Bester is not a subtle writer. This is his first novel and it opens with the main character waking screaming from a nightmare, and then keeps up more or less the same helter-skelter, overdriven pace throughout. Everyone is running around shouting, arguing, fighting, partying. It’s full of what my kids’ primary school teachers used to call ‘doing’ words:

• Reich tore out of Personnel…
• He returned to his own office and paced in a fury…
• With a roar of rage, Reich snatched up a gold paper-weight and hurled it into the crystal screen…
• Reich swore feverishly all the way down from the tower apartment to the cellar garage…
• Reich hurled himself to the ground…

Slam, bam, thank you ma’am. Or, as the characters say, using the latest zippy catchphrase:

‘Pip,’ she said.
‘Pop,’ he said.
‘Bim,’ she said.
‘Bam,’ he said.

24th century telepathy

The Demolished Man is set in the 24th century when telepathy has become common, boring and mundane. Telepaths are called Espers (extra-sensory perception) or, colloquially, ‘peepers’. They have an Esper Guild, which holds exams and enforces rules. There are some 100,000 3rd class Espers in the Esper guild (who can send and receive simple messages, mind to mind), and 10,000 2nd class Espers (who can penetrate some way into a person’s thoughts), and about 1,000 1st class Espers (who can read anything in another person’s mind, drilling right down into their unconscious mind).

Multi-millionaire boss of the multi-planet corporation Monarch Industries, Ben Reich, wakes from a terrifying dream, screaming because he is haunted every night by ‘The Man With No Face’. His  staff analyst, Carson Breen, Esper Medical Doctor 2, therapist, tells him what he already suspects, that this figure is a symbol of his powerful business rival, Craye D’Courtney, owner of the powerful D’Courtney Cartel. In between zipping all over New York (a city of 17.5 million in the 24th century) supervising his multinational corporation, Reich conceives the simple idea of murdering his rival and thus stopping his anxiety dreams, an ambition which becomes burning after D’Courtney rejects merger talks Reich sends him via coded telegram. Right!

He returned to his own office and paced in a fury for five minutes. ‘It’s no use,’ he muttered. ‘I know I’ll have to kill him. He won’t accept merger. Why should he? He’s licked me and he knows it. I’ll have to kill him and I’ll need help. Peeper help.’

Murder is unknown

Peeper help, yes, because it turns out that nobody has committed a murder for generations.

This is the basic idea of the plot: in a world of powerful telepaths, murder – in fact most forms of crime – are impossible, because Espers or peepers will read a criminal’s plans beforehand, and can certainly be hired to track down the guilty afterwards.

So the initial interest of the book, such as it is, is How do you commit a murder in a world where minds can be read? In fact, the answer turns out to be, pretty easily. Reich pays a young woman working in the equivalent of Tin Pan Alley, Duffy Wyg&, to sing him a song so horribly catchy that all he has to do is think it and it completely blocks his thinking from all peepers. Then he blackmails a former peeper who helped him once before and got thrown out of the Espers Guild for his pains, Jerry Church, and who now runs a pawn shop, to sell him an antique, rather odd-sounding ‘knife-gun’.(Not many of them about in the peaceful future.)

Lastly, Reich pays a high-powered Esper, Gus Tate, to establish that D’Courtney is visiting Terra from his base on Mars (humans appear to have colonised Mars and Venus, Reich has a digital clock showing the time on earth, Mars and Venus – later there are quick jaunts to the moons of Jupiter and a vast pleasurecentre which has been built in space). So Reich ascertains that D’Courtney is staying at the house of notorious socialite Madame Maria Beaumont – nicknamed the Gilt Corpse and recipient of vast amounts of plastic surgery which she likes to show off by dressing in the fashionable half-naked style of the times.

The murder

So Reich makes his plans. He sends Madame Maria a copy of an old book of party games which includes the instructions for Sardines (one person hides, everyone else looks for them, as they find them the seekers join the hider, until only one seekers is left; they’re the loser). She is enchanted and, once her party is underway, from a raised platform tells the semi-naked fashionable guests they’re going to play it. The lights go off and – this being a titillating, pulpy novel – most of the guests proceed to take off the remainder of their clothes amid squeals and giggles.

