Harrison may be best known for his Stainless Steel Rat books, a series built around the exploits of the reformed interstellar master criminal James Bolivar DiGriz but his finest achievement is probably this dystopian tale of an overpopulated New York. The year is 1999 and, as the millennium beckons, the city has descended into near chaos. It has 35 million inhabitants struggling to find food, shelter and the means of survival. One of them is the book's downbeat anti-hero Andy Rusch, a policeman who is drawn into the hunt for the killer of a racketeer and into a relationship with the dead racketeer's girlfriend. In the course of Harrison's deliberately unsensational story, Rusch finds little resolution to the problems of his personal and professional life. The killer is never brought to justice (and there is no sense that justice would really be served if he were); the girl leaves Rusch and his closest friend, Sol, an elderly room-mate with a line in homespun philosophy, dies. The policeman is left alone in melancholy contemplation of a city which, in its exponential growth, has left most human values behind.

The 1970s film version of Make Room! Make Room!, its title changed to Soylent Green, has its own cult status and its own devotees but does Harrison's novel a disservice. With its emphasis on the uncomfortable origins of the 'soylent' food used to stave off starvation in the city, the film moves into territory in which Harrison shows little interest. His book, so different from the light-hearted space romps for which he is famous, is an often bleak prediction of what the future might hold if human population continues to soar. The fact that the year in which Harrison's novel is set is now in the past rather than the future, and that it held few of the terrors he predicted, is irrelevant. Make Room! Make Room! still works as a powerful vision of a society crumbling under its own fertility and (who knows?) it might yet prove prescient.

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