Product Description

A gangster is murdered during a blistering Manhattan heat wave. City cop Andy Rusch is under pressure solve the crime and captivated by the victim’s beautiful girlfriend. But it is difficult to catch a killer, let alone get the girl, in crazy streets crammed full of people. The planet’s population has exploded. The 35 million inhabitants of New York City run their TVs off pedal power, riot for water, loot and trample for lentil ‘steaks’ and are controlled by sinister barbed wire dropped from the sky. Written in 1966 and set in 1999, Make Room! Make Room! is a witty and unnerving story about stretching the earth’s resources, and the human spirit, to breaking point.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #49667 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

About the Author
Harry Harrison was born in Connecticut in 1925 and lived in New York City until 1943, when he was drafted into the United States Army. For the past thirty years he has lived in Ireland and England. Other books published by Harrison include Deathworld, also published by Penguin, the Stainless Steel Rat series, Bill, the Galactic Hero, Stars and Stripes Forever, West of Eden and Captive Universe. He has received the Nebula Award, the Golden Scroll of the Academy of SF Film, Prix Jules Verne (Sweden) and the Premio Italia. He is a member of the SF Hall of Fame and is a European Grandmaster.

Customer Reviews

Better than that nonsense Chuck starred in!
Briefly, Make room, make room is one of the best SF novels I have ever read. It deals with overcrowding and lack of resources and where the continuing expansion in the World population may lead us.

As in that film it centres on Andy Rusch a cop and his elderly friend Sol. Andy falls in love witha yong girl who is about to lose her sugar daddy and persaudes Sol to take her in. Andy is roted in his situtation of having little to eat so greatly that he cannot comprehend a better world and even the lure of the girl being there with him is not enough.

Unlike the film, the food Soylent is neither undesirable nor made from human flesh. It is made from Soya and lentils and people enjoy eating it. When a young kid gets hold of some and intends to sell it, he eats some and cannot beleive how good it is.

A particularly harrowing description is given to a drug trip where the kid thinks dirt tastes sweet and noises sound musical, powerful writing that you won't forget quickly.

This is not a life changing book, I suspect few are, but if you read it you will neither regret it or forget it. Abnd you won't bother with the travesty of a film they made from it again either because next to the book, "Soylent Green" is cheap unwashed pants!

a view of what the sixities thourght the nineties would be l
This book was written in the 1960's and paints a very bleak view of what the world might look like in the 1990's. It describes the city of New York as an overpopulated, underfed, undernourished world where everything is rationed and instead of speakeasys they have "meateasys". A world where nearly everyone is on welfare, the rations consisting of "weed crackers", where everyone has been inoculated from most ailments and there is an evergroing population of "eldsters". The book circulates about 1 cop and a murder investigation, set against the turn of the milennium and the possible end of the world.

A very spooky look at a premonition of the world today.

Kids and Adults - read this book. Well written and realistic "What If" sci-fi
Firstly I have to say that I have not seen the movie remake so can not compare the two.

Make Room Make Room has a straight forward story that somehow twists and turns around unpleasent realities and prophecies, it has a bleak and unforgiving manner that faces up to human nature in a scarily precise way. Dont be put off, many great stories have a tragic side to them, and this is certainly a great tale. The story telling is inspired and the imagery it conjures up is upsetting, but compelling. By and large the book is a social commentary, dealing with issues of population explosion and resource scarcity. Importantly it projects these issues onto a few hard luck characters that could so easily be anyone of us, the feelings the characters are put through are ones that, especially in light of current global situation, we may have felt ourselves. There are plenty of reviews that give an over view of the story but I would just like to comment a couple of things that stood out to me

Having studied environmental issues, I can say that the problems Harry Harrison (HH) foresaw are ones that are starting to be felt around the world (in some cases they have been around since time immemorial). Other reviewers have criticised this book for its lack of accuracy in the numbers it has predicted, and the fact that we are currently surviving quite well thank you very much with population figures well in excess of those quoted in the book. I think you can look at this comment in two ways,

1) The book paints such vivid a picture that readers try and escape the reality by taking the story literally and then pulling it apart by grasping hold of the imprecise statistics that it quotes, but then ignoring key aspects of the story - A testimony to the skill of HH as a writer, and the accuracy with which he has predicted the problems the human race will face. He has made the story so scarily plausible, that people try to escape the reality of the situation by misinterpreting his words. Namely by side stepping the fact that the resources available to us are being terminally diminished. The numbers are just flesh to the story; the theme remains the same no matter what the numbers say. The real statement is that the population is a problem because the resources are finite and the population is increasing exponentially.

2) The reviewers have not travelled very far from their own back door. A quick glance at the evening news shows that all sorts of the same problems written about in the book are affecting us now, and to a lesser or greater degree have been since before 1999. Unfortunately it appears that they are not currently being experienced/recognised by some of the people who have written cursory reviews that chastise this book

Having visited developing countries I can say with some certainty that: population displacement, desertification, pollution, war, gangs, over population, water scarcity, agriculture draining the land of resources, falling oil production, poor government emergency planning are all real issues. And they are not just "challenges" being faced by the developing world. I would ask any nay sayers to type in any of the issues mentioned above to an internet search engine and see how many of the problems are local to them (and then another exercise - define local), and then see if the effects are similar to those described in the book.

This is a great book, it is probably the kind of story/textbook that should be read in schools as a warning to kids as to how things could turn out, if their Mums and Dads don't get their acts together.

PS: do an internet search "drought New York", you might be surprised