Make Room Make Room

Make Room! Make Room! is Harry Harrison's 1966 dystopian novel, the source text for Richard Fleischer's 1973 film Soylent Green and one of the most prescient overpopulation novels of the twentieth century. The setting is a 1999 New York City of 35 million people, where the heat is permanent, the water is rationed, the soylent steaks are made of soy and lentil (not what the movie tells you), and detective Andy Rusch is investigating a small-time political assassination during the long collapse.

What the novel does better than the film is the texture of slow apocalypse. Harrison lets you feel the day-to-day grinding shortages, the small bureaucratic indignities, the way climate and crowding have remade ordinary marriage and friendship. The detective plot is the structural spine but the worldbuilding is where the book lives. Sol, Andy's elderly roommate, is one of the great minor characters of mid-century American SF, and the book's ending earns its quiet despair.

Recommended for hard-SF readers who want a novel that has aged into being more relevant rather than less, for anyone curious how Soylent Green simplified the source material, and for readers looking for books like Make Room! Make Room! in the demographic-collapse SF tradition (J. G. Ballard's High-Rise, John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar). Five stars and a classic that earns the word.