In 1953 Alfred Bester won the first Hugo award for his novel, The Demolished Man. It’s easy to see why. This is a fast-paced story in an interesting world, written in tight prose and delivering a haunting climax. The Demolished Man is partly a police procedural but also a crime procedural, much like the story structure of the Columbo TV series. We watch a brilliant and powerful man carefully plot and execute his crime and then follow the equally brilliant detective, Lincoln Powell, as he goes after the concrete evidence he needs to prove what his instinct is telling him about the killer. I do have deep reservations that I’ll go into below, but the story propels the reader through one interesting turn after another.
The mystery takes place in the world of the early 24th century in a city of tall buildings linked by skyways with automated cars that speed the wealthy and their minions from place to place. There are flying jumpers everywhere for longer trips and rockets available on frequent schedules to shoot people all over the solar system. Since knowledge of the planets and moons was so limited at that time, there are thriving settlements on Venus and Callisto and other uninhabitable places. This is also a period of a corps of people with great psychic powers, called Espers, with ethics prescribed and enforced by their own guild. (Remember the psychic police of Babylon 5 and their leader named Alfred Bester?). There hasn’t been a successful murder in decades because Espers can always read the minds of killers and bring them to justice.
There is also a surprisingly clunky wall-sized computer the prosecutors rely on to sift evidence and determine whether a case is ready for trial. I say surprising because it resembles more an early 1950s model than anything one might expect after three and a half centuries of computer development. There is also a lot of terrible Freudian psychology right out of the era the story was written, and the treatment of women characters is in a class by itself. But while the negatives stand out in 2025, they didn’t diminish the enthusiasm greeting this novel for many decades. It still makes the top tier of science fiction novels.
The Demolished Man begins in the nightmares of one of the world’s super-rich men, Ben Reich, who keeps seeing a horrifying Man Without a Face in these dreams. He believes that this nightmare figure is his greatest rival, Craye D’Courtney, an elderly man who runs his own massive cartel. Reich convinces himself that D’Courtney is out to crush him but gives him one last chance by proposing a merger. To do this, he uses a code apparently restricted to the super-rich, but when he gets the answer he misinterprets it as a refusal. Then he sets about plotting a murder, and devises a plan to defeat the power of the Espers and the most powerful mind-reader of all, Lincoln Powell.
Reich gets a songwriter to prepare a meaningless jingle that he can focus on to block out the “peepers.” Then he assembles the tools he needs, including a corruptible Esper psychologist, so that he can determine exactly where D’Courtney will be, how to overcome his bodyguards, how to kill him with an unconventional weapon and how to account for his presence at a gala party where the whole crime will unfold. We see the event take place, but at the last minute the beautiful and scantily clad 25 year-old daughter, Barbara D’Courtney, bursts into the room, grabs the weapon from Reich as she screams at sight of her dead father and then disappears – completely. In the ensuing investigation by Lincoln Powell, Reich raises the prefect’s suspicions but seems to have an alibi.
Then it’s up to Powell to find the irrefutable proof that will convict Reich. The story follows his investigation through a series of fast-paced action scenes as the prefect gathers one element of proof after another. Yet when he presents all the evidence to the computer, it coughs and sputters a bit then delivers its verdict that all elements needed for conviction have not been proved. Nevertheless, Reich is on the run, destroying evidence and killing accomplices along the way, and Powell is after him. When he finally gets the evidence he needs but still hasn’t captured Reich, he asks his fellow Espers to do something extraordinary – to channel simultaneously their powers through him as Powell focuses on Reich. The result is a terrifying living nightmare for Reich that is even worse than the demolition punishment the killer undergoes once he is caught. If that were the whole story, this would be a masterpiece for the ages. But there is the Freudian psychology, and there are the women.
Some of the women in this story have talent and agency, but the major characters are rendered in stereotypical terms. And sometimes just weirdly. First is Powell’s faithful helper, Mary Noyes, herself an Esper, though at a lower grade than Powell, and obviously in love with the man, that is, she’s the faithful and self-effacing helper of the great hero. The way she is introduced, though, is bizarre. She’s described as short, dark and swarthy on the outside, but “tall and swaying in thought,” “frost white in pattern,” and almost “a nun in white.” The mind, we’re told, is the reality, and you are what you think. So, dark on the outside but white on the inside, and that’s what counts? What?
Mary is frustrated that he does not return her feeling, though he says he loves her. And his use of words to say this brings out an interesting idea about communicating feelings. Among Espers, speaking out loud is a mistrusted way to talk to one’s peers. It is only by thinking something and allowing other Espers to read your mind, without blocking, that true intent can be discerned. So when Powell merely says to Mary that he loves her, she bitterly reflects that he uses the words but never expresses the feeling in his mind, confirming that he will never marry her. Nonetheless, she stays loyal to him, keeping the depth of her love to herself. And that brings up a weird thing about Bester’s idea of feminine love for men. The way Mary thinks of Powell is that he is the image of her father, as if that is the key thing about her feelings. This gets weirder with the other major female character, Barbara D’Courtney.
As the sole witness to her father’s murder, Barbara is crucial for both Powell and Reich. Powell needs to get her testimony against the killer and Reich wants to silence her. The prefect manages to get the woman away from Reich before he can shoot her, but everything she has been through has thrown her into a state of wordless catatonia. Powell takes her to a non-Esper psychiatrist who explains that she will only come out of her trauma-induced state by reliving every phase of her life from infancy onward, a process, he says, that takes about three weeks. We’re not told how this psychic regression takes place, but it does, and Barbara lives under the care of Mary Noyes and Powell during her time of “growing up” all over again. We see Barbara in a few grotesque scenes where she is a baby-talking infant, right through a stage of a coy teen-ager, while her obsession with her new Dad, Powell, is deepening all the time. Powell dives into her id, which Bester describes as a roiling world of drives toward sex and death, where he encounters a Janus-faced figure, with Powell’s face on the back of real father D’Courtney’s head. And since Barbara is clearly focused on her new father figure that means she must be in love with him, according to Bester’s logic.
That’s all pretty dreadful, but in spite of these weird ideas about women, the rest of the book is a good thriller. The combination of genuinely exciting story with terrible psychology reminds me of Hitchcock’s film Psycho. I saw this film when it first came out (yes, I’m 150 years old) and when the audience (this was in one of those great old movie palaces) saw the climactic scene, which was unique at that time, everyone screamed. I mean full-throated screaming. There was nothing but noise and gradually diminishing exclamations and sighs of relief that made it blessedly impossible to hear the psychological explanation scene that followed. People had quieted down enough to pay attention again just in time to see that evil little smile on Norman Bates’ face as the film came to an end. That’s something like the effect of the powerful climactic scene in The Demolished Man, but unfortunately the ensuing psychological explanations and wrapping up of the “love” interest were all too audible in my brain. If you can skim through the bizarre parts about women and the id, you’re left with a great story, worth all the praise it has received. If you can’t, well, just leave this one on the TBR.
Leave a Reply