![]() ![]() Harrison certainly takes ‘misery and vice’ into consideration in his novel. That the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice. That population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase, and, That the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence, The fears of overpopulation had been extent since the publication of Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) and its incredibly depressing, pre-Darwinian assessment on the nature and condition of population growth based on three principles: This phrase from the 1973 Richard Fleischer film Soylent Green, does not actually appear in its original source material, Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! Relying on shocking cannibalism, Fleischer ignores Harrison’s interest in the political movement for contraception to be made legal and widely available. The cultural meme of “Soylent Green is people!” is treated as a joke today, but had far more relevant implications in decades past. One of the great social anxieties of the 1960s was the population explosion rampant in the post-WWII years and its environmental impact, a social tremor that still exists. ![]() “Make Room! Make Room!” and a The Politics of Contraception ![]()
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