Make Room! Make Room!

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**Title** **Make Room! Make Room!**
Cover of Penguin paperback re-issue, book cover illustration by Alan Aldridge.
Author	Harry Harrison
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Dystopian science fiction
Publisher	Doubleday
Released	1966
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	216 pp
ISBN	NA

Make Room! Make Room! is a 1966 science fiction novel written by Harry Harrison, and later used as the basis for the 1973 science fiction movie Soylent Green (although the movie changed the plot and theme).

The fast paced thriller is set in a future 1999, beginning in August. Its background theme extrapolates trends in the proportion of world resources used by the USA and of population growth to depict a world where the global population is seven billion, resulting in rampant over-crowding, shortages and a crumbling infrastructure. The plot jumps from character to character, describing the lifestyles of people in various walks of life in a sweltering New York City (population around 35 million) resembling the worst slums of India.

1 Plot summary
2 Major themes
3 Differences in the movie
4 External links
5 Reference

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Originally expanded by Harry Harrison from one of his own short stories of the same name, the book is set in New York in 1999 (about thirty years in the future at the time of writing): It opens during a massive heatwave, on Andy Rusch, an overworked police detective, who lives in half a room. On the other side of the thin partition he chats to his "room-mate" Sol, a retired ex army engineer whose adapted bicycle generator, hooked up to old car batteries, powers an old television and a fridge. After Andy queues for their water ration, he is called out and becomes involved in dealing with a riot which starts as a protest by the 'Eldsters' (made up of people 65 years and older who have been forced into retirement) but quickly becomes complete pandemonium when it becomes known that a shop in the area is having a 'bring in, sell out' sale on "soylent" (soya and lentil) steaks. Billy Chung, a desperately poor Chinese boy, grabs a box of the steaks and after eating several, sells the rest for enough D's (dollars) to buy a job as a messenger boy. His first message takes him into a semi-fortified apartment block where air conditioning and running water for showers (which the reader might think of as normal facilities) are revealed to be luxuries of the rich. The residents include a rich racketeer called 'Big Mike' and his mistress Shirl who is pink and beautiful in a city where most are gray and malnourished. She takes a trishaw bicycle taxi to the market while her rental bodyguard runs alongside. There she buys such 'staples' as weed-crackers and petroleum-based margarine before going to a "meatlegger" and buying a real steak for the racketeer. They return to find Mike murdered: the Chinese boy broke in (partly for theft and partly because of a sudden fascination with the racketeer's mistress whom he saw naked while delivering the message), then when he was surprised by Mike entering from the soundproofed shower cubicle, lashed out and killed him. Billy flees in a panic and it is only after several minutes of running that he realises that he has left all the stolen goods he was gathering behind.

Andy is called in to investigate the murder and correctly reconstructs the circumstances, that of an attempted robbery gone awry. He expects the case to be dropped: at seven murders a day, the over-stretched force can only follow up the most obvious cases, but the (criminal) "syndicate" operating through a corrupt official, Judge Santini, think a mark left by the Chinese boy may mean the mafia are muscling in on their territory, and instruct the justice department to get the killer found. As the investigation continues, Andy becomes romantically involved with the mistress, despite her being way above his class. He ensures that despite the racketeer having willed his apartment (and indeed everything he owns) to his sister (portrayed as a selfish, almost crone-like woman), Shirl is permitted to stay in the apartment until the end of the month to assist with his investigations. During that time they both share a life of unaccustomed luxury (unusual to Andy because he simply doesn't have the money for such a lifestyle, and to Shirl because Big Mike kept most of the riches such as the meat and alcohol to himself). They systematically work their way through Big Mike's supply of food and drink, snatching what moments they can together between Andy's double and triple-shift workload. As the end of the month approaches and Shirl realises she has nowhere to go, Andy offers for her to move in with him. After she accepts they have one final party during which they eat and drink the last of the food and alcohol and also pilfer a set of Big Mike's bedsheets. After winning over an initially-reluctant Sol with a couple of Big Mike's cigars, Shirl moves in with Andy, but the reality of their life together, separated from the luxury they had been sharing, quickly takes the shine off their relationship. Andy is away on shift constantly and Shirl experiences continual reminders of the difficulty of life without money in this bleak 'future'. She befriends a woman who protects her from being mugged for her water and learns about the now-common diseases such as kwashiorkor and beri beri that afflict people who can't afford to eat properly.

Meanwhile Andy is trying to squeeze his tracking down of Billy Chung into his already massive regular workload. Dealing with riots, paperwork and an apparently unreasonable chief who is trying to spread his meagre force as far as it will go makes him increasingly irritable. This, in combination with his apparent shame that the life he is now giving Shirl is far removed from the one she is used to, makes him more and more distant with her. He begins to obsess about Billy and is determined to catch him. Eventually he finds fingerprint cards that reveal Billy's home address among a suburb made of old decommissioned ships. A visit to the address shows that Billy hasn't been home since the break in and he leaves stool pigeons to alert the police if and when he returns.

