1953 Hugo Winner
Novel The Demolished ManAlfred Bester
Fog Index 13.6
Alfred Bester (1913-1987) was born in New York and attended the University of Pennsylvania. He devoted his life to writing, but a significant portion of that writing was not in the area of SF. He wrote for comics, radio, and television (which he disliked). His most famous SF novels are The Demolished Man(1953) and The Stars my Destination(1956). After writing these books and a number of well-regarded short stories, he didnīt write SF for awhile, instead doing SF criticism for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He was also senior editor of the magazine Holiday (another place where his writing appeared) starting in 1967. He returned to writing SF novels in 1975 with The Computer Connection, but none of his later SF novels or stories ever achieved the high regard of his earlier work. He received the SF Writers of Americaīs "Grand Master" award in 1987.
The Demolished Man depicts a society where telepaths are organized and stratified, and crime has become practically impossible. A magnate named Ben Reich has murdered a business rival, Craye DīCourtney, using a clever means of getting around the probes of both the telepaths at the murder site and those who come to question him later. Lincoln Powell, police prefect, has found a hole in Reichīs verbal testimony that point to him as the murderer, but he has a number of problems. Telepathic evidence is not admissible in court. The only person who witnessed the murder, DīCourtneyīs daughter Barbara, has been traumatized by the experience and must go through a literal regression therapy before she can be of help to Powellīs investigation. And also, to satisfy the criteria of the computerized DA, Powell must find a motive for the killing. Since DīCourtney had just accepted a merger with Reichīs company, there seems no concrete reason for Reich to have killed him.
In his introduction to the Vintage Edition (1996) of The Demolished Man, Harry Harrison says "the cyberpunks only echo dim whispers of The Demolished Man's rolling thunder." The Demolished Man does bear some resemblances to the cyberpunk 30 years in its future. Most striking is in its imagery, for example, the landscape that Chooka Froodīs psychic entertainment house lies in: "Bastion West Side, famous last bulwark in the Siege of New York, was dedicated as a war memorial. Its ten torn acres were to be maintained in perpetuity as a stinging denunciation of the insanity that produced the final war. But the final war, as usual, proved to be the next-to-the-final, and Bastion West Sideīs shattered buildings and gutted alleys were patched into a crazy slum by squatters." (Ch. 9) This kind of blighted landscape is the lifeblood of cyberpunkīs scene setting! Chooka Froodīs, and the sprawling asteroid settlement called Spaceland, among other places, serve as settings for chase scenes, confrontations between characters, or places for secondary characters to be killed off. All are beautifully and vibrantly depicted, letting the reader become immersed in the setting for the short time that it is visited in the story. In Besterīs world, people acting alone, or against the dictates of society, are criminals or mentally insane, wheras in cyberpunk itīs the loners that end up making the most essential changes in the world. In cyberpunk, society on the large scale is at best indifferent, and more often than not corrupt. While in The Demolished Man, I got the impression that society on the large scale cares about individuals and will act in the best interest of those who most need help, like Barbara or Reich. Its denizens see it as essentially on the side of good. But at the same time, those people are put back together--for the good of society and/or themselves--by being taken apart first, which puts a questionable spin on whether that society really is all that "good." Besterīs outlook in this book may be even more "punk" than its surface landscapes make it seem!
Much of Besterīs dialogue is dated. An example I grabbed at random: "Youīre the only one with a gripe and the only one who hires gimpsters. That adds up to you, so letīs get it squared off." Two or three of the characters are given names with symbols instead of characters, i.e. Dr. @kins, which I canīt decide if itīs clever or if itīs, perhaps, a little too coy. Plotwise I didnīt find too many surprises in this book. The insights that Powell gets from the unconscious depths of the regressed Barbara lead to what is assumed to be a surprise or shock regarding Reich later on. But neither that, nor the nature of "Demolition," which plays such an important part in the story, were particularly earth-shattering for me. And characterization, with the possible exception of Reich, is fairly basic, especially in its all-too-ī50s depictions of women, and men for that matter. Bester has been given many kudos for his inventiveness, and I fully agree with them. He doesnīt solely rely on images or plot gimmicks to carry his story, but adds things to think about in the context of its SFnal extrapolations--which are not "hard" by any means, another potential comparison to cyberpunk. (In fact Bester himself said, "Iīm not much interested in extrapolating science and technology; I merely use extrapolation as a means of putting people into new quandaries which produce colorful pressures and conflicts.") I can see why The Demolished Man was chosen for the very first Hugo novel award and why it is still considered influential today. It is an absorbing book that really does stand above the vast majority of SF written in its time, and the majority written after its time, for that matter. Recommended.
