Make Room Make room!! It's not soylent enough

Make Room!  Make Room! by Harry Harrison.  It's a book!!  It's a dystopian novel!!!  It's the book that Soylent Green was based upon!!  (Yummers!!!!) Talk about a find, I was searching the library to find something readable and I spotted this gem, well....it's almost a gem.  1984 it isn't, but few things live up to that level of literature. 

The plot and the book are drastically different but one thing remains the same.  Earth is severly overpopulated, nature has been destroyed to house mankind, and natural resources have run dry.  The book takes place in 1999 and America's population is 340 million which is pretty close to where we are now.  We sit at 300 million.  There's a detective, a murder, an old roommate, a foxy lady, and tons of sad images about an overcrowded world. 

Harrison effectively communicates his vision of a cramped, dirty, violent, wasteland of a future where most people live off of soylent burgers and wafers (only the climatic scene of the movie isn't in the movie nor is it explicit that the earth is dead.  The movie tells the audience that the world is one inch from death).  The future is bleak and the world is almost about to come crashing down but the leaders still fight over mundane things like birth control as water rations cause riots.  The old man is Harrison's voice and expels his philosophy while the scenery is Harrison's vision. 

Harrison 's prose is nothing fancy but he communicates his vision without being preachy, mostly, and he does it well by constantly repeating certain facts over and over again about the heat, the dust and dirt, people in every available inch of space.  The plot is mostly an excuse to communicate his ideas which isn't a bad thing but I'm just pointing out that a million stories in his fictional future could have communicated his vision just as well which to me means that the plot isn't the most important thing, it's the message.  That being said, it's still a great mood affecting read, not as depressing as The Road by any stretch of the imagination but still good.