Make Room! Make Room!
by Harry Harrison
Dear classics readers,
This Wednesday would have been the 100th birthday of Harry Harrison.
Why not mark the occasion by reading his 1969 science-fiction classic, Make Room! Make Room!
Harrison worked as a commercial illustrator and art director in New York until his science fiction writing began to sell, at which point he and his family set off to travel the world, living in Mexico, England, Italy, Denmark and Ireland.
He is particularly well known for his Deathworld trilogy and for his Stainless Steel Rat and Bill the Galactic Hero series. He was a Damon Knight Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America and he was also a cult hero in Russia, winning the 2008 Golden Roscon for lifetime achievement in science fiction.
In Make Room! Make Room! it is August 1999, the distant future, and the planet’s population has exploded to 7 billion.
The 35 million inhabitants of New York City run their televisions off pedal power, riot for water and loot food shops for soy-lentil ‘steaks’.
It’s a chilling cautionary tale of overpopulation and stretched planetary resources, dedicated to Harrison’s children, Todd and Moira: ‘For your sakes, children, I hope this proves to be a work of fiction.’
Make Room! Make Room! was the basis for Richard Fleischer’s 1973 film Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston, which is now a classic eco-disaster movie in its own right, and introduces an even darker secret behind the production of the ‘Soylent Green’ food supply.
When Make Room! Make Room! was written, the planet’s population was 3.6 billion; in the novel it is 7 billion; today it is over 8 billion.
‘We are now living in the world that I wrote about then,’ said Harrison in the 2008 afterword he wrote for the Penguin Modern Classics edition: ‘the future has arrived.’
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If you’re reading along with Anna Karenina or Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - I hope you’re enjoying it! We’ll start discussing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes this Friday!
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