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New York City—stolen from the trusting Indians by the wily Dutch, taken from the law-abiding Dutch by the warlike British, then wrested in turn from the peaceful British by the revolutionary colonials. Its trees were burned decades ago, its hills leveled and the fresh ponds drained and filled, while the crystal springs have been imprisoned underground and spill their pure waters directly into the sewers. Reaching out urbanizing tentacles from its island home, the city has become a megalopolis with four of its five boroughs blanketing half of one island over a hundred miles long, engulfing another island, and sprawling up the Hudson River onto the mainland of North America. The fifth and original borough is Manhattan: a slab of primordial granite and metamorphic rock bounded on all sides by water, squatting like a steel and stone spider in the midst of its web of bridges, tunnels, tubes, cables and ferries. Unable to expand outward, Manhattan has writhed upward, feeding on its own flesh as it tears down the old buildings to replace them with the new, rising higher and still higher—yet never high enough, for there seems to be no limit to the people crowding here. They press in from the outside and raise their families, and their children and their children's children raise families, until this city is populated as no other city has ever been in the history of the world.

"I think this margarine has turned."
"How can you tell?" Sol grunted, biting into one of the dry crackers. "Anything made from motor oil and whale blubber is turned to begin with."
"Now you begin to sound like a naturist," Andy said, washing his cracker down with cold water.
"There's hardly any flavor at all to the fats made from petrochemicals and you know there aren't any whales left so they can't use blubber—it's just good chlorella oil."

… the men stared at him with a cold look of hatred stamped across their features that gave them a strangely alike appearance, as though they were all members of the same angry family.

… when he reached the sidewalk he had to step over the outstretched leg of an old man who
sprawled there. He looked dead, not asleep, and he might be for all that anyone cared. His foot was
bare and filthy and a string tied about his ankle led to a naked baby that was sitting vacantly on the
sidewalk chewing on a bent plastic dish. The baby was as dirty as the man and the string was tied
about its chest under the pipestem arms because its stomach was swollen and heavy. Was the old man
dead? Not that it mattered, the only work he had to do in the world was to act as an anchor for the
baby and he could do that job just as well alive or dead.

"Got a real riot brewing here and it's gonna get worse before it's better. <…> Klein's had one of those lightning-flash sales, you know, they suddenly put up signs in the windows and they got something that sells out quick, they done it before with no trouble. Only this time they had a shipment of soylent steaks. Some chunkhead bought hers and went around the corner and ran into one of those roving TV reporters and blabbed the thing. People are pouring in from all over hell and gone and I don't think half the streets are blocked yet."
<…> the patrolmen pushing the crowd back as far as possible.

Cabs were certainly cheap enough, she usually walked just because she liked it, but not in this heat. There was a waiting row of pedicabs already, with most of the drivers squatting in the meager shade of their rear seats. Tab led the way to the second one in line and steadied the back so that she could climb in.
"What's the matter with me?" the first driver asked angrily.
"You got a flat tire, that's what's the matter with you," Tab said quietly.
"It's not flat, just a little low, you can't—"
"Shove off!" Tab hissed and raised his clenched fist a few inches; the sharpened iron spikes gleamed. The man climbed quickly into his saddle and pedaled off down the street. The other drivers turned away and said nothing. "Gramercy Market," he told the second driver.
The cab driver pedaled slowly so that Tab could keep up without running, yet the man was still sweating. His shoulders went up and down right in front of Shirl and she could see the rivulets of perspiration running down his neck and even the dandruff on his thin hair; being this close to people bothered her. She turned to look at the street. People shuffling by, other cabs moving past the slower— moving tugtrucks with their covered loads. The bar on the corner of Park Avenue had a sign out saying BEER TODAY—2 P.M. and there were some people already lined up there. It seemed a long wait for a glass of beer, particularly at the prices they were charging this summer. There never was very much, they were always talking about grain allotments or something, but in the hot weather it was gone as soon as they got it in, and at fantastic prices.

Around the entrance were the weedcracker stalls with their hanging rows of multicolored crackers reaching high overhead, brown, red, blue-green.
"Three pounds of green," she told the man at the stand where she always shopped, then looked at the
price card. "Another ten cents a pound!"
"That's the price I gotta pay, lady, no more profit for me." He put a weight on the balance scale and shook crackers onto the other side.
"But why should they keep raising the price?" She took a broken piece of cracker from the scale and chewed it. The color came from the kind of seaweed the crackers were made from and the green always tasted better to her, less of the iodiney flavor than the others had.
"Supply and demand, supply and demand." He dumped the crackers into the shopping bag while Tab held it open. "The more people there is the less to go around there is. And I hear they have to farm weed beds farther away. The longer the trip the higher the price." He delivered this litany of cause and effect in a monotone voice like a recording that has been played many times before.

When she spoke her lips opened in a narrow slit, delivered the words like metal stampings from a press, then closed instantly afterward lest they deliver one item more than was needed.

There was a rumble of wheels behind him and he stepped aside to let a heavy tugtruck pass, a square, boxlike body mounted on old auto wheels, guided by the two men who pulled it. They were bent almost double and aware of nothing except their fatigue. As they plodded by, just a few feet from him, Andy could see how the traces cut into their necks, gouging into the permanent ulcers on their shoulders that stained their shirts wet with pus.

There was a fit of screaming and sudden movement as they eddied about two boys coming from the direction of the docks, whose arms were spotted with bites and streaks of uncongealed blood. On the end of a string they carried their prize, a large gray dead rat. They would eat well tonight.

