![]() Nor was he just off by a few years, as even twenty years after his future date we don't seem close to experiencing this particular apocalypse. New York by 1999 had nowhere near thirty-five million inhabitants, scrambling over each other to find a place to sleep, fighting over fetid water, swelling their bellies with foul-tasting soy and lentil paste, and keeping the police busy with constant crime and rioting. Still, it's hard to avoid the conclusion when reading Make Room! Make Room! in the twenty-first century that Harrison's future world has not come about. And some, if not all, the dire consequences may still be in play. Note, I'm using careful language because arguments have also been made that at least some of those predictions have been misinterpreted. In fact, Harry Harrison says he actually got the idea in 1946.īut before we get too idolatrous about Harrison's prescience, note those other works have, in the years since, been criticized for having gotten it wrong-for having predicted famines, overcrowdedness and economic ruin that haven't occurred, at least not on the timetables they seemingly presented. It actually preceded a number of nonfictional works, like The Population Bomb (1968) and The Limits to Growth (1972), that raised the alarm. ![]() ![]() The novel Make Room! Make Room! was published right in the middle of the boom in warnings about overpopulation and depletion of resources in the 1960s and early 1970s. ![]()
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