“Soylent Green is …” Well, most of us know how that cry ends, thanks to the 1973 sci-fi film. What is often forgotten is that the movie took prolific author Harry Harrison’s dystopian novel MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM! as its basis. And after all the liberties taken with the screenplay adaptation (Soylent Green is not even in the novel), it’s not surprising that Harrison’s book got lost in all the shouting.
But Orb apparently wants to correct that with this new trade edition reissue. The often playful Harrison (with series and stories featuring Bill the Galactic Hero and The Stainless Steel Rat, among others) turned dead-serious in 1966, envisioning the world of 1999 suffering under the weight of overpopulation.
Natural resources are all but extinct. Crowds dwell in the streets or wander aimlessly shoulder-to-shoulder at all hours. Drinking water is tightly rationed and food is processed from plankton into dry crackers.
New York police detective Andy Rusch and his fellow officers try to keep the peace among the city’s 35 million inhabitants. One of these is Billy Chung, a young street hustler who steals food, or whatever else he can grab, and resells it for cash. One afternoon, Billy takes a part-time job delivering telegrams and forwards a message to the opulent apartment of Mike O’Brien. The sight of O’Brien’s riches, along with a glimpse of O’Brien’s girlfriend in bed, inspires Billy to brake into O’Brien’s apartment later than night. But O’Brien catches Billy in the act. Billy kills O’Brien in a brief struggle and flees into the crowded streets.
Rusch is called in to investigate and is close to filing the usual routine report when it is revealed that the victim is actually “Big Mike” O’Brien, a racketeer with powerful political connections. His murder might mean a rival is muscling into his territory. Suddenly, Rusch is ordered to devote more than the obligatory 48 hours to investigate a murder in a city where multiple killings are a daily
occurrence. But when it is confirmed that the murder was random and not politically motivated, the police department quickly loses interest. Rusch is then reprimanded for firing his gun in self-defense and demoted to a uniformed beat cop.
Sadly, the passing time has dulled Harrison’s urgency and highlighted the flaws of his approach. Far too many scenes and often whole sections of dialogue have no other purpose than to express Harrison’s polemic. This is especially true of “Sol” Solomon Kane, Rusch’s elderly but resourceful roommate, whose every other sentence sounds like propaganda.
But when Harrison steps down off his soapbox, turns down the amplifiers and lets his fiction do the work, the results are far more persuasive. Such as when a rainstorm threatens to drown infants who can’t find shelter; or when Billy takes temporary refuge among those living in forgotten lots of abandoned or impounded cars; or the court-mandated, forced tenancy “squat-orders” issued immediately after the death of a building occupant. These moments lurk in our memory with frightening and prophetic imagery far more effectively than, by comparison, the overbearing sermon that serves as the novel’s prologue.
The depletion of natural resources is still very much a concern in today’s reality (expressed via concerns of global warming and pleas to “go green” rather than control the world’s population). And while it’s great to see Harrison back among the selections in the science-fiction section, this particular work is recommended more as a curiosity of how an otherwise creative and obviously concerned author frantically warned of what might happen. —Alan Cranis
