Make Room! Make Room!

Make Room! Make Room! is a science fiction novel by the American writer Harry Harrison, published in 1966. It takes the trend of population growth and resource use and follows it to an extreme.

The book is set in 1999, in a New York City of thirty-five million people, where water and food are rationed, the infrastructure is failing and the wealthy hoard what they do not need. Detective Andy Rusch lives in half a room shared with Sol, a retired engineer who has rigged a bicycle to generate power for an old television.

A gangster is murdered during a blistering heat wave, and Rusch is under pressure to solve the case. He is also drawn to the dead man's girlfriend, which complicates a life that has no room in it for complication. The novel moves between characters at different levels of the city, and it became the basis of the film Soylent Green, which changed most of the plot. Harrison builds the book out of shortages rather than a single disaster: the pressure is always on the water, the food and the space to stand up in.