These are exactly the conditions Reich had intended, ideal for making his way through the darkness to the secret upper-floor room where his Esper, Tate, has ascertained that D’Courtney is hiding.

Reich has come armed with stun capsules, to be precise:

They were cubes of copper, half the size of fulminating caps, but twice as deadly. When they were broken open, they erupted a dazzling blue flare that ionized the Rhodopsin—the visual purple in the retina of the eye—blinding the victim and abolishing his perception of time and space.

He throws these into the ante-room to paralyse the two guards, then pushes into the main room to encounter D’Courtney who turns out to be a frail old man who can barely stand and barely talk. He is, apparently, struggling to make peace with bullish Reich and agree and reconcile, when the door bursts open and D’Courtney’s half-dressed blonde daughter, Barbara, comes racing in begging Reich not to hurt her father.

Too late. Reich grabs the fragile old man, grabs his head, forces the pistol into his mouth and shoots him through the mouth and bottom of the brain. Corpse falls to floor. Daughter runs out screaming. Reich turns, tries to follow her through the pitch-dark mansion, gets caught back up in the game, the hostess announces he is the loser since he’s the only one not in her secret hiding place, party lights come back on as guests exit the hiding place and refill the main room where she’s making a jokey speech to Reich when everyone notices blood dripping onto his clothes through the ceiling above. Hostess screams. Someone calls the cops.

Lincoln Powell, the Prefect of the Police Psychotic Division

Apparently, a police procedural is:

a subgenre of procedural drama and detective fiction that emphasizes the investigative procedure of a police officer or department as the protagonist(s), as contrasted with other genres that focus on either a private detective, amateur investigator or characters who are the targets of investigations.

So The Demolished Man is a police procedural insofar as, from this point onwards (about page 80 to the end of the 250-page Gollancz edition), the interest is in whether Reich will be caught.

But it also belongs to the genre of the inverted detective story:

a murder mystery fiction in which the commission of the crime is shown or described at the beginning, usually including the identity of the perpetrator and the story then describes the detective’s attempt to solve the mystery.

It becomes even more so once snazzy Lincoln Powell, the Prefect of the Police Psychotic Division and himself a powerful 1st class Esper, turns up on the scene, pushing his way through the bustling uniformed cops and the forensics boys, as we have seen the handsome lead detective do in thousands of TV cop series and thriller movies, in order to schmooze the bosomy socialite hostess and her guests.

Powell is clever, he is dangerous, and within a few pages he catches Reich out in his account of events (by this time everyone knows D’Courtney has been murdered since half the party went upstairs to see the body, and the hostess has also told them D’Courtney’s daughter was with him but has now disappeared) but Reich lets slip that he knows she (the daughter) was half-dressed – giving away the fact that he was there.

And, although Reich has called to his side a powerful Esper lawyer, Jo ¼maine, Powell still slips into his mind for a moment when it isn’t filled with the inane pop jingle mentioned earlier, and confirms to his own satisfaction that Reich did it.

So by page 100 we know who committed the murder – Reich – and we know that the lead detective on the case knows it, too.

So, in fictional terms, the interest ought to become the cat-and-mouse process of the detective trying to prove it and the culprit trying to prevent him.

Except that this isn’t really a very serious book. I’ve just read several science fiction masterpieces which take the idea of telepathy extremely seriously, powerfully conveying the shock and disorientation and fear that would be caused if someone else really could penetrate your thoughts, and speak to you inside your head – namely Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and, in a rather different mode, The Fifth Head of Cerberus.

By comparison, The Demolished Man is about as serious as an episode of Starsky and Hutch with spaceships. It comes as no surprise to flick through his Wikipedia article and learn that Bester wrote extensively during his career for popular TV shows such as Nick Carter, The Shadow, Charlie Chan, The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe and The CBS Radio Mystery Theater.

