The Demolished Man

by Alfred Bester
Rating: ***
The thought that I kept on having all throughout reading this book was that it really doesn't stand up well after nearly sixty years. With a lot of sci-fi from the fifties (or sixties, or seventies for that matter), you can tell it's decades old pretty easily.  It might set cataclysms in the futuristic years of the 1990s, it might talk about the endless Cold War (or, just as often, actual war) between Russia and the United States, or it might take seriously the idea of Martians. For the most part, this isn't too distracting. If the writing's good enough, the fact that it's 2011, or that the Cold War ended before I was old enough to understand what it was, or that there aren't any canals on mars won't bother me for more than a paragraph.

But outdated ideas aren't the problem with this book. At its core, it's an interesting story: a sizable minority of humanity develop the ability to sense people's emotions. A smaller subset of them can read people minds if the person is willing, and a much smaller portion can forcibly read someone's mind. There are enough of these people wandering around that committing a crime becomes difficult, if not impossible: anger, hatred, will to commit violence are easily detected, and—while telepathic testimony is inadmissible in courts—crimes are generally prevented before they happen. The villain protagonist of the story sets about to evade all the telepaths around him and murder a rival. The idea that a telepathic police officer can't use what he reads in someone's mind as evidence is one of the most compelling devices in the story; the antagonist hero knows for a fact what the protagonist did, having read it all in the protagonist's mind, but he can't do anything about it without first finding real, physical evidence.

It's not the ideas that date the book.  There no overload of predictions about the future that seem laughable now. There isn't an over reliance on science that was sound sixty years ago but seems laughable now.
 it's the writing. It's the writing itself, the language the author uses, that seems incredibly dated. The most grating example of this was having people greet each other by alternating,
"Bip."
"Bop."
"Bim."
"Bam."
It looks clanky on the page and just seems silly. Less annoying, though far more common throughout the book, was the main term for telepaths: peepers. No one uses that word anymore, no one has for years. It's hardly Bester's fault that language has moved on, but it's all the more frustrating because he also refers to telepaths as espers. This is a term that Bester coined in an earlier story (derived from "ESP") that doesn't sound dated because it's never been in common parlance. This is frustrating because Bester uses peepers about five times as often as espers. I know it's trivial and not at all the author's fault, but I would've enjoyed the book a lot better with fewer peepers running around.

Looking past linguistic preferences, the book has flaws that seriously detract from the central concept. The characters' motivations are spelled out hamfistedly, and the characters are all fairly flat. There are several references throughout the book (usually at the end of a chapter) to Demolition, some vague, dreadful fate—distinct and different from death—that the protagonist is trying to avoid. You don't find out what Demolition is until the last few pages, and then it's simply explained by the narrator. The threat of Demolition would've been a lot more meaningful to the story if the audience had any idea what it meant at some point before the denouement.


My biggest problem with the book, though (my biggest actual problem, leaving aside the peepers), is that it kicks to pieces it's central concept. Murder is built up as an impossible crime in this society, something that only a psychotic genius could pull off, something that takes years of planning. Then, in a dramatic scene that undermines the entire book, we find out that low-level thugs kill people frequently and efficiently. Gang leaders have squads of assassins that are routinely arrested, but hey, there's always more people willing to commit murder.


It's an engaging book—especially towards the middle—despite all these flaws. But getting to the good parts was frustrating.

The Hugos

I've been reading more lately than I usually do.  There are two main reasons, as far as I can tell.  First of all, I found myself carpooling 45 minutes every morning, with nothing much to do on the drive other than listen to NPR News.  Not a bad way to start the morning, but not my favorite way, either. The second reason, which has been going on for much longer, is that my job often finds me in waiting rooms at hospitals, property management companies, Social Security, dentists, my own office (oddly enough) and a handful of other places. When the commuting started, I picked up the Dresden Files series where I'd left off, and finished it before too long.  I wasn't really sure what to read next. 

Enter goodreads.com.  My wife, V, signed up for it, and it seemed like fun, so before too long I found myself trying to remember every book I've ever read, and what I thought of them at the time (or what I thought of them now, which is a very different thing).  I've read a lot of science fictions books in my life, and in high school, especially, I was drawn to early science fiction, to The Golden Age of Science Fiction, specifically. Scouring my memory, I rated books by Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and so forth, and was rewarded with recommendations for other early science fiction writers. The one they pushed the most, though, was The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester.

I hadn't ever heard of Bester before; I didn't know if I'd like him or even what to expect of him. But I decided to pick up the book from the local library, and use it as a test for how effective goodreads is at picking out books I'll actually like. A few chapters in, I started to think about the heading on the front cover: "Winner of the First Hugo Award." From my experience, Hugo Award winning novels are generally enjoyable. I hadn't read many (though I'd read more than I thought, and just not noticed), and decided that I should read more. I decided that I should read all of them. In order.

Reading them in order didn't last beyond the first winner.  From there I went to the third, the fifth, the second, and I'm now reading the thirteenth winner.  (Sixty novels have won the honor so far, if you're wondering.) I'll get to why later.  For now, let's just look at The Demolished Man.

By Way of Introduction

I've been meaning to do this for a while, now. For the most part, I like writing.  I like seeing my thoughts spread out before me, I like the clack of the keys under my fingers. Maybe this blog won't amount to anything. Maybe it'll be one of the countless blogs that disappear after a month or a week or a single post.  Maybe I'll stick with it for years and really enjoy it; I might even find people who actually want to hear what I have to say. Hard to tell at this point. Let's find out, shall we?