Harrison’s writing perfectly captures the charged, tense and stifling atmosphere of the city, and the pressure on his characters as they grow closer to breaking point. Through all these story lines, Harrison presents a view of this future world from diverse angles the pressure on the good, honest workers trying to survive in a corrupt world the pressure on the impoverished trying to survive another day the pressure on the elderly who are no longer useful and become low priority to help while drawing readers back in with a love story, peppered with tender moments but also under pressure, and a general meditation on how people act, and react, in times of crisis. We also follow a young boy Billy, whose story largely focuses on the desperate need to jostle and be resourceful in a world running out of resources.

Sol, Andy’s flatmate, is a great old character, no-nonsense and full of ideas on the most pressing issues of the day, with a particular interest in the issue of population control.

The story follows Andy, a city cop, who comes under increasing pressure to solve a murder of political interest complicating the matter further is his falling for the murder victim’s girlfriend Shirl. It’s a society we do recognise as our own, just worsened to an extreme, and that’s what’s possibly so frightening about it. Unlike many of the classic dystopian novels, where a new, distinctive ruling order with ominous leaders and social structures has emerged, Make Room! Make Room! seems to focus more on some of the key problems of the author’s time – including a growing gear of overpopulation, pollution, oil consumption and corruption – and imagines a future world where these problems worsened relentlessly and exponentially to leave a society of violence and poverty simmering with tension and on the verge of imploding. The New York of Harrison’s vision is a hot and dirty city which is, as the title implies, heaving with people (an envisioned 35 million versus the approx 8.5 million it is now) where society’s basic and driving resources, and the world’s raw materials, are running at an all time low, leaving people jostling, and pitted against each other, for survival. The book projects a vision of New York in 1999, over 30 years in the future and on the cusp of a new millennium. Written in 1966, Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison is a novel that merges science fiction and the dystopian with detective story and a little bit of a love story thrown in for good measure. One time we had the whole world in our hands, but we ate it and we burned it and it’s gone now.

Make room make room by harry harrison