‘Are you rocketing?’ he said hoarsely. ‘Do you think I’ll fall into that orbit?’

Telepathy

No, having destroyed any suspense by telling us who did it, and that the investigating detective knows whodunnit, the interest switches to admiring how many variations Bester can wring out of their cat-and-mouse confrontations, how many wacky, 24th century scenes he can cook up.

First and foremost there is the recurring trope of telepathy, where there’s lots of fun to be had from Bester fleshing out the idea of a Guild of Espers, with all its procedures and politics and rivalries – its selection procedures and what he tells us, straight-faced, is its ‘Esper Pledge’.

I will look upon him who shall have taught me this Art as one of my parents. I will share my substance with him, and I will supply his necessities if he be in need. I will regard his offspring even as my own brethren and I will teach them this Art by precept, by lecture, and by every mode of teaching; and I will teach this Art to all others. The regimen I adopt shall be for the benefit of mankind according to my ability and judgment, and not for hurt or wrong. I will give no deadly thought to any, though it be asked of me. Whatsoever mind I enter, there will I go for the benefit of man, refraining from all wrong-doing and corruption. Whatsoever thoughts I see or hear in the mind of man which ought not to be made known, I will keep silence thereon, counting such things to be as sacred secrets.

In the middle of the book, Powell finds the runaway daughter, Barbara, brings her safely to his house where he gets an assistant, Mary Noyes to look after her. Barbara is in such a state of catatonic shock – Powell finds her mind to be a raging chaos – that they embark on a newly discovered technique (‘the Déjà Èprouvé Series for catatonia’) of regressing Barbara to childhood and getting her to relive her mental development – the idea being to regrow her mind in an environment where her father is already dead, so Powell can access her adult mind.

But along the way he has to peer deep, deep into her primitive child-mind and these scenes – the sensations and feelings of telepathy – are described for pages with a kind of vivid, technocratic exuberance, with the technicolour blaze of the kinds of American TV sci fi shows I loved when I was a boy – Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants, Star Trek. It sounds like this:

Here were the somatic messages that fed the cauldron; cell reactions by the incredible billion, organic cries, the muted drone of muscle tone, sensory sub-currents, blood-flow, the wavering superheterodyne of blood pH… all whirling and churning in the balancing pattern that formed the girl’s psyche. The never-ending make and-break of synapses contributed a crackling hail of complex rhythms. Packed in the changing interstices were broken images, half-symbols, partial references… Theionized nuclei of thought.

Similarly, a number of parties are described or encounters and conversations between peepers, in which the exchanges are written in quickfire italics or – a Bester trademark, this – clever and stylised typography, the words of different telepaths set in different positions around the page, for example creating rows and columns which the reader has to navigate, typographically conveying the sense of complex telepathic interactions.

In its shiny, snappy, techno diction and Pop Art layout, this is all a million miles away from the subtlety and Eastern-inspired insights of Ursula Le Guin’s descriptions of telepathy.

Narrative energy

But above all the book’s fundamental quality is the relentless speed, its zingy, fast-paced narrative and its bubblegum, wow-words style.

• They all shot to their feet and shouted “No! No! No!”
• He horded the terrified squad toward the door, pushed them out, slammed the door and locked it.
• Reich wrapped the book, addressed it to Graham, the appraiser, and dropped it into the airslot. It went off with a puff and a bang.

As, indeed, does the whole book.

Colourful incidents

The book is packed with quickfire, colourful incident. Set in New York (admittedly in the 24th century and after some kind of war wrecked parts of the city in the late twentieth) many of the settings (casino, nightclub, pawn shop) and many of the outlandish names (Keno Quizzard, Choka Frood) reminded me of Damon Runyon, but above all the snappy dialogue, and smart-alec  attitude of all concerned.

‘I’ve got no time for a two-bit hater with coffin-queer friends.’

Everyone’s a wiseguy.

