room! Make Room!

(1966/2009) Harry Harrison, Penguin, £9.99, pbk, pp224, ISBN 978-0-141-19023-5

It is the year 1999 and an over-crowded world sees the masses thrown together in cities.   Outside, the countryside is heavily protected and geared to food production, but even with the technology of the future there is not enough to go around.   It is a world of starving billions, where the most many can hope for is a diet of lentils and soya with the occasional rat if lucky.   But in the city of New York, population 35 million, there is a cop who will not simply walk away from what is just another routine unsolved murder. And so when there is a murder our man gets stuck in...

It is worth remembering that earlier in the 20th century, when this was being written, the World's population really was growing at a super-exponential rate (not at the lower rate as it was in the real 1999).   Harry Harrison properly researched this book's background and it even contains an academic bibliography at the end; a rarity for SF novels. It is the proverbial Malthusian SF novel and Harrison's wake-up call for mankind.

Now you may think that this sounds a tad serious for an SF book, but SF is a genre that can sound wake-up calls and get people to think: War of the Worlds, 1984, The Telepathist... you take your pick. This is Harrison's environmental book and you do need to remember that back in the early 1970s there was genuine science concern from population demographers, human ecologists and what would soon be called environmental scientists, as to how the global population was growing.

Make Room! Make Room! was also the basis for a film, Soylent Green (1973, coincidentally the year of the oil crisis) which though different still captures the gritty, if not grubby, existence this book's citizens endure.

As many will probably have seen the film it is worthwhile reminding ourselves a few facts and noting some of its key differences with the book. It is a US film that was made in 1973 directed by Richard (20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Fantastic Voyage) Fleischer. It is set in 2022 (not 1999 as in the book) some 40 million (not 35 as in the book) people are crammed into the city of New York. In a world barely - despite extreme measures - able to support its huge population, a rich executive of the Soylent (food) Corporation is murdered. Detective Frank Thorne (Charlton Heston) finds himself unable to walk away from the case and discovers that the killing was instigated by the powerful Soylent Corporation itself. Sol (Edward G Robinson), Thorne's elderly researcher (or 'book') side kick, uncovers the motive, but its up to Thorne to reveal the truth to the world... Soylent Green was voted into the top 30 Concatenation all-time film poll. However while both the film Soylent Green and the book Make Room! Make Room! are excellent in their own ways, their respective stories are markedly different. In Soylent Green the murder victim is a senior director of the Soylent Company who, shocked at what the world has come to and his company's role, has to be silenced by the other members of the Soylent board. Finding this out is integral to the film's climax. (In the book the murder was not pre-motivated as the reader learns early on.) For my money (and I know that Harry has some sympathy with this) the film's opening credit sequence is absolutely brilliant as, through a sequence of stills, it recounts human development from the Victorian age through to the turn of the millennium (as perceived back in the 1970s). Principal cast: Charlton (Planet of the Apes) Heston, Edward G Robinson (his last film), Leigh Taylor-Young, Chuck Connors, Joseph Cotton, and Brock Peters.