Make Room! Make Room!
First edition, 1966
Make Room! Make Room! (1966) by Harry Harrison is set in New York City on New Year's Eve 1999, where the population has reached thirty-five million and the city is held together by rationed water, cramped shared living arrangements, and a dwindling supply of processed food made from soybeans and lentils. The novel follows Andy Rusch, a third-grade detective investigating the murder of a small-time racketeer, and Billy Chung, the young man who killed him, whose story runs parallel and whose circumstances illustrate the grinding desperation at the bottom of the city's social order. Harrison was not writing a thriller. The murder investigation is a structural device for moving through layers of the city, and the novel's real subject is the systemic failure of a society that refused to address its own growth.
Harrison opens the novel with a prologue quoting President Eisenhower's refusal to make birth control a government concern, and closes it with a bibliography of nonfiction sources on population and resource depletion. The novel was a genuine act of advocacy, written at a time when Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb had not yet been published and the subject had almost no popular traction. The 1973 film Soylent Green, directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson in his final role, drew loosely on the novel but departed from it substantially, most famously by introducing cannibalism to the plot, which has no basis in Harrison's book
First edition published by Doubleday in 1966. The novel was originally serialized in Impulse magazine in three parts earlier the same year; the Doubleday edition is the first book publication.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth binding. "H18" date code on lower right margin of page 216. New York: Doubleday, 1966. Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (50). #10554.
Two faint stains on the lower front panel and fold of the jacket, only discernible on the verso side. Otherwise, an exceptionally fine copy in dust jacket. Scarce.
Harrison opens the novel with a prologue quoting President Eisenhower's refusal to make birth control a government concern, and closes it with a bibliography of nonfiction sources on population and resource depletion. The novel was a genuine act of advocacy, written at a time when Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb had not yet been published and the subject had almost no popular traction. The 1973 film Soylent Green, directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson in his final role, drew loosely on the novel but departed from it substantially, most famously by introducing cannibalism to the plot, which has no basis in Harrison's book
First edition published by Doubleday in 1966. The novel was originally serialized in Impulse magazine in three parts earlier the same year; the Doubleday edition is the first book publication.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth binding. "H18" date code on lower right margin of page 216. New York: Doubleday, 1966. Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (50). #10554.
Two faint stains on the lower front panel and fold of the jacket, only discernible on the verso side. Otherwise, an exceptionally fine copy in dust jacket. Scarce.
Related item
