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But outdated ideas aren't the problem with this book.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.