During the first chapters of this book, my thoughts were along the lines of, "Holy shit, why didn't anybody tell me Harry Harrison was such a great writer?" The descriptions and worldbuilding are brilliant. I was bummed I already knew the ending since I'd seen the film adaptation, Soylent Green, but this story had the potential to be richer. 
 And as the story proceeded, it didn't go anywhere near that Soylent Green storyline I was expecting. My new thoughts were, "Huh. Sure is taking a long time for anything interesting to happen." There were a lot of references to koffee and meateasies and our future overpopulated world seemed extraordinarily bleak, but not much of anything happened. Where was that fascinating story? 
 It never happened. (Turns out the film used the great worldbuilding, but heavily modified the plot.) The ending was anticlimactic and, worse, it got really preachy. There were long sections of dialogue lecturing the reader on the direction humanity was taking. Honestly, the world he describes in this book was enough to convey all that. He didn't need to be so overt. I recognize that sort of thing was common in the old science fiction novels, but between that and the 2D characters, it ended up feeling very dated. A boring story with flat characters in a richly painted world.