‘You took out our tail, Duffy. Congratulations.”
Ah-ha! Hassop is your pet horse. A childhood accident robbed him of a horse’s crowning glory. You substituted an artificial one which—
‘Clever-up, Duffy. That isn’t going to travel far.’
‘Then, boy-wonder, will you ream your tubes?’

This is a snappy exchange between Powell and a sassy young woman he thinks is working for Reich about a guy named Hassop who Powell set to tail her. I like the phrase ‘clever-up’ which numerous characters use to each other, obviously Bester’s 24th century version of ‘wise up’. I’ve no idea what ‘will you ream your tubes?’ means.

Rough and Smooth Anyway, Powell tells his team they’re going to Rough-and-Smooth Reich, with a whole set of plain clothes detectives and snoops following him in plain sight, so that when he evades them he lets his guard down and is accessible to the much subtler undercover cops.

The Monarch Jumper Doesn’t really work out as Reich zips around the city taking care of all the loose ends which might tie him to the crime, and all the time coming up with hare-brained schemes for finding the girl, the key witness. He persuades one of his advertising executives that they need a pretty girl to be the face of ‘the Monarch Jumper’ (apparently a kind of rocketship), and sketches Barbara’s face and tells him to scour the city for her. He offers a fortune to set up sanctuaries for the city’s homeless, and then pays for a man at the door of every shelter, with a sketch of Barbara and a hefty bonus if they spot her.

The Rainbow House of Chooka Frood None of this works till an underworld contact of Reich’s, Keno Quizzard, tracks the girl down to the bizarre entertainment venue at 99 Bastion West, hosted by Chooka Frood (in that crazy twentieth century war a bomb blew up a ceramics factory and created a mad multi-coloured swirl of melting glaze which poured down into the cellar and solidified, hence The Rainbow House of Chooka Frood). Upstairs there’s a ‘frab’ joint, whatever that is.

The Neuron Scrambler Anyway, from different directions, Powell and Reich both arrive there at the same time, Powell getting into the actual room where the blind, sluglike Quizzard is pawing and fondling the catatonic Barbara. Powell paralyses Quizzard and seizes the girl. Reich was slower, having to threaten sleazy Chooka with a ‘neuron scrambler’ in order to get her to reveal the girl’s location, and watches through the transparent floor from the from above, holding the scrambler on both of them.

(A neuron scrambler has three settings or notches: Notch 1. charges the central nervous system with a low induction current. Notch 2. Break-bone ague, brute groans of a tortured animal. Notch 3. Death.)

For a moment he has it in his power to stun Powell and grab the girl but he doesn’t, he himself doesn’t know why. Deep down he’s a decent sort, maybe. Or there is a bond between him and the cop, they’re the same type, clever, charismatic, it’s an accident they’ve ended up on opposing sides.

The harmonic gun There are many many other colourful episodes. Powell drops into Jerry Church’s pawnshop, having invited Reich’s tame peeper Gus Tate to meet him there and is in the middle of carrying out a subtle psychological con on Church when… someone attacks the joint with a ‘harmonic gun’ which sends fatal ripples up through the floor. Powell leaps for the chandelier, along with Church, but can’t prevent Tate falling to the floor where he is instantly vibrated into a bloody raw mess.

In another episode Powell gets the laboratory at the Espers Guild to put on a show for the old and vain Dr Wilson Jordan who, Powell has established, helped Reich with the crime. By pandering to his vanity one of the teams in the lab gets him to own up to inventing the anti-rhodopsin drops which stunned D’Courtney’s guards.

It is extremely intricate and fast-paced and wonderfully silly.

[Choka] shot up from the desk and screamed: ‘Magda!’ Reich caught her by the arm and hurled her across the office. She side-swiped the couch and fell across it. The red-eyed bodyguard came running into the office. Reich was ready for her. He clubbed her across the back of the neck, and as she fell forward, he ground his heel into her back and slammed her flat on the floor.

Spaceland In another abrupt change of scene, Powell and his sidekick Jackson Beck (Esper class 2) get wind that Reich has jetted to Spaceland, the enormous adapted asteroid in space where entrepreneurs have set up concatenations of luxury hotels.

