"Make Room! Make Room!" by Harry Harrison

"It's people!  Soylent green is made out of people."

Well, not in the original novel.

Harry Harrison's "Make Room! Make Room!" may be the basis of "Soylent Green," but it has a number of significant differences.  Soylent is just a high protein meat substitute.  Det. Rusch's elderly roommate isn't euthanized in a death room while classical music plays and bucolic nature scenes are projected on the walls.  An evil corporation isn't trying to keep itself rich at the expense of the poor.

In Harrison's book, it's 1999. The population of NYC has grown to 35 million, most of it poor and unemployed.  People live in squalor.  There is little or no infrastructure left - no subways, iffy water supply - and most of America has been poisoned or swallowed by a dust bowl caused by global warming.

The main plot deals with a murder of a rich criminal, Det. Rusch's investigation of his death, and his relationship with Shirl, the criminal's girlfriend.  But the really interesting part of the book is the dystopian future and the fact that this book is so blatantly pro-abortion (it was written in '66, 7 years before Roe v. Wade).

This was an amazingly good read, one that I nearly passed up because I was expecting, well, Charlton Heston.  It's a more nuanced book than I expected, and from what I've read, a real departure from Harrison's normal writing (darker, less humorous). Now I want to go read the Stainless Steel Rat books and see what they're like.

I'm also glad I read this while living in New York.  I love reading books set here (especially Lawrence Block's various series), because I like to see how many of the places I know and how true the story seems to be to the location.  Harrison's book was great, because it was so easy to picture.  Spend a couple of hours in Times Square and it's easy to pretend that we live in a city of 35 million people (and half of them are dressed like Elmo).

The book was bleak and the ending was pretty much what I expected.  Not a bang, but a whimper.  And one that Harrison was hoping to warn us away from.