Make Room! Make Room!

Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison is a novel written in 1966 and set in 1999, but it's taken me until 2023 to get around to reading it. The novel, in two parts deals with a world in which there are seven billion people on the planet Earth, three hundred forty million in the United States, and thirty-five million in the city of New York City alone. These massive numbers create overwhelming pressures on the natural resources and manmade systems intended to keep people alive. There's not enough water, nor is there enough food in a world where people are forced to live cheek to jowl. The novel though is not what I expected it to be. 

I knew that the novel was the source for the movie Soylent Green, a dystopian action movie starring Charlton Heston. I'll be taking a closer look at that movie tomorrow. But suffice it to say that the novel is not about the things the movie spends great time on. And frankly it's a curiosity as to why. 

The novel features a cop named Andy Rusch who is trying to do a decent job under tough circumstances. He lives with an old man named Sol who remembers better days. The murder of a crime boss by a young Asian-American boy named Billy Chung becomes one focus of the story. Another is the presence of a beautiful woman name Shirl who had been the lover of the murdered man and who finds sanctuary in this dangerous world in the arms of the cop investigating the case. They seemed to truly fall in love, but that romance has a lot of things stacked up against it. 

The central focus of the story in the beginning is the murder investigation, but in the second part the theme of overpopulation becomes more evident, and even strident. Sol is the character who gives voice to the frustration of a world which has failed to come to terms with simple birth control. It's strange to read the arguments against birth control (mostly religious) in world of this kind. For one thing, the debate seems all to obvious and makes the fact that recent changes in United States laws concerning abortion ring with the same incoherence. It feels like we have not moved forward much at all. 

In reality there are currently eight billion people on the planet Earth and three hundred thirty million in the U.S. NYC though only has a population of just under nineteen million folks. So, in some ways the situation is at once worse, the same, and better than the novel presents. I was struck by the fact that in the Avengers movies which were seemingly seen by most folks on the planet, the plot of Thanos was the eliminate half of the population. He does so for a time, but even then, his scheme gives the world a population of four billion. What's striking is that number is still way more people than were alive when I was born, the when the world population was just under three billion. It seems that I and others of my generation have become Sol, oldsters who look back to a better time and ahead to a more fearful one. 

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