Does anyone remember the book “Make Room! Make Room!” by Harry Harrison – written I think in the 1960s. I remember enjoying it years and years ago. It imagines the future, 1999, in which population has exploded. The story is about a New York cop, struggling to help control a city of 35 million, riddled with crimes (usually food stealing)? The book was made into a classic film (which I also enjoyed, and even have on DVD somewhere I think, remembering this fact – though I have not watched it), starring Charlton Heston, in the 1970s, with an added shock-horror element not in the book. John Self of Asylum blog has just reviewed the book#. (Asylum is a great blog, featuring reviews of books the writer likes reading, irrespective of when they were published). John posts an extract from the book describing how the catastrophe came about:
I’ll tell you what changed. Modern medicine arrived. Everything had a cure. Malaria was wiped out along with all the other diseases that had been killing people young and keeping the population down. Death control arrived. Old people lived longer. More babies lived who would have died, and now they grow up into old people who live longer still. People are still being fed into the world just as fast – they’re just not being taken out of it at the same rate. Three are born for every two that die. So the population doubles and doubles – and keeps on doubling at a quicker rate all the time. We got a plague of people, a disease of people infecting the world. We got more people who are living longer. Less people have to be born, that’s the answer. We got death control – we got to match it with birth control.
Interesting 1960s perspective on what the next 30 years would bring. Now we are ten years on from that envisaged future.