He was also one of the main writers on the Flash Gordon newspaper strip in the 1950s and 1960s and a dedicated Esperanto speaker, saying he learned the language when he was bored during his conscription in the US Army Air Corps. Born in 1925, he wrote more than 50 novels and won numerous awards – as well as a place in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2004. Harrison was also a prolific and highly respected elder of the scene. Quotes such as that helped cement his reputation in the SF community for being ( as Christopher Priest put it in his 2012 obituary) “amiable, outspoken and endlessly amusing”. This is a point on which the novelist had strong opinions, believing that making Soylent Green out of humans was a sensationalist trick: “What’s wrong with cannibalism? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with cannibalism – humans put on meat too slowly.” In Harrison’s book, “soylent” is made of soybeans and lentils. Famously, there’s at least one crucial difference – and look away now if you’re one of the few people left in the world who doesn’t know what Soylent Green is: there’s no cannibalism in the novel. While we’re making comparisons, I’m also curious to see how the novel stacks up against the film it inspired, the 1973 classic Soylent Green.

It will be interesting to see how well Harrison’s predictions measure up to reality. As incredible as it may seem to some of us, that’s now a long time in the past. We’ll be able to test just how prescient because Harrison set his dystopia in the then distant year of 1999.

Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison