The book decried the use of pesticides and had several lasting effects, including the banning of DDT and ultimately the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (as proposed by then-president Richard Nixon in 1970). One of the catalysts was Rachel Carson’s seminal 1962 work, Silent Spring. Though themes of nature and preservation went back even earlier than 19th century thought leaders like Emerson and Thoreau, a real movement surrounding those ideas grew rapidly in the 1960s. In writing Make Room! Make Room!, Harrison joined a lineage of writers who had dealt with ecological and environmental concerns. Harry Harrison in 2005 ( Photo by Szymon Sokół via Wikimedia Commons used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license) The novel was originally serialized in Britain’s Impulse magazine and dealt with two very real concerns: overpopulation and scarce resources being hoarded by the wealthy.

Make Room!, however, showed his serious side. Perhaps best known as the writer of two popular series of humorous SF novels ( Bill, the Galactic Hero and The Stainless Steel Rat), Harrison also earned many fans for his 1950s/1960s run as the primary writer of the newspaper comic strip Flash Gordon. Throughout his long career, Harrison would become a beloved figure in the science fiction community. The film had its roots in the 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison. In the midst of this, police detective Richard Thorn begins to tug on the threads of a vast, horrifying conspiracy. It’s so hopeless that people can check out permanently at their local euthanasia center. Soylent Green takes place in a dystopian 2022 (ouch!) where the wealthy hoard most of the resources and the poor are in a terrible state of food scarcity. (If you know it already, or even if you don’t.

For membership in the pantheon of iconic, climactic movie lines, you’ll find a few obvious contenders, like Rhett Butler’s “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” and Rick Blaine’s “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” But few can match Charlton Heston’s immortal warning at the end of a film released fifty years ago, Soylent Green.

Harry harrison soylent green