MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM!

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

Harry Harrison’s novel, Make Room! Make Room! a warning against the overpopulation of the earth and the depletion of our resources. Set in 1999 in a New York City populated with 35 million people, food riots, water rationing, and a lack of houses are the driving forces behind daily life. Most modern readers will come to the novel with expectations based on the 1973 Charlton Heston film Soylent Green, which is not an accurate depiction of the action in the novel.

In the novel, Billy Chung is a young boy living in New York when he manages to acquire several soylent steaks during a riot. These steaks, made up of a mixture of soybean and lentils, have replaced meat in the New York diet, but they are also expensive and somewhat rare. Selling off most of the steaks, he gains a job delivering messages which results in him decided to rob one of the recipients. When the burglary goes wrong and Billy winds up killing Big Mike O’Brien, Billy disappears and Detective Andy Rusch is assigned to the case.

Rusch figures it will be a quick and easy case. All he has to do is file the paperwork and move on. Unfortunately, the discovery of a small heart drawn into the dust of the window through which Billy gained access to the building raises concerns that Big Mike’s death was the opening salvo of a political turf war and Rusch is ordered to actually solve the case. Mixing his investigation with his standard duties, Rusch begins a relationship with Shirl, Big Mike’s girlfriend at the time of his death. Much of Harrison’s story revolves around their relationship, even as the primary focus of the novel is on the scarcity of goods and the demands of an ever growing population.

Although the novel mostly focuses on Rusch, perhaps the most important character us Sol, his flatmate. Much older than Rusch, Sol remembers a time before overpopulation was such a major issue and while for Rusch, Shirl, Billy, and other characters the world of 1999 is the status quo, Sol has the perspective to see what humanity might have done differently to avoid the situation. He also has the optimism to hope that if humanity could change their point of view and traditions, they could still resolve their problems before the collapse of civilization. It is easy to hear Sol’s voice in 2019 arguing for change to avoid the dangers of climate change, but within the confines of Make Room! Make Room!, he is a Cassandra preaching to an audience of two.

In the end, Make Room! Make Room! is less a novel with plot as it is a warning somewhat thinly disguised as a novel. Less a plotted work and more a look at the way various characters move through his setting, trying to live their own lives, Make Room! Make Room!. Interestingly, while the real New York of 1999 was about 23% of the population postulated by Harrison, the population of the US was fully 81% of the country’s population at the end of the novel (and the country’s population is currently about 96% of his prediction).

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