Make Room! Make Room!

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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
Publication date	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 exploring the consequences of unchecked population growth on society.^[1] The novel was the basis of the 1973 science fiction movie Soylent Green, although the movie changed much of the plot and theme.

Set in then-future August, 1999, the novel explores trends in the proportion of world resources used by the USA and other countries compared to population growth, depicting a world where the global population is seven billion, subject to over-crowding, resource shortages and a crumbling infrastructure. The plot jumps from character to character, recounting the live of people in various walks of life in New York City (population around 35 million).

1 Plot summary
2 Major themes
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Plot summary

Originally expanded by Harry Harrison from his own short story "Roommates", Make Room! Make Room! is set in the overpopulated New York City of 1999 (thirty years later than the time of writing). It opens with overworked police detective Andy Rusch, who lives in half a room, waking in the middle of an intense heatwave. He chats with 'room-mate' Sol who is on the other side of the thin partition that makes two rooms out of one. Sol is a retired ex-army engineer who has adapted a bicycle generator, connected to old car batteries, to power an old television set and a refrigerator.

After Andy queues for their continually reducing water ration he is called to work and becomes involved in dealing with a riot, which starts as a protest by the 'Eldsters' (people 65 years and older who have been forcibly retired). This demonstration quickly turns to pandemonium when it becomes known that a nearby food shop is having a 'bring in, sell out' sale on "soylent" (soya and lentil) steaks. Andy follows the crowd to find that the shop is under attack, with the front glass smashing just as he arrives and people involved in looting the contents.

The narrative switches to follow Billy Chung, a desperately poor Taiwanese boy and one of the looters who grabs a box of soylent steaks and just escapes Andy's clutches. He runs away and, after eating several of the steaks, sells the rest for enough D's (dollars) to buy himself a messenger-boy job. His first delivery takes him into a semi-fortified apartment block, complete with the rare luxuries of air conditioning and running water for showers. He delivers his message to one of the residents, a rich racketeer named 'Big Mike'. While Mike is reading the message, Billy catches sight of Shirl, his mistress, laying naked on Mike's bed who is pink and beautiful in a city where most people are gray and malnourished. Billy leaves the apartment after Mike acknowledges the message, and then Mike departs soon after. The narrative shifts to stay with Shirl this time and for the remainder of the novel (with the exception of a few brief departures) follows one of these three characters (Andy, Billy and Shirl) throughout.

Shirl takes a trishaw taxi to market while her rental bodyguard Tab runs alongside. There, she buys such 'staples' as weed-crackers and petroleum-based margarine before going to a "meat-legger" and buying a real beef steak for the racketeer. Shirl and the bodyguard return to the apartment to find that Mike has come back in the interim and been murdered. It transpires that Billy has hidden in the building's basement, idly drawing a love heart on the dust of a window, and then broke into what he thought was the now empty apartment (partly for theft and partly for his sudden fascination with Shirl who had smiled at him when she caught his eye and teased the boy with the barest glimpse of her body). However Mike is back and just finishing a shower in the sound-proof stall in the next room. He walks in on Billy during the robbery and in his shock at being discovered Billy lashes out with a crowbar and kills him. Panicked, Billy flees, and it is only after several minutes' running that he realises he has left behind all the stolen goods he was gathering.

NYPD Detective Andy Rusch is called to investigate the murder; he correctly reconstructs the circumstances of an attempted robbery gone awry. He expects the case to be dropped: at seven murders a day the over-stretched police force can follow up only the most obvious or important cases, but the (criminal) syndicate operating via corrupt official Judge Santini, think the love-heart mark left by the Taiwanese boy may mean the Mafia are muscling in on their territory, and instruct the justice department to find the killer.

As the investigation continues, Andy becomes romantically involved with the mistress, despite her being used to a standard of living considerably higher than his. He ensures that, despite the racketeer having willed his apartment (and everything he owned) to his sister (a selfish crone), Shirl is permitted to stay in the apartment until the end of the month, to 'assist 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 style of life; and to Shirl, because Big Mike kept most of the riches, such as meat and alcohol, to himself). They systematically work their way through Big Mike's food and drink supplies, snatching what intimate moments they can between Andy's double- and triple-shift workload.

As the end of the month approaches and Shirl realises that she has nowhere to go, Andy suggests that she 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 pilfer a set of Big Mike's bedsheets. After winning over an initially-reluctant Sol with some of Big Mike's cigars, Shirl moves in with Andy. But the meager reality of their life together, separated from the luxury they had been sharing, quickly takes the shine off their relationship. Andy is constantly away on shift, and Shirl experiences continual reminders of the difficulty of life without money. 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 afflicting people who cannot afford to eat properly.