Even more colourful, they learn that his ship crash-landed or was involved in a collision with an asteroid or space junk, but that Reich was injured and one of the passengers killed. When they catch up, Powell and team realise the dead man was Quizzard, the crash was faked, and Reich is leaving a trail of the corpses of his collaborators behind him.

The Reservation But the plot keeps racing on to ever-more colourful scenarios, and now Powell learns Reich has gone into ‘the Reservation’, an off-world recreation of the untouched jungle, and has taken with him Hassop, keeper of Reich and Monarch’s secret codes, and the only man who has a record of the coded exchange that took place between Reich and D’Courtney. With typical wild abandon, Powell recruits a whole raft of civilians to go into the Reservation and track the pair, quickly finding them and closing in to discover that Reich has set up an impenetrable security bubble around them, while he whittles a bow and arrow and Hassock builds a fire. Spooked by what he senses of someone closing in, Reich panics and starts firing his arrows at Hassock who runs round and round the perimeter of the security bubble panicking and screaming, until Powell performs the trick of projecting a vast wave of TERROR at the lowest range possible for an Esper and thus stampedes all the elephants, rhinos and other big game for miles who stomp right through Reich’s security bubble and, in the chaos, Powell grabs hold of the terrified Hassop and yanks him to safety.

Old Man Moses

By page 180, the thoroughly exhausted reader watches Powell gather up all the testimony he has accumulated and present it to the District Attorney and, more importantly, to ‘Old Man Mose’, the giga-computer more correctly referred to as the Mosaic Multiplex Prosecution Computer. After some comic stumbles (the programmer makes a mistake and the computer rejects Powell’s entire case) it not only accepts all the evidence, but states he has a 97.0099% probability of a successful prosecution. Powell is just celebrating when the door opens and two technicians rush in with terrible news – they’ve decoded the exchange Reich and D’Courtney had a few days before the murder – and D’Courntey accepted the offer of a merger. He was giving Reich everything the latter could possibly want. At a stroke, the entire motive for the murder disappears!

Mad finale

At which point the novel feels like it goes into overdrive for the final mad fifty pages:

Assassination attempts First of all there are no fewer than three attempts on Reich’s life – bombs going off in his spacerocket back to earth, in his office and in a domestic ‘jumper’ (a kind of rocket taxi).

Reich jumps to the wild conclusion that it is Powell trying to kill him, out of frustration that his legal case has collapsed and so he creates a diversion, threatening Choka Frood into video phoning Powell that she has the knife-gun which killed D’Coutney. Powell is excited at the thought of getting his hand on key evidence, tells Frood not to move and grabs a jet over… while Reich jets to Powell’s home, stuns Mary (the woman who loves Powell and has move into his house to chaperone Barbara D’Courtney) and starts trying to interrogate Barbara, thinking her little-girl-lost behaviour is a wisecracking act… before Powell arrives home, having realised the Frood gun-thing was a distraction. They talk, they fight, Powell deep-peeps Reich and is horrified by what he finds.

To cut a long story short, Powell realises that Reich is D’Courtney’s son. D’Courtney had an affair with Reich’s mother. For the rest of his life he’s felt increasingly guilty at having abandoned him. Now, in the final stages of throat cancer, D’Courtney had agreed to the merger and wanted to meet Reich to explain that he was his son and to be reconciled.

But Reich was so fired up by his own impetuous rage that he a) misread the telegram back agreeing to the merger b) refused to listen as D’Courtney struggled to tell him the truth, at Maria’s mansion.

This explains a lot of the doppelganger imagery which has been floating round in Reich’s mind, but also explains other oddities, like how he couldn’t shoot the neuron scrambler at Barbara and Powell when the latter rescued her from The Rainbow House of Chooka Frood. It was because, at some level, he knew Barbara was his step-sister.

Anyway, this confrontation builds up to the climax of Powell telling Reich that the real person responsible for the assassination attempts on his is not Powell – it is THE MAN WITH NO FACE, at which point Reich screams in mental agony and blunders out of Powell’s house into the streets.

