Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man

[bluetomb]

Ben Reich is a man having a bad time. Obscenely wealthy, head of the vast and powerful Monarch Utilities & Resources organisation, but Monarch is getting beaten all ends up by the rival D'Courtney Cartel, and he's beset by terrifying nightmares of a faceless man. When old man Craye D'Courtney seems to refuse Reich's offer of a merger with Monarch, there's only one thing for it : kill him! But how does one set about about murder in a time in which a guild of benevolent telepaths, called Espers, can read murderous intent and stop the deeds before they have even been committed? Well, Reich is a smart one and his resources are vast. He schemes, he recruits allies, and he gets down to it. Nearly gets away too, except for getting swiftly rumbled by Esper police Prefect Lincoln Powell, equally smart and an all round cool customer. But Reich isn't going down easy. Going down means something terrible called demolition, and he's going to do absolutely everything he can to avoid it. Things are going to get tense...

Alfred Bester, though he only published a handful of novels and only two of which are really acclaimed, changed the face of science fiction, forerunning both its New Wave in the 60's and the whole later cyberpunk movement. The Demolished Man lives up to its reputation, it may not be quite as glorious as The Stars My Destination but it’s exciting and mind expanding in just the ways it goes for. Vitally, it’s an enjoyable thriller. Ben Reich may be an evil mad bastard, but he’s smart and his plans are interesting, Lincoln Powell may be a model of a good cop but he’s wrongfooted or backfooted a lot of the time. There’s plenty of back and forth to their cat and mouse game and it’s intriguing to see what might come next. There are splashes of violent action, and Bester opts for queasy nightmare rush over ripping yarn fun to good effect. The science fiction is ever present but lightly drawn, there are some great settings (I especially liked an exploded ceramics factory turned flop hotel/club) but they keep largely within the realms of variations on average experiences rather than anything too space opera, the reader is trusted to infer how the background technology looks and functions, and other than a little typographical play (a side character called Wig&, or word shape depictions of Esper party cross think) and some future colloquialism/slang, there’s nothing too fancy going on. Works very nicely, adds colour and interest to the thrill of the chase and the inexorable drawing towards the point of the title but never distracts from them, and makes the few passages of out and out sci-fi description strike with all the more awe.

ctually though, the real climax is in the penultimate chapter, a terrific sustained sequence of paranoid sci-fi horror as effective as maybe anything Philip K Dick ever conjured up or even a lot of outright horror writers, and the real end, with exposition and resolution and romance, is a little laboured and inconsequential after. It’s one of the only off notes, the others being that, apart from the standard minor grumble of inability to write women as equal humans, there’s a whole business with D’Courtney’s daughter Barbara having her psyche broken down to that of a child’s, which I suppose may have been intended as comic, thought provoking, touching etc., but to me came across more just a bit awkward and creepy. And I would have liked more on how the how of the D’Courtney murder was worked out, as it’s a really neat trick. Still, minor blemishes, minor blemishes. If vintage sci-fi is at all your bag, this is strongly recommended, and even to vintage pulp fans at large.

[ramseycampbell]

That penultimate chapter terrified me as I turned teenage. It may well have been an influence.

[bluetomb]

I suppose it speaks to the fears in our pre-rational perceptions of our environments, although quite possibly Bester just thought it was a striking image. He sure seemed to have a knack for the frightening, I recently read his collection Starburst and was surprised by how many stories put their science fiction to unsettling ends.