Harrison depicts New York as a ruined, heavily overcrowded city in the waning days of 1999 – 2012 Mayan prophecy? Forget it! – and the rich live in guarded apartments while the rest are left to survive the best they can with shrinking food and water rations. This is a mathematical impossibility - aside from the fact that there will be about seven billion people on this earth at that time and - perhaps - they would like to have some of the raw materials too…” “By the end of the century,” he notes in a prologue to his novel, reissued by Orb Books in 2008, “should our population continue to increase at the same rate, this country will need more than 100 per cent of the planet’s resources to maintain our current living standards. He’d have hated to be called a prophet, though – it was just common sense, helped by some grim statistics, that compelled him to write his chilling “what if” story of America’s future long before Suzanne Collins ever imagined the “Hunger Games” world in which Katniss draws an arrow from her quiver (actually, she was just a toddler the year that “Make Room!” was published).
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