Society has broken down. The weather’s weird. The air is foul with pollution. No one can travel anywhere. The government is unaccountable, brutal, corrupt, criminal. The police spend their time beating up protestors while ignoring most crimes because that uses up too many resources. People keep coming up with really crappy vegan alternatives to meat. Everyone is exhausted. The only nice place left on Earth is Denmark.

Not all of these things had come to pass by 1999, the year in which Harry Harrison set his 1966 dystopian classic Make Room! Make Room!, but you can see that there are some impressively prescient ideas in the novel. Reading it right now, during a period of uncertainty, has often been a bracing, revelatory experience.

Although, I could have listed just as many things in Make Room! Make Room! that haven’t worked out as Harrison portrayed them. Most notably, the central idea at the heart of the book, beautifully explained by Harrison himself in a 2006 interview with Locus magazine, has not come to pass:

It was really the first book, fiction or nonfiction, about overpopulation. The idea came from an Indian I met after the war, in 1946. He told me, ‘Overpopulation is the big problem coming up in the world,’ (nobody had ever heard of it in those days) and he said, ‘Want to make a lot of money, Harry? You have to import rubber contraceptives to India.’ I didn’t mind making money, but I didn’t want to be the rubber king of India! … But I started reading a bit about overpopulation, and got the idea for the book. It stayed in my head as I watched the population trend going the wrong way.

It’s easy to mock his Malthusian ideas now, but in 1966 he must have felt as though he was ahead of the curve. Notably, his novel came out two years before Dr Paul R Ehrlich’s bestselling book of alarmist nonfiction, The Population Bomb. Ehrlich himself acknowledged the importance of Make Room! Make Room! in an introduction that ran in some 1970s editions of that book:

Make Room! Make Room! presents a gripping scenario of where current trends may be leading. Such scenarios are important tools in helping us to think about the future, and in bringing home to people the possible consequences of our collective behaviour. When such a serious goal can be achieved through an engrossing work of fiction we are doubly rewarded. Thank you, Harry Harrison.

This feels like a dubious endorsement now. When people quote Ehrlich today, it’s usually to pour scorn on the scaremongering and inaccuracy in his theories. So far, population growth has not outstripped agricultural growth and Harrison’s portrayals of food shortages in New York City may be vivid, but it’s comforting to know that they didn’t happen.

I almost wrote that it’s comforting to know that Harrison “has been proved wrong”, but that would be unfair. He never claimed he was writing anything other than fiction. “I have never believed that science fiction predicts the future,” he wrote in 2008 – a point only slightly undermined by his subsequent prophecy that petroleum prices “will never come down again”. It’s hard to read that with a straight face right now.

But contemporary knowledge can also make some aspects of this book feel all too pertinent. In the early pages, there is a constant hum of worry, stress and – worse still – helplessness. Harrison’s society is “trembling on the edge of disaster” and I frequently wished that his characters’ emotions didn’t feel so familiar. There were also plenty of individual moments that brought me up short. In an early scene, where a character called Billy crosses the Williamsburg Bridge, we are told that halfway across “he realised that he was out of Manhattan – for the first time in his life”. If I’d been reading this book two months ago, I may not have thought about the reality of a life so confined. As it is, it made me wonder about the next time I’ll get to leave my small part of Norwich, where I’m writing this. It’s unusually quiet outside and even London suddenly feels a very long way away …

There were even moments when I worried that the events in Make Room! Make Room! were blurring all too easily into all the coronavirus news updates as I read. But mainly it’s been cathartic to experience this vision of a society in peril. Harrison’s characters may be beaten down, but he also makes you feel that if they can keep going, so can we. This book comes from a hopeful place, in spite of his portrayals of an unhappy future: catastrophe can be averted. As Harrison once wrote, “if science fiction can teach us one thing, it is that we have the power to change”. Let’s hope he’s at least right about that one.