"Soylent Green is made of people!"*
Detective Robert Thorn, Soylent Green
As part of my birthday trip to Victoria in September, I made a shopping trip to the Cavity Curiosity Shop, which I've found to be an excellent spot for vintage science fiction shopping. I've been trying to restrict myself to the purchase of replacement books, but sometimes it can be hard not to colour outside the lines, and unfortunately (or fortunately) Cavity offers a wide range of temptations.
On this occasion, one of those temptations was a copy of the classic SF novel Make Room Make Room! by Harry Harrison, which I've somehow managed to go without reading up until now.
Harry Harrison is quite a good writer, and has an excellent bibliography. He’s one of the large group of workmanlike and perhaps lesser-known SF authors from the 60s and 70s, authors like Colin Kapp, Keith Laumer, Robert Sheckley, A. Bertram Chandler, and Brian W. Aldiss.
Originally serialized in three parts in the United Kingdom science fiction magazine Impulse and then published in novel form in 1966, Make Room! Make Room is a low-key near-future eco-disaster drama set in 1996 New York, population 35 million.
It's a sad little dystopian story of overpopulation, deprivation, overcrowding and misery, with none of the excessive drama that you find in other Malthusian** not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper novels like John Christopher's 1956 novel The Death of Grass, or Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, both by John Brunner.
It's also the relatively unknown inspiration for the 1973 movie Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston and featuring veteran actor Edward G. Robinson in his last movie role.
Soylent Green, which, slightly ironically, is set in 2022, received mixed reviews generally but was more favourably received by the science fiction community, winning both a Nebula award and a Saturn Award, and receiving a Hugo nomination.***
To be honest, I don’t think I would have chosen Make Room! Make Room! for a Harry Harrision movie adaptation - his 1970 political SF novel The Daleth Effect strikes me as a far better choice. Make Room! Make Room! is an understated cautionary tale: subtle, nuanced, and without a definitive resolution to its rendition of life in 1996 New York, and as such it seems an odd choice for Hollywood to option. It's equally odd that, having chosen to adapt Harrison's slice-of-life story, the producers decided to change it into an action-filled conspiracy thriller.
It's a heavy-handed change to the original plot, but it does succeed in terms of creating something that probably felt more like a science fiction movie script to the producers. (There was probably a similar process involved in the transition from Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to the script for Bladerunner.)
Now, just to make this clear, I'm not saying that Soylent Green is a better story than Make Room! Make Room!, but the concept of recycling humans as food* is certainly a bold science fiction concept that falls firmly into the "My god, what if" approach to SF.
The re-written storyline gives the plot a specific direction by changing the accidental murder of a mob boss by a frightened teenage thief into the assassination of a Soylent Corporation executive to prevent him from going public with the truth about Soylent Green.
In Harrison's original text, the term "soylent" refers to a mix of soy beans and lentils used to create food patties - the original Impossible burger, come to think of it. In the movie, it's a more abstract concept, partially because it's supposed to be made from plankton, which turns the name Soylent into a futuristic sounding buzzword.
As is very often the case with science fiction set in a specific time, both Make Room! Make Room! and Soylent Green have passed their best before date in terms of predictive accuracy, although that in no way diminishes their value in terms of social commentary and cautionary warnings.
However, the good news is that none of the current vegetarian meat substitutes on the market are made out of people - at least, not that I know of. Our version of 2022 certainly has some issues, but I'm reasonably certain that's not one of them.
- Sid
*My apologies to anyone who was unaware of this climactic plot twist
and has now had the movie spoiled forever, but let's be fair, Soylent Green
came out almost 50 years ago and I feel that it's somewhat in the public domain in terms of surprise endings.
** This is the sort of thing you learn by reading science fiction. In his 1798 publication, An Essay on the Principle of Population, British clergyman and scholar Thomas Malthus suggested that it was inevitable that population growth would exceed food production, an idea which the science fiction community has referenced again and again over the years.
*** Nebula Awards are in some ways the science fiction equivalent of the Golden Globes in the same way that the Hugo Awards are the Oscars of SF. The Saturn Awards are movie-specific and were originally developed by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films to address the lack of genre recognition by the Oscars.
