Make Room! Make Room!
A gangster is murdered during a blistering Manhattan heat wave. City cop Andy Rusch is under pressure to solve the crime and captivated by the victim's beautiful girlfriend. But it is difficult to catch a killer, let alone get the girl, in crazy streets crammed full of people. The planet's population has exploded. The 35 million inhabitants of New York City run their TVs off pedal power, riot for water, loot and trample for lentil 'steaks' and are controlled by sinister barbed wire dropped from the sky.
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- The topic of "creeping cost of living" reminded me of two other good dystopian novels:
- > 4. John Brunner - not really "cyberpunk" but some of his work is often described as "proto-cyberpunk". The Shockwave Rider is one of his most famous works, and it is really good IMO. I haven't read Stand on Zanzibar yet, but it is also highly regarded.
Brunner's work is sometimes a bit of a downer, Stand on Zanzibar is matched or exceeded in that regard by The Sheep Look Up.
However, if that's your thing I can suggest George Turner and Paolo Bacigalupi, and Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room! (which was turned into the movie Soylent Green).
> 5. Pat Cadigan - I haven't read any of her stuff yet, but she is on my short-list of authors to start reading. Gets recommended a lot in these circles.
Cadigan is great, but her ouvre isn't all that large. Linda Nagata is a similar author well worth reading.
BTW, from my perspective Stephenson's real contribution in Snow Crash wasn't the Metaverse per-se but the huge dose of irony and insider humor, which reinvigorated a subgenre that was starting to take itself and it's RainyGrimDarkness a bit too seriously.
Then again, others have since explored similar territory (Tad Williams' Otherland series, Diane Duane's Omnitopia Dawn, etc.), but Stephenson's return to these stomping grounds in Reamde was a bit... turgid, by comparison.
- "Soylent Green" seems more and more prescient. I'm not talking about turning people into food — not even the over-population fracas depicted in the film (that seems to have been a distinctly 70's-era fear).
Seeing the film again I notice the way it portrays the untouchable wealthy classes (briefly) and then the rest of us. (I should read the book [1] because I was intrigued by little scenes like the one with the old people in the library — if you even remember that bit.)
[1] "Make Room! Make Room!" by Harry Harrison
- It's a story I cite fairly often.
A few others which examine this sort of thing are:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cookie_Monster_(novella)
- https://qntm.org/mmacevedo (originally published as: https://qntm.org/lena )
and I can never miss a chance to recommend "Raindrop" from Hal Clement's _Space Lash_ (originally published as _Small Changes_)
At some point in the future one hopes that a technology will be developed which allows doing more than just pillaging the earth's resources for some additional comfort/convenience/energy, agriculture and improvements on it would be that, except that by making Malthus wrong, they've just increased the number of people for whom problems need to be resolved --- computing had the potential to do this, but the discussion about taxing CPUs to fund a universal basic income or even job re-training for displaced workers never got out the gate --- solar may be the first such, but it really needs more adoption, and an implementation which doesn't depend on batteries which added a fifth item to the resources humans plunder:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112974899-material-world
(the newcomer is lithium, the others were sand, salt, copper, and oil)
We keep crossing tipping points which no one talks about much:
and folks have been writing science fiction stories on this sort of thing since _Make Room, Make Room!_ (and the public is moderately familiar with the movie version _Soylent Green_)
What technologies or social changes offer an escape hatch?
- cold fusion?
- making limestone out of CO2 in warm moist air (needs abundant energy and either an affordable/available reagent or a new process)
- switching folks from eating beef to something else?
- desalination (needs abundant energy, and a compleatness which will prevent issues such as: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S106422931502009X )
- It's wild to think of how many scifi stories and novels there are about immense, completely unmanageable world overpopulation and then give numbers that are lower than what we have right now.
The classic example would probably be Make Room! Make Room! (the very loose basis for the film Soylent Green), where a United States of 344 million people is so massively crammed and overpopulated that the average person lives on strictly rationed water and food.
- Potato prices have been very high this year.
And also, Swift's was always a very s(ali|oyl)ent Green proposal is appropriate to Make Room! Make Room!
