Make Room! Make Room! - SFBA Book Club

Paperback, 224 pages

English language

Published May 3, 1986 by Penguin Books.

ISBN:: 978-0-14-002664-1
OCLC Number:: 15281884

(1 review)

A gangster is murdered during a blistering Manhattan heat wave. City cop Andy Rusch is under pressure to solve the crime and captivated by the victim's beautiful girlfriend. But it is difficult to catch a killer, let alone get the girl, in crazy streets crammed full of people. The planet's population has exploded. The 35 million inhabitants of New York City run their TVs off pedal power, riot for water, loot and trample for lentil 'steaks' and are controlled by sinister barbed wire dropped from the sky.

20 editions

Neil reviewed Make Room! Make Room! by Eric Michael Summerer

Review of 'Make Room! Make Room!' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I enjoyed reading this book. It starts off almost as like a detective novel but the intrigue soon dissolves into the background and in the end it is more like a portrait of a possible dystopian future without much of a story. Despite being published in 1966, it successfully predicts the problems we have now of running out of resources. However it blames this squarely on over-population rather than over-consumption and reads like a manifesto for increased access to birth control as the solution. I think this is what dates the book a little because I get the impression that we now have quite good access to birth control and education about that, at least where I live, yet we are still heading towards the catastrophic future predicted in the book. In a way the dystopia in the story seems almost reassuring viewed from a modern perspective where we are …

I enjoyed reading this book. It starts off almost as like a detective novel but the intrigue soon dissolves into the background and in the end it is more like a portrait of a possible dystopian future without much of a story. Despite being published in 1966, it successfully predicts the problems we have now of running out of resources. However it blames this squarely on over-population rather than over-consumption and reads like a manifesto for increased access to birth control as the solution. I think this is what dates the book a little because I get the impression that we now have quite good access to birth control and education about that, at least where I live, yet we are still heading towards the catastrophic future predicted in the book. In a way the dystopia in the story seems almost reassuring viewed from a modern perspective where we are fed stories of catastrophic climate change and the extinction of the human race. At least in the book they somehow manage to get together and distribute enough food and water rations to everyone like a sort of socialism instead of just having an all out war and survival of the fittest to get access to the resources. Overall it’s a good book that is still relevant but doesn’t go far enough for a modern viewpoint.