SCI FI PI

THE DEMOLISHED MAN
By Alfred Bester

This is the first ever Hugo Award winner, back in 1953. Named after groundbreaking editor and Author Hugo Gernsback, the Hugos, along with the Nebula Awards, are considered the highest recognition that a Science Fiction Author can achieve.

The Demolished Man is generally included in any top ten of Golden Age Sci Fi, and often of all time Sci Fi.

Alfred Bester’s writing is characterised by an energy and imagination that must have been astonishing in the 50’s, and is still eye-opening today. He wrote few novels in a genre packed with logorrhoea, but his The Stars My Destination (1956) is always considered when discussing the greatest Sci Fi novels of all time. We’ll read more about that one later.

Bester also wrote some of the very best short stories in Sci Fi, with a penchant for humour, fast pacing and imaginative and often superbly clever plotting.

Bester is a Science Fiction Hall of Fame member, born in New York in 1913. He dropped out of Columbia Law, and published his first story in 1939. In 1942 he began work at DC comics. He wrote on Superman and The Green Lantern, and also wrote for The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician.

During this time he wrote short stories for Astounding, although he stopped submitting when editor John Campbell followed fellow Science Fiction writer L Ron Hubbard’s newly formed Dianetics movement.

Bester also wrote radio scripts and during his later career was the literary editor for Holiday magazine.

The Demolished Man is essentially a crime novel, setting up both criminal and investigator to the reader, and to each other. It is not so much a game of whodunit, but of cat and mouse. In a world dominated by telepaths, where the idea of being able to ‘get away with murder’ is preposterous, then everything really is turned up a notch.

The new reader of The Demolished Man cannot help but be impressed by the ‘thought conversations’, brilliantly and literally transcribed as if looking at a physical wall of thought as ideas flash from person to person, unencumbered by speech. The speeches form patterns on the page, and are surprisingly readable for the eye trained on single paragraphs.

Another remarkable aspect is the precognitive use of ‘txt’ spelling, with formal surnames like @kins and ¼maine produced 50 years before the widespread use of crushed computerised spelling.

The novel is also interesting in its dissection of the hierarchy of telepaths, ‘espers’ who rank themselves on their ability to see or block someone else’s thoughts. They have formed their own guild, and link across crucial sectors of society and the economy. They are looked upon with awe and suspicion by normal people.

Having a telepathic police prefect is of course excellent for interrogation, but when a telepath of equal or greater ability is used to block the power to read minds, things get interesting. When a powerful, rich and determined man is hell bent on breaking the law, it takes a special kind of investigation to stop him.

Of course, like much Golden Age Sci Fi, there are anachronisms of behaviour and social organisation, but because the book is written so briskly, these tend to become part of Bester’s alternate world, rather than a jarring reference to the author’s bygone milieu.

The Demolished Man of the title is what happens to the psyche of the convicted criminal. Demolition is the order of the day for those caught for the unthinkable and impossible act of premeditated murder. But for the details of what Demolition actually is, you’ll have to read about it yourself.

As a cracking yarn, The Demolished Man cannot be faulted. As a piece of Sci Fi history, it is required reading.




THE BABYLON 5 CONNECTION

Clever Sci Fi fans would have already spotted the link between Alfred Bester and Babylon 5. Walter Koenig’s delightfully devious Psi Core Operative, Bester, is of course named after the famous author. In fact, J. Michael Straczynski’s huge telepath plot line, the social organisation of a core of telepaths (in Bab 5’s case, The Psi Core) in ranks of telepathic ability, closely mirror the world constructed in The Demolished Man. Even the idea of demolition itself is mirrored in the sentence of ‘death of personality’ for murder, in the season 1 episode “The Quality of Mercy”. Let’s just say it’s an ‘homage’.

Click here to see the next episode of Babylon 5 to compare and contrast!

More of a true homage is the mention of Serenity’s previous engineer in Joss Whedon’s Firefly. Apparently he was named Bester.