… woman <…>—a shapeless bundle of heavy clothing covered with a torn plastic raincoat, with a cord tied about her middle so that she resembled a lumpy sack.

"… we have to look ahead. City income tax is higher, eighty percent now, because of the raised Welfare payment…

At the center of the mob were three crumb stands, one of them knocked off its legs and half overturned, with bags of weedcrumbs dribbling to the ground.
"They been jacking the price!" a thin-faced harridan screamed. "Against the law jacking the price. They asking double for crumbs."
"No law says, we can ask what we want," a stall owner shouted back, clearing the area in front of him with wild swings of an old connecting rod. He was ready to defend with his life his stock of broken bits of weedcracker. Weedcrumbs, the cheapest and most tasteless nourishment ever consumed by man.

The first cavemen were coming out of the subway entrance, blinking at the light. During the summer everyone laughed at the cavemen—the people whom Welfare had assigned to living quarters in the stations of the now-silent subways—but as the cold weather approached, the laughter was replaced by envy. Perhaps it was filthy down there, dusty, dark, but there were always a few electric heaters turned on.

… the history of medicine is the history of the violation of natural law. The Church—and that includes the Protestant as well as the Catholic—tried to stop the use of anesthetics because it was natural law for a woman to have pain while giving birth. And it was natural law for people to die of sickness. And natural law that the body not be cut open and repaired. There was even a guy named Bruno that got burned at the stake because he didn't believe in absolute truth and natural laws like these. Everything was against natural law once, and now birth control has got to join the rest. Because all of our troubles today come from the fact that there are too many people in the world.

We're all winners in the ovarian derby, yet I never heard anyone crying about <…> the sperm who were the losers in the race.

Your Church has gone on record and fought publicly against any public birth control measures. <…> The results—which prove them wrong—are just outside that window. They have forced their beliefs on the rest of us so we're all going down the drain together.

The world's gone <…> to hell in a hand basket, and it's all of us who pushed it there.

Mr. Belicher was thin, with a strangely shaped head, almost no chin and just enough intelligence to sign his name to the Welfare application. Mrs. Belicher was the support of the family; from the flabby fat of her body came the children, all seven of them, to swell the Relief allotment on which they survived. Number eight was pushing an extra bulge out of the dough of her flesh;..

"… the nut cults are saying it's the millennium, Judgment Day or Doomsday or whatever the hell you call it. There's bunches of them all over town. They're going to be damn unhappy when the world doesn't come to an end at midnight…"

"It's after midnight, the new century has begun and nothing has changed."
"Nothing changed?" Peter shouted. "It is Armageddon, it must be." Terrified, he pulled his arm from Andy's grip and started away, then turned back when he had only gone a pace.
"It must end," he called in a tortured voice. "Can this world go on for another thousand years, like this? LIKE THIS?"

Through scientific journals I became more and more aware of the threat of overpopulation on the entire world. <…> I realised that science fiction had fudged this problem by setting the stories in the far future. I picked the year 2000 as being close enough to be a real threat as well…

… Harrison's premises rather shaky, but the reasoning and plotting built on them very solid^[2]; the end did not quite sustain my interest…^[3]

The book is extrapolation that the author means to be taken seriously, and he appends a page and a half of collateral reading in the hope that you will do so.
<…> the message of Harry Harrison's book: We are building [social structure] to a point where it will take all our skills and energy to hold our level, and where the least imbalance means collapse and destruction.
In 1999, New York is a city of thirty-five million people dangling from the administration's fraying shoestrings. Food is synthetic and expensive; water is rationed; electricity is gone; living space is almost nonexistent.
<…> Harrison's point that there can be no happy ending. We probably do not have it in our power to bring one about, except by limiting population, putting an end to waste, abandoning the easy way.
If your friends complain that science fiction is daydream literature for escapists, give them this one.^[4]

… grimly realistic and completely merciless story…^[5][2]

Behind the violence of Harrison's writing <…> one senses the formation of liberal or liberal-inclined societies. <…> Make Room, Make Room, for instance, is a highly credible portrait of an overcrowded New York, the society of which hangs together, not only through dogged police and governmental coercion, but through an unstated acceptance of the social contract by millions of hard-pressed inhabitants; so that, at the end of the book, the status quo still holds, the entity survives. (A masterly stroke, and not only because it defies a long-established sf convention that Everything Falls Apart in the Final Chapter.)

Even if 1999 in New York turns out to be nothing like Harrison's imaginings, this will remain a truthful novel.

There are, I’d suggest, two canonical SF novels about overpopulation. One, John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), <…> whose encompassing rage is not nearly well known enough outside the SF field. The other, <…> Make Room! Make Room! is well known, but mainly through its film incarnation as Soylent Green.
<…> the pressure of so many people is close to causing society to break down, and violence and looting are regular occurrences in the book. This is one reason why making the protagonist a police officer has a kind of rightness to it: the police are, after all, concerned with trying to hold society together or at least stop transgressions against its rules. Andy and his colleagues are fighting a losing battle <…>.
If I had to pick one word to describe Make Room! Make Room!, it’d be clamorous. It’s an astonishingly noisy book, as the title hints, everyone attempting to be heard against the background of everyone else. New York is a frenetic enough city as it is, and Harrison is inviting us to see how much worse it might be. <…> There is no magic here to whisk anyone out of the noise.
<…> there are plenty of cities in the world where some of the things he describes are coming true. <…> it sets out how dire the situation could be without ever seeming didactic.^[6]