But in fact this isn’t what had shocked Powell because, as he deep-peeped Reich’s mind he saw something far, far worse, he saw that Reich is one of the rare individuals who can change reality; whose paranoia and fear and rage are so intense that they can wrest reality to their fantasies.

The Esper Guild Council So Powell calls an emergency meeting of the Espers Guild’s Council at which he explains that it is necessary to carry out a Mass Cathexis, a rare united action by the top Espers in which they focus all their energy via one individual. Powell presents his case that Reich is a one in a generation individual who has the capacity to shape the world to his own paranoid needs. To be precise, as Powell tells the emergency meeting of the Esper Guild’s Council:

Reich is about to become a Galactic focal point… A crucial link between the positive past and the probable future. He is on the verge of a powerful reorganization at this moment. Time is of the essence. If Reich can readjust and reorient before I can reach him, he will become immune to our reality, invulnerable to our attack, and the deadly enemy of Galactic reason and reality.’

The council reluctantly agrees to carry out the cathexis – reluctantly because the Esper at the centre of it – in this case Powell – has in all previous cases been destroyed.

Powell jets home and packs off the unwilling Mary and Barbara to Kingston mental hospital in upstate New York, getting them out of the way so he can prepare for the final battle.

Powell goes to NYC police HQ Meanwhile we cut to what turns into the weirdest and most intense passage of the novel, a sequence of scenes in which Reich finds himself in different settings as the universe collapses around him. First he wakes in the gutter in the rain in a foetal position, realising he must have blacked out and being helped to his feet by young Galen Chervil, a minor character we met earlier. Chervil helps him stagger along to police headquarters where Reich demands to see the Chief of Police (who is on his payroll) and learns that the murder case against him has definitely been dropped. He runs out of police headquarters roaring with triumph but then sees, walking across the busy New York street towards him, The Man With No Face!

In Duffy Wyg&’s bed When he comes round he is in the pretty pink bedroom of the songwriter Duffy Wyg& who has always fancied him. They josh and banter in a wisecracking 1950s style, but when Reich sticks his head out the bedroom window he notices something terrible – there are no stars in the sky. Worse, when he quizzes Wyg& about it – she has never heard of stars, doesn’t know what stars are, thinks he’s mad. Terrified, Reich dresses, rushes out into the street and catches a jumper to the city observatory where the man at the telescope tells him there are no stars, there have newver been stars… turns round and is revealed to be… The Man With No Face!

At Monarch HQ Running out the observatory screaming, Reich tells the jumper pilot (basically a rocket taxi) to take him to Monarch HQ, where he calls senior managers to his office to announce the merger with D’Courtney and that he will soon be ruling over Mars and Venus and all the satellites. They look at him blankly. They’ve never heard of Mars and Venus. Reich has a fit mad and ransacks through the office files to get confirmatory documents but there are none – there is no record of a Venus or Mars or indeed of the entire solar system. It doesn’t exist. It has never existed.

Reich’s people call Monarch security – the boss has obviously gone mad, but Reich dodges them and makes it out into the streets of the hectic city to discover that…

There is no sun. There has never been a sun. The world has always been illuminated by streetlights. Reich shouts about it at passersby who look at him as at any maniac. He goes to a public information booth and quizzes the central computer, which says… there has never been a sun. Overhead is black black black.

At each of these junctures he has suddenly come face to face with… The Man With No Face… And now there is no New York, there is just a waste land in darkness stretching off in every direction and the voice, the voice loud and commanding saying There is nothing, There is nowhere, the voice of the Man With No Face.

An hysterical style for a tale of hysteria

This is all very effective. Because the entire novel has been written at such a hectic pace, the reader has become used to being rushed and buffeted into new scenes and revelations, and this final sequence feels like a natural climax to Reich’s hysteria.