After fleeing the bungled burglary Billy leaves the part of the city he is used to and eventually breaks into an abandoned shipping container site. He moves in with a fatalist hermit, Peter, who is obsessed by armageddon and awaiting the new millennium as the end of the world. Here he discovers a huge supply of catchment water in an old tank, which he sells a bit at a time for the money he needs to keep himself and Peter fed and also maintain his newly acquired drug-dependence (on "Dust" - LSD cut with dirt or other powdery substances). However they are soon attacked by a small group of homeless people and forced to leave. They eventually find a new home in a junked car where the previous owner has frozen to death. However Peter's stoic acceptance of everything that happens to him frustrates Billy to the point where he eventually leaves and decides to return to his family, believing that by now the police will have lost interest in him.

During this time Sol has made up his mind that he can remain inactive no longer and decides to join a march against the overturning of a bill in support of family planning. He sees population control as humanity's last hope of survival and although Shirl tries to talk him out of it he goes anyway. Andy returns late in the night carrying Sol after he was injured when the protest became yet another riot. Sol recovers from his injuries but becomes bedridden and then catches pneumonia. His illness puts yet another strain on the long-suffering Shirl and drives her and Andy further apart. Then one night Andy returns to find the room dark and cold. He hears Shirl crying softly in their section and realises that Sol has died while she was there alone with him. A few days later Shirl and Andy are sitting in the apartment, having returned from Sol's funeral, when her old bodyguard, Tab, knocks on the door. He is there in the employ of a family of obnoxious people who have scanned the death notices in the hopes of finding a vacant apartment. They have a 'squat order', a government-sanctioned permission to take over Sol's living space and move in, making Shirl and Andy's life even more miserable than before. The few times Shirl tries to talk to Andy about getting away from the family he changes the subject or leaves the apartment to go to work.

In the climax of the book Andy stumbles upon Billy when he returns to the ships, and accidentally shoots and kills him as the boy tries to run. He then tells his boss what has happened, only to discover that the crime syndicate lost interest in the case weeks before. His chief, far from congratulating him for finally finding the murderer, actually lets him take the fall for the boy's accidental death and even goes so far as to berate him for spending so much time and resources on a dead case. He demotes Andy and puts him back on the beat. Andy returns to the apartment to find that Shirl has left him.

The book closes with Andy on the beat in Times Square for the New Year's Eve "celebrations". During this time he catches a glimpse of Shirl dressed up and getting into a car in the company of a number of wealthy people. He is faced by bitter personal failure as the clock strikes midnight. He bumps into Peter, Billy's old 'room'mate who is distraught that the world hasn't ended and asks rhetorically how life can possibly go on like this. The book ends with the Times Square screen announcement "Census says United States had biggest year ever end of the century, 344 million citizens..."

[edit] Major themes

The novella has an underlying theme of social commentary, with Harrison primarily using Sol as his voice to promote the importance of birth control and sustainable development. Destruction of the environment has left individuals apathetic, struggling to maintain any quality of life. Almost all mechanised transport has been replaced by human power, much of the farmland has been poisoned by pollution or absorbed in a growing dust bowl and the government can barely cope with providing basic rations of food and water to a disorderly population crowded into the cities. The end of most mechanised transport is spotlighted by a number of stark and disturbing images, for example the "tugtrucks"--large bins on four old tires towed by the human muscle power of two "truckers", and "the lots", former impound lots where the destitute live in long-dead cars, and the "now silent subway stations" where still more destitutes are assigned to live by the city welfare department.

In the speculative fiction tradition of "what if?" a convincing alternative world is depicted, not as prediction but to convey vividly what such a future could be like from the viewpoint of the man-in-the street. The writing is unusually bleak for Harrison, departing from his usual humorous approach but keeping his distrust of authority.

The late 1960s and 1970s saw numerous descriptions of New York City, both in fiction and in the news, suggesting that violent crime was rampant and that complete societal breakdown, if not imminent, was at least on the horizon. Make Room! Make Room! was perhaps influenced by this context and can be regarded as the extreme extrapolation of the trends that were perceived at the time of its writing.

[edit] Differences in the movie

The movie Soylent Green left out much of the story, and added memorable elements which are not in the novella. For instance, the racketeer's mistress becomes "furniture" (a concubine attached to a rental apartment) in the movie, and the racketeer is replaced by an executive of the dictatorial Soylent Company. The movie omits the sub-plot involving the Chinese boy and the millennial anticlimax.

Most notably, though the movie depicts overpopulation, its main conflict is a cannibalism conspiracy which does not occur at all in the novella. The "soylent steaks" mentioned in the book (made from soya and lentils) are changed in the movie into Soylent Green, which turns out to be partially made from the bodies of those who make use of government-sponsored euthanasia clinics.

As a result, the depiction of the failure to plan for the future and match population to resources — which serves as the focus of the novel — is only an exotic backdrop in the movie. This makes the movie less intellectual than the novel, but also provides it with a more active plot which better suits the medium of film. The New York Times review in 1973 described the movie as "simple, muscular melodrama" with "a rough cop chasing standard bad guys", however the outlandishness of its cannibalism plot has kept it in the public consciousness ever since its release.