Review of Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
So, this is the book Soylent Green was based on. Based on in the same way that another Heston classic, The Omega Man, was based on I Am Legend.
Allow me to adjust your set for reading this book. There is Soylent, but no Soylent Green, and nothing is distressingly made out of people. Soylent is the closest thing to affordable protein available, and it’s still far too expensive for most people. It’s comprised of soybean product and lentils. The mainstay food are weedcrackers, which are made of seaweed. Also mentioned are ener-G, which are granules of plankton, and meat flakes, comprised of snail or slug bits, issued to the very ill.
No, the thrust of this book is the living hell we’ll create with unchecked population growth. In this New York City has about 35 million inhabitants, the vast majority of which are beyond impoverished.
I really have to point out how amusing, and interesting, it is that someone as pro-life as Heston was in that movie. Of course, it leads me to wonder at how much impact he, or someone else in production with similar morals, deflected the message of the movie from birth control to outrage at defiling the dead.
Anyway. The plot, characters, and setting, are all carried out so very well. Sometimes you feel the author himself shy away from the future he can envision with such clarity, but it really only serves to get your own wheels turning.
All that said, you really have to prepare yourself for a soul crushing ride. You are left feeling that happiness, in any form, is at best a setup to more cruelty, and that you have been pre-fucked by every generation before you, while failing to summon the strength or resources to unfuck the future even a little.
Like anything I’ve suggested by Peter Watts, read this one when you think your feeling too good about yourself and the world.