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Make Room! Make Room!: The Classic Novel of an Overpopulated Future Paperback – April 1, 2008

4.1 out of 5 stars 1,301

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The world is crowded. Far too crowded. Its starving billions live on lentils, soya beans, and ―if they're lucky―the odd starving rat.

In a New York City groaning under the burden of 35 million inhabitants, detective Andy Rusch is engaged in a desperate and lonely hunt for a killer everyone has forgotten. For even in a world such as this, a policeman can find himself utterly alone….

Acclaimed on its original publication in 1966,
Make Room! Make Room! was adapted into the movie Soylent Green in 1973, starring Charlton Heston along with Edward G. Robinson in his last role.


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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Harrison's fictions constitute one of the main monuments in modern SF.” ―Paul Di Filippo, SciFi.com

About the Author

HARRY HARRISON (1925-2012) was the Hugo Award-nominated, Nebula Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of the Stainless Steel Rat, Deathworld, and West of Eden series, as well as Make Room! Make Room! which was turned into the cult classic movie, Soylent Green starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson. In 2009 Harrison was awarded the Damon Knight SF Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Orb Books; First Edition (April 1, 2008)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0765318857
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0765318855
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.6 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.55 x 1 x 8.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 out of 5 stars 1,301

About the author

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Harry Harrison
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Harry Max Harrison (born Henry Maxwell Dempsey; March 12, 1925 – August 15, 2012) was an American science fiction (SF) author, best known for his character the Stainless Steel Rat and for his novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966). The latter was the rough basis for the motion picture Soylent Green (1973). Harrison was (with Brian Aldiss) the co-president of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group.

Aldiss called him "a constant peer and great family friend". His friend Michael Carroll said, "Imagine Pirates of the Caribbean or Raiders of the Lost Ark, and picture them as science-fiction novels. They're rip-roaring adventures, but they're stories with a lot of heart."

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Szymon Sokół (Picture taken at Worldcon 2005) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
1,301 global ratings
the basis for Soylent Green
4 Stars
the basis for Soylent Green
This novel was the basis for the 1973 sci fi classic SOYLENT GREEN. I would have to say that this is the one time where an adaptation is much better than the original novel; the film is a detective story; the novel just sort of wanders around so the author can show the disastrous effects of overpopulation. This is worth reading, but don't expect Soylent Green.
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Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2023
I loved this book and really like the movie Soilent Green. It is a deep story, full of more detail than the movie. They cannot put it all when making any movie. Thoroughly enjoyable read, the writing and description are excellent. Loved it!
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Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2022
I remember when I first saw "Soylent Green," the movie, 49 years ago. It has haunted me ever since. To say that the screen play writer took liberties with the Harrison novel would be the understatement of the year or millennium. The silent horror of this novel: the over population of the world, becomes the blood curdling shout of Det. Thorne (Charlton Heston) of the film: "Soylent Green is people!"

All in all an ominous future for humanity. Harrison is a master story teller and novelist with this coherent, neatly tied up plot. Sol Kahn (Sol Roth [Edward G. Robinson] in the film) is Harrison's mouthpiece to advocate for BIRTH CONTROL. This dates the book to the end of the 1960s when the Pope put out his encyclical against birth control, "Humanae Vitae." This was what "wokeism" looked like then. A good tale with less shock and pessimism that attended the movie made from it.

Harry Harrison is a 20th century Dickens as he leads his reader through the grimy, smelly, rusty world of HIS future, 1999. For us alive today in 2022 we can see that things did not turn out quite so bad in 1999, the time setting of the novel, or even 2022, the time setting of "Soylent Green."

The biggest contrast between the novel and the film: the film displays the catastrophic personal devastation brought on by the world condition that has people desiring death while the novel portrays tough, ordinary people, who want to live, though they have to adapt to an inconvenient truth in a nightmare world.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2012
It isn't often I like a film better than the novel on which it was based, but there is always the occasional exception that proves the rule.

MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM! is the novel that inspired the film SOYLENT GREEN, notable for its (at the time) shocker of an ending and the fact that it was Edward G Robinson's last film (and he delivered a wonderful performance that even got tears from his normally wooden co-star Charlton Heston). While the basic premise of the novel and the film are similar, the two versions take the story in entirely different directions.

The setting is the one thing that novel and film have in common: New York City, sometime in the not-all-that-distant future (1999 in the novel, 2022 in the film). Blanketed in a smog that turns the air brown, and sweltering under an oppressive heat wave, the basic setting may well be the most disturbing aspect of both the novel and the film, because climate change is now a reality and we may very well be heading where they point if we don't do something to stop it.

Overcrowded, with 35 million inhabitants crammed into what housing there is like so many sardines, Harrison's novel is even grimier than Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, though the influences of Orwell, Huxley, and Zamiatin are in evidence here.

So the premise isn't terribly original, but let's face it: the futuristic dystopia is a sub genre of science fiction, which by its very nature makes it somewhat narrow, and similarities are bound to crop up. Harrison makes up for what he lacks in originality by making his characters real people. This is perhaps the only area in which the novel is superior to the film, since with the exception of Robinson's character most of the cast is right out of Central Casting.

A wealthy executive has been murdered. Who exactly he is is somewhat muddled, but he is important enough that the understaffed police department is ordered to make the investigation a priority; the task of apprehending the man's killer falls to a young detective named Andy Rusch.

That basic premise is really all the film took from the book. Unfortunately I found the film a great deal more exciting and involving than Harrison's rather plodding narrative. He takes nearly three hundred pages to tell a story that could probably have been told better in half that length, and at times the story moves ahead so slowly that I found myself peeking ahead, something I almost never do.

