amazing read

Have read this book many, many times but as I get older I realise that Harry Harrison was more of a visionary than I realised, this is closer to today than it is comfortable to be

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A darkly compelling vision of the future

An outstanding reading of Harry Harrison's classic distopian vision of a future, in which mankind is on the verge of breeding itself to death, having consumed virtually all the world's resources as the population continues to grow at an exponential rate.

In the cities, food and water are subject to rationing for all but the corrupt and wealthy few. Homelessness is rife, with most of the population living on the streets or in makeshift shelters. It's against this backdrop that New York detective Andy Rusch investigates the murder of a wealthy - and very shady - businessman, hooking up with the dead man's moll in the process.

This main thread of the novel is a police procedural, with shades of '30s pulp detective fiction. While gripping in its own right, it serves primarily to provide a context in which the protagonists - Rusch, his girlfriend Shirl and Billy Chung, a young boy for whom a life of crime and misfortune are an inevitable consequence of his impoverished circumstances - interact with the drab, mundane horror of the world they live in.

Make Room! Make Room! has been on my to-read list for years and this audio rendition perfectly realises everything I'd hoped the book would be. The novel is unrelentingly dark, teasing listeners with a tantalising glimmer of hope, only to snatch it away in an instant.

While some of the social issues Harrison confronts have perhaps lost their immediacy (in most of the western world, at least), others, including environmental depredation, global overpopulation and the class divide are still every bit as relevant as when the book was first written.

The text is also of particular interest in the context of the time it was written, with a progressive (if typically bleak) attitude to women's and civil rights that's not found in many other stories of the era.

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7 people found this helpful

Interesting view on how the millennium would fall

Enjoyable story and a solid narrative performance. I liked the characters and the hidden predictions (completing a full 3 years of school for instance), however in not sure how the population predictions stack up, be he was in the right track.
not exactly a feel good novel though!

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1 person found this helpful

Not what I expected

Any additional comments?

I bought this on the strength of the film Soylent Green, but it feels more like Bladerunner without the gunfire.
"Soyent" added components to the book that gave the story more of an edge, while the book just meanders without really getting anywhere.

However, there IS a seriously good point about over-population. I just believe that other writers have done better in this area.

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3 people found this helpful

Could have been so much better

This book takes an interesting premise – the overpopulation of the world and the associated depletion of its resources – and doesn’t do a lot with it. Other than setting the novel in the future setting (the turn of the millennium - future from the perspective of the time the author was writing) there are no clever concepts about the future of society or technology. The only concept advanced in limited detail is the overpopulation of the Earth, focusing on New York City, but despite the pressures that this is putting on humanity there is no thought given to any measures that would have probably been taken by that point to alleviate the stress, and very little development of the world beyond New York. Instead, the book seems to be a soapbox for the author to talk about the importance of birth control which must have been a controversial topic at the time of writing and perhaps still is in some parts of America but to today’s audience will probably seem only partially relevant to wider concerns that would be prevalent in such a world – including wasteful use of resources, renewable energy, and sustainable development, etc.
 
There is no plot to speak of and this is the most disappointing aspect of the book. The story opens with the potential to become a crime thriller or murder mystery with cop pursuing killer but really fails to develop that and the murder has no influence on the story other than forcing the perpetrator to leave his home, which has little influence on wider events. The ultimate solving of the crime has no bearing on events – it wouldn’t have mattered to the story whether the murderer was caught or not. Later on, when the cop meets a girl, there is the potential for a relationship drama but that fails to develop too and the reader is left wondering why the relationship has developed at all given there seems to be no real reason for the characters to be together. There is also no real depth to the story thread about the exiled murderer struggling for survival on the margins of society in the future New York. It all could have added up to so much more but there is no real emotional intensity to any of it. There is no tension or drama throughout the book – it proceeds at a slow pace and lacks any urgency or excitement. The whole story could read as a case study about how not to write an engaging fiction story – i.e. no drama, no tension, no peril, no character motivation, no clear plot, little worldbuilding. Even the killing scene - a minor moment of drama - is over in a flash. Really the only thing driving the action is the poverty and the pressures this exerts on the characters – but while this is ostensibly about a future New York with fewer resources, it could really have taken place in any present-day setting where resources are scarce and there is a significant contingent of people living in poverty. The overcrowding per se is immaterial.
 
The action also cuts at random moments and then jumps ahead to several days later, leaving you wondering how the events in the previous scene were supposed to have played out. For example a chase scene when the killer is running from the police ends abruptly and although he gets away, we're not told how and the police don't seem to be talking about it at all after that. It's ages before we revisit the killer, leaving the listener wondering what was the point of that original (rare) moment of drama.
 
The characters are one dimensional and limited in scope and depth. None are fleshed out in any real detail and not much thought is given to motivation or values, or even whether they have a sense of humour (no-one in the future New York seems to). Small parts are filled by caricatures – the jowly police lieutenant, the slow-witted-and-gentle-but-strong black bodyguard. The one woman character seems to exist for no other reason than to service the men around her and spends the entire novel whining and asking why things can’t just be nice the whole time.
 
The narration is dull and the affected character voices are twee and many sound like stereotypes you've seen in countless cop films: the scowling grumpy police chief, the big, deep-voiced negro servant, the creepy street dwellers of New York.
 
Great sci-fi weaves in its societal points as part of the plot, but this one hammers them home in one character monologue toward the end of the book – about the lack of birth control information and the impact that has had. It feels very unsubtle.
 
It all could have been so much better and left me wondering why this book is considered one of the important works of classic sci fi.

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okish

it has some interesting elements of the dystopian universe and plot, but i can't say i liked the story too much, at times it felt longer than i would have liked, where interesting details about the state of society got lost in the plot. it's not bad, but it also did not make my favourites list.

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