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Original Title:	The Demolished Man
ISBN:	1857988221 (ISBN13: 9781857988222)
Edition Language:	English
Characters:	Ben Reich, Lincoln Powell
Literary Awards:	Hugo Award for Best Novel (1953), International Fantasy Award Nominee for Fiction (1954)

The Demolished Man

Alfred Bester

Paperback | Pages: 250 pages

Rating: 3.99 | 26890 Users | 1254 Reviews

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Title	:	The Demolished Man
Author	:	Alfred Bester
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	SF Masterworks #14
Pages	:	Pages: 250 pages
Published	:	July 8th 1999 by Millennium (first published March 1953)
Categories	:	Science Fiction. Fiction. Classics. Mystery. Hugo Awards. Science Fiction Fantasy. Crime

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I have a bee in my bonnet that I would like to deal with first. I tend to feel annoyed (even though I shouldn’t) when people ask for sci-fi recommendations with the caveat that the book being recommended must not be more than 10 years old. The reason given for this clause is usually because the science is “wrong”, there is no internet or history did not turn out the way the author depicted in the book. WUT? I would like to reiterate that it is not a sci-fi author’s job to predict the future, the whole point is to speculate. Anybody who want to get into reading sci-fi but steadfastly refuse to read the classics from the 50s, 60s etc. is really doing themselves a disfavor and missing out on some of the greatest sf stories and ideas ever written in the history of mankind.

Which brings us to Alfred’s Bester’s The Demolished Man, first published in 1953. Read this or his other classic The Stars My Destination and you will understand why I insist sci-fi readers should never neglect older science fiction. These are two terrific stories that stand the test of time.

1953 cover

In The Stars My Destination Bester posits a strange future society where everybody can teleport using the power of their mind. In The Demolished Man not everybody is a telepath but they are quite commonplace and can be found in all kinds of profession. Boy, did he get the future “wrong”! In lesser hands, this conceit would never work but Alfred’s Bester was able to spin a great yarn from this fairly simple premise.

The Demolished Man is an “inverted detective story” in that the reader is immediately told who the murderer is, but the difficulty for our hero is how to catch the devious bastard. The murderer Ben Reich is a “normal”, non-telepathic person, but he is extremely smart and is able to foil even mind reading policemen. For example to avoid his mind being read by telepathic police he goes to a commercial jingle writer to play him a jingle that lodges in his brain after just one listening and bounces around it in an incessant looping playback. The hero policeman Lincoln Powell can barely keep up with him even with all the telepathic power (and manpower) at his disposal. The climax of the book is wonderfully surreal and reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven and PKD’s Flow My Tears the Policeman Said. A friend recently told me that I sometimes inadvertently put spoilers in my reviews so I’d better not elaborate any more on this point.

The awesome edition I had (lost it now!)

Bester’s writing style reminds me of noir detective fiction by the likes of Raymond Chandler, with the clipped dialogue and witty banter. The book is quite short so there is not a lot of room for character development, but the protagonist and antagonist are quite complex and believable characters.

All in all a gripping, entertaining and very readable sci-fi classic that should please all sci-fi fans.

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Ratings: 3.99 From 26890 Users | 1254 Reviews

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The Demolished Man: A SF classic about murder in a telepathic society(Posted at Fantasy Literature)If I had read this book back in 1952 when it was first published, I would have given it 5 stars, no question. But in 2014, with 60 years of refinements in the genre, it suffers from some very dated dialogue and characterization, and some really condescending portrayals of women, so I'm afraid the present value of the book is 4 stars. Having said that, The Demolished Man remains an

The Demolished Man (1953), first winner of the Hugo Award, is an ingenious amalgam of noir policier and dystopian science fiction of the mega-corporate/telepathic surveillance variety. It poses the question: what if you are a very rich man who wishes to kill another rich man, but you live in a society in which mutant telepaths (called Espers or peepers) guard every big corporation and work for the metropolitan police? Is the perfect crime still possible? And how would you go about committing it?

The Demolished Man is sometimes called the first cyberpunk novel, and it took me ages to figure out why. There's one computer in this story and it doesn't even have a screen. The characters feed data in using punchcards.But that's not where the cyberpunk comes from. The Demolished Man features a society of telepaths, known as Espers, and Bester has clearly given a lot of thought to how telepathic communication might work and pretty much predicted how conversation works on the internet! People

3.5* Alfred Bester, one of the icons of science fiction (though I didnt know him until a month ago [yep you got me Im not much of a sci-fi guy]), challenges himself by writing an inter-genre novel, The Demolished Man , which is the Hugo Award winner dated in 1953. The novel is certainly one of his best novels but a way behind to best his best Bester novel: The Stars My Destination . Yet it was a pretty entertaining novel with some good old ancient obsolete science. Oh Im exaggerating; you can

What was up with the 50s? Not only are nearly all the female characters lovely, inneffectual young ladies being cast aside by by powerful older men but the ont exception is a powerful older man falling in love with a literally infantalized expression of various Freud-based concepts. Which leads me to Jake's comment on the general embarrassing proliferation of particularly dated Freudisms. And then, it seems for a while that our protagonist is, seriously, a dashing billionaire with the sheer

A classic SF murder thriller yarn featuring PSI powers in future society not too distant. Trips to various planets & stations don't seem to take very long, a little too convenient. The future society had a lot of interesting elements such as pneumatic enhancement for the ladies. Quite a few names used symbols such as @kins for Atkins or $$son for Jackson (I had to be told about that one. Apparently a 'jack' was slang for money back then. I'd been calling the guy Buckson.) Considering texting

Eight, sir; seven, sir;Six, sir; five, sir;Four, sir; Three, sir;Two, sir; one!Tenser, said the Tensor.Tenser, said the Tensor.Tension, apprehension,And dissension have begun.