Meanwhile, Andy is trying to squeeze the murder investigation into his already massive regular workload. Dealing with riots, paperwork, and an apparently unreasonable chief trying to spread his meagre force as far as it will go, increasingly makes Andy irritable. This, in combination with the shame that the life he is now giving Shirl is so far removed from the one she is used to, makes him more and more distant with her. He begins to obsess about Billy Chung (whose identity he still doesn't know), projecting a lot of his own troubles on the boy and becoming determined to catch him. Eventually, he finds fingerprint cards revealing Billy's home address among a suburb composed of old, decommissioned ships. A visit to this address reveals Billy hasn't been home since the break-in. Andy leaves stool pigeons to alert the police if and when Billy returns.

After laying low for some time after the bungled burglary, Billy returns to his home. But after a brief altercation with his mother and older sister (who has become the fatherless family's matriarch) he leaves again. At first he simply wanders over the ship, but after narrowly escaping capture from the alerted police and nearly jumping to his death in a drug-induced haze, he leaves the part of the city he is used to, eventually breaking into an abandoned shipping container site. He moves in with Peter, a fatalist hermit obsessed with armageddon, who is eagerly awaiting the new millennium as the end of the world. There, Billy 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 to maintain his newly-acquired "Dust" (LSD cut with dirt or other powder) drug dependence. Soon, however, they are attacked by a small group of homeless people and forced to leave. Eventually, they find a new home in a junked car, where the previous owner had 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 then the police will have lost interest in him.

Meanwhile, Sol has made up his mind that he can no longer remain inactive in the face of what he sees as human life's growing crisis. He decides to join a protest march against the over-turning of a legislative bill supporting family planning. Sol sees population control as humanity's last hope for survival, and although Shirl tries talking him out of it, he goes anyway. Andy returns late in the night carrying Sol, who was injured when the protest degenerated into yet another riot. Sol recovers from his injuries, but becomes bed-ridden, then catches pneumonia. His illness puts yet another strain on the long-suffering Shirl, driving her and Andy further apart. Then, one night, Andy returns to find the room dark and cold. He hears Shirl softly crying in their section and then understands that Sol 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. They are discussing having a picnic out of the city on a rare day off for Andy. The conversation is the first time they've been really happy together for some time. But the mood is shattered when Tab, her old bodyguard, knocks at the door. He is reluctantly there in the employ of a family of unpleasant people, with a slimy patriarch who have scanned the death notices in the hopes of finding a vacant apartment. They have a 'squat order', a government-sanctioned permission form 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 over the following days he changes the subject or leaves the apartment to go to work.

In the climax of the story, Andy stumbles upon Billy Chung when he returns home to the ships, accidentally shooting and killing the boy when he tries to run away. Andy tells his chief what happened only to discover that, weeks before, the syndicate had lost interest in the case after their own investigations confirmed there was no mafia takeover bid. The police chief, far from congratulating Andy for finally finding the racketeer's murderer, lets him take the fall for the boy's accidental shooting death. He goes so far as to berate Andy for expending so much time and effort on a dead case. He demotes Andy, putting him back on a street beat and openly tells Andy this is so he can save his own (the chief's) career. When Andy returns to his apartment he finds that Shirl has left him, and he sits on the bed in his empty room while the lowlife family next door snigger and whisper about this latest downturn in his life.

The story ends with Andy on the beat in Times Square for the New Year's Eve "celebrations". While keeping an eye out for trouble he glimpses Shirl from a distance, dressed up and laughing, getting into a car in the company of a number of rich party-goers. As the clock strikes midnight, he faces bitter personal failure. He then encounters Peter, Billy Chung's old 'room mate', who is distraught that the world has not ended. Rhetorically Peter asks how life can possibly go on like this, but with no answer Andy just moves him on. The story concludes with the Times Square screen announcing: "Census says United States had biggest year ever, end-of-the-century, 344 million citizens..."

[edit] Major themes

Social commentary is the novel's underlying theme, with author Harry Harrison primarily using Sol as his voice in promoting the importance of birth control and sustainable development. Environmental destruction has rendered people apathetic, leaving them struggling to sustain themselves in any fashion they can find. Almost all mechanized 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 food and water rations to a disorderly population crowded into the decaying cities.

The end of mechanized transport is spotlighted by a number of stark, disturbing images, for example, the "tugtrucks" — large bins on four old tires towed with 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 destitute people 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 as a vivid communication of what such a future would be like from the man-in-the street's point of view. Harrison's writing is unusually bleak, departing, as it does, from his usually humorous approach, but it maintains his usual distrust of authority.

The late 1960s and the 1970s produced descriptions of New York City, both fictional and reportage, suggesting that violent crime was rampant and that complete societal breakdown, if not imminent, was on the horizon. Make Room! Make Room! was perhaps influenced by this context and can be regarded as an extreme extrapolation of the societal trends perceptible at the time of its writing.