It is thrilling to read about the slow demolition of the universe and I assumed that it really reflected reality, that Reich really was remodelling the universe to reflect his own terrors, as in a Philip K. Dick novel or in Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven where individual’s minds can change the world… although I was a little puzzled that there was no sign of Powell and the big Mass Cathexis we had been promised…

But then, a new chapter starts and all is made clear. The universe and the world haven’t ended at all. What we had read so vividly described in the previous chapter was the Mass Cathexis. It was the power of all the Espers in the Guild channeling their energy through Powell who projected it into Reich’s mind, and made all his worst fears come true in his mind. Eventually there is nothing but darkness and The Man With No Face in Reich’s mind only because he has gone mad. And been shut down. Neutralised.

Kingston Hospital The scene cuts to Kingston hospital in the sunshine where happy patients are doing outdoors exercises as Powell’s rocket descends.

1. He survived. He was not consumed in the Mass Cathexis.
2. Reich was contained. His destructive energies were broken. Now he is a mad patient at the hospital.
3. Powell has come to declare his love for the beautiful blonde Barbara D’Courtney, bringing with him a box of luxury treats.

The sun is shining, the world is saved, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. They walk into the sunset…

Oh, there’s a slight interruption when Reich gets free and jumps from a balcony into the garden setting patients screaming. Powell puts Barbara protectively behind him and walks over to confront Reich. The latter is half-way through his treatment, the psychological ‘demolition’ which gives the book its title. What does that entail? I’m glad you asked:

When a man is demolished at Kingston Hospital, his entire psyche is destroyed. The series of osmotic injections begins with the topmost strata of cortical synapses and slowly works down, switching off every circuit, extinguishing every memory, destroying every particle of the pattern that has been built up since birth. And as the pattern is erased, each particle discharges its portion of energy, turning the entire body into a shuddering maelstrom of dissociation. But this is not the pain; this is not the dread of Demolition. The horror lies in the fact that the consciousness is never lost; that as the psyche is wiped out, the mind is aware of its slow, backward death until at last it too disappears and awaits the rebirth. The mind bids an eternity of farewells; it mourns at an endless funeral. And in those blinking, twitching eyes of Ben Reich, Powell saw the awareness… the pain… the tragic despair.

Reich is not going to be executed. That’s the kind of barbaric punishment they meted out back in the twentieth century ha ha. He is going to be stripped down and remade, preserving his manic energy and character, refocusing it on socially useful ends.

Powell looks into the eyes of the slobbering half-man in front of him, and gently offers him the goodies he had brought Barbara. His attendants arrive and take Reich away. Powell returns to the pretty blonde who is his reward for being such a hero. All’s right with the world.

Thoughts

It has been a rollicking read. My guess would be that most initial readers were blown away by the thoroughness of Bester’s ideas and conceits – namely his working out of all aspects of the his very practical conception of telepathy – the Guild, the pledge, the comic conversations telepaths have at parties and so on – along with the powerful (for 1953) Freudian themes of oedipal murder, frustrated incest, and so on – not to mention the intense final scenes where Reich goes mad and experiences a collapsing universe – and all this stuff is tremendously compelling, albeit in a dated, bubblegum, 1950s sort of way.

But reading it 60 years later, what is clear to me is that the real secret of The Demolished Man is its extraordinary verbal energy and phenomenal narrative pace. It is a rollercoaster of a read which it is impossible to put down or pause. As so often, I believe the real secret of a bestseller or legendary book, is in the quality of its writing. Reich may be going out of his mind but Good God, the energy of the man, and the energy the writing conveys right into the reader’s head.