One thing must be noted: the novel's treatment of women is far better than that of the film. In the film, attractive young women are "for rent" with the plush apartments occupied by wealthy men. and are referred to as "furniture;" after the initial murder, the detective rather cavalierly avails himself of the sexual favors of Shirl, the "furniture" he left behind.

Shirl is a much more self-actualized character in the novel. Forced by circumstances to fall back on youth and beauty as commodities with which she can buy a more comfortable life, in some aspects she is a prostitute, but it is impossible to judge her for this; one feels that in her shoes one would do the exact same thing.

Also in the novel, the detective falls in love with Shirl, which confuses and frightens her; after she moves into his cramped quarters and sees how people live who have no resources, she is eventually frightened into packing her bags and returning to her former life. And it's hard to blame her.

SOYLENT GREEN has been a favorite of mine for years, so I was very much hoping to love the novel. Unfortunately, at the end of the day it is a rather tedious business, lacking in originality and with a terrible sense of pacing that makes it an excruciating read. And it isn't helped much by the feeling of déja vû one has if one has read widely in this particular sub genre.
41 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2021
So the inspiration for Soylent Green is clearly evident in the book but the plots between the two differ dramatically. This book is incredibly depressing in the future it paints. Way, way, way more depressing then the movie. The author intended it as an exploration of the perils of overpopulation but as we have surpassed the population in the novel and do not live in a comparable dystopia (our dystopia is of an entirely different sort), that aspect of it I think is hard to relate to. What is not hard to relate to is the parallels in the daily life and projecting into the future what our lives could be with limited resources.

I could not put this book down, but it did haunt me for several days and left me feeling very depressed. I take that as a mark of an extremely well written book in that it created a strong emotional reaction from me. It is also readable, the characters relatable, and the flow sufficient to keep you reading.

If you are coming to this book having watched the movie and want more, this does not give you more than what is in the movie; it gives you something different. Kind of a parallel world/story with the same people and maybe the same instigating event, but things go in a very different direction. So read this book if you want a different story set in the same place with the same people and not if you want a continuation or expansion of the story you saw in the movie.
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Top reviews from other countries

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John B. Parry
5.0 out of 5 stars Make Room Make Room - Harry Harrison's dystopian New York
Reviewed in Canada on September 30, 2019
This is a good old sci-fi book about a dystopian New York in 1999. I had never heard about Harry Harrison before some article I read mentioned the story in the light of Soylent Green. I was intrigued and had to order the novel. Though the writing was a bit dated I enjoyed the story immensely. He has some interesting predicitions, he was correct as to the population of the US at present, overestimated the population of New York and totally underestimated the ability of world to feed itself. I decided to read more of Harrison's early work. Well worth the read.
MPR
5.0 out of 5 stars On the verge of the extitions. Make Room Make Room
Reviewed in Italy on September 13, 2020
Il romanzo su cui è stato basato "Soylen Green" con Charlton Heston. A mio parere migliore del film.
BeastlyMuLLeR
4.0 out of 5 stars An interesting, not so well-known sci-fi classic.
Reviewed in Spain on July 29, 2020
The first part of the novel felt somewhat slow and limited itself to presenting the issue: lack of housing, food and water rationing, and skyrocketing criminal rates, all in an extremely overpopulated New York, in an equally overpopulated planet Earth, in which services cannot cope anymore with the excess of people. Within all this chaos, we are introduced to the main characters, all somehow connected to the murder of some apparent big fish of New York’s elite. It is in Part 2 where the story shifts to the main action: the riots and protests in a city that is not capable anymore of maintaining the fragile status-quo.

Reading this 54 years after it’s first publication, it might seem like he had the numbers wrong (in that time has shown that 7 billion is still a tolerable number -if you live in the ‘right’ part of the world, that is-), but the future Harrison envisioned might not be as far off as we could think. The issues described in the novel might very possibly be the problems mankind will be facing in 50 years.
As Sol puts it, science and medical advancements have put us in a position where we can keep a tighter leash at death, but cultural and religious factors still make us suffer from a very real issue of birth control. People do not die of desease as often anymore, pass away at a much more older age, and virtually all children of a family nowadays make it to adulthood; yet in many areas of the world families keep giving birth to 6-7-8 children, numbers corresponding to an era in which having more children was the only means for guaranteeing at least some of them would reach their adult life. Pandemics, food and water, fuel, pollution and global warming... as dark and complex as the idea might seem, I too think the biggest issue mankind will be facing in the upcoming future will be that of overpopulation.
Yet sadly, birth-control policies alone, or at least as we know them today, won’t be enough for reaching a long-term solution. For any readers interested in these topics, I would highly recommend Maggie Shen King’s novel ‘An excess male’, which deals with the topic of a China in the near future where the ‘single child policy’ and the families’ desires to obtain male-children has turned Chinese society into a nation with an excess of male population.
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ヒルマ ヤスシ
5.0 out of 5 stars 生命の重みとは
Reviewed in Japan on June 11, 2020
何年たっても日本語版が出ないので購入しました。Oasisの辞書機能も使いながら読了し、満足しています。
人種や女性の扱い方が、今の時代には受け入れられにくいですが、生命の倫理について考えさせられる名作だと思います。
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Stefan Weiss
5.0 out of 5 stars Ein Klassiker
Reviewed in Germany on August 22, 2016
Ich wollte das Buch schon lange haben; es ist - wie andere schon hervorgehoben haben - die Vorlage für den Film "New York 1999 - die überleben wollen". Das Buch hat einen etwas anderen Plot, ist meines Erachtens aber noch besser als der Film. Die hier gekaufte Ausgabe von Penguin liegt angenehm in der Hand, ist auf gutem Papier gedruckt, auch da ist nichts auszusetzen.
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