• He carried her to the window, tore away the drapes and kicked open the sashes…
• He shoved her away, turned and ran to the bathroom…
• He flung out of the apartment and rushed down to the street…
• Reich cried out. He turned and ran. He flew out of the door, down the steps and across the lawn to the waiting cab…
• He darted to the desk and yanked out drawers. There was a stunning explosion…
• He ran out of his office and burst into the file vaults. He tore out rack after rack; scattering papers, clusters of piezo crystals, ancient wire recordings, microfilm, molecular transcripts…
• Reich howled. He leaped to his feet, knocking the desk chair backward. He picked it up and smashed it down on that frightful image…
• He spun around twice, heart pounding, skull pounding, located the door and ran out…
• He ran blindly onto the skyway, shied feebly from an oncoming car, and was struck down into enveloping darkness

Of course the themes are important and the plot is gripping, but it’s this bombardment of hyperactivity, it’s all the running and smashing and kicking and yanking and exploding and screaming which really characterises the visceral experience of reading this breathless text.

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Related links

• The Demolished Man online

Other science fiction reviews

Late Victorian
1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1900s
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1910s
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1920s
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover…

1930s
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the most sweeping vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars

1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950s
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence, powered by ‘spindizzy’ technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them until one fireman, Guy Montag, rebels
1953 The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester – a breathless novel set in a 24th century New York populated by telepaths and describing the mental collapse of corporate mogul Ben Reich who starts by murdering his rival Craye D’Courtney and becomes progressively more psychotic as he is pursued by telepathic detective, Lincoln Powell
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fast-paced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard-man, Gulliver Foyle, is looking for revenge
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding novel of Blish’s ‘Okie’ tetralogy in which mayor of New York John Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe

1960s
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space-travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – Le Guin’s first novel, a ‘planetary romance’ or ‘science fantasy’ set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer and ‘starlord’ Gaverel Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who destroyed his spaceship and killed his colleagues, aided by sword-wielding Lord Mogien and a telepathic Fian
1966 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin – both the ‘farborn’ colonists of planet Werel, and the surrounding tribespeople, the Tevarans, must unite to fight off the marauding Gaal who are migrating south as the planet enters its deep long winter – not a good moment for the farborn leader, Jakob Agat Alterra, to fall in love with Rolery, the beautiful, golden-eyed daughter of the Tevaran chief
1967 City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin – an unnamed humanoid with yellow cat’s eyes stumbles out of the great Eastern Forest which covers America thousands of years in the future when the human race has been reduced to a pitiful handful of suspicious rednecks or savages living in remote settlements. He is discovered and nursed back to health by a relatively benign commune but then decides he must make his way West in an epic trek across the continent to the fabled city of Es Toch where he will discover his true identity and mankind’s true history
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped ‘andys’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – is sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the focus of the book is a mind-expanding exploration of the hermaphroditism of Gethen’s inhabitants, as Genly is forced to undertake a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced native lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love

1970s
1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines – and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling forwards through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe – one of the most thrilling sci-fi books I’ve ever read
1971 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin – thirty years in the future (in 2002) America is an overpopulated environmental catastrophe zone where meek and unassuming George Orr discovers that is dreams can alter reality, changing history at will. He comes under the control of visionary neuro-scientist, Dr Haber, who sets about using George’s powers to alter the world for the better with unanticipated and disastrous consequences
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
1972 The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin – novella set on the planet Athshe describing its brutal colonisation by exploitative Terrans (who call it ‘New Tahiti’) and the resistance of the metre-tall, furry, native population of Athsheans, with their culture of dreamtime and singing
1972 The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe – a mind-boggling trio of novellas set on a pair of planets 20 light years away, the stories revolve around the puzzle of whether the supposedly human colonists are, in fact, the descendants of the planets’ shapeshifting aboriginal inhabitants who murdered the first earth colonists and took their places so effectively that they have forgotten the fact and think themselves genuinely human
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it in one of the most haunting and evocative novels of this type ever written
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the barren, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything

1980s
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the ‘Golden Era’ of the genre, basically the 1950s
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – Gibson’s stunning debut novel which establishes the ‘Sprawl’ universe, in which burnt-out cyberspace cowboy, Case, is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool, at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the ‘Sprawl trilogy’
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall, who they plan to kidnap but is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero; while the daughter of a Japanese gangster who’s sent her to London for safekeeping is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer

1990s
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative version of history, Charles Babbage’s early computer, instead of being left as a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population suppressed