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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good science fiction, not great science fiction., 12 Dec 1997
By A Customer
I welcomed the re-issue of this book as it gave me a chance to read what has been touted as one of the truly great works of science fiction. With these expectations, I could only be let down. It has a complex plot (although it seems simple enough at first), and some of the surprises are truly masterful. I particularly liked the description of demolition. The best part of the novel is a long, psychic vs. normal police investigation where Bester has two characters handicapped by aspects of their society place a wonderfully written chess game where the final stake is the oft-mentioned demolition. But, overall the book has some failings.
A lack of character
The characters of the book are too simple and too Freudian. Lincoln Powell is by far the most interesting, but the alter ego that Bester sets up for Powell never really reaches the climax that it deserves. Ben Reich starts off as your simple, marxist caricature of a rich man, and really has little room to grow, either into an interesting character or a truly hateable antagonist.
Sometimes science gets in the way of science fiction ...
and this is a classic case. It is hard to read this book because the science is so dated. It is a hardcore Freudian read, and the characters are strictly governed by Id, Ego, Superego, and refer to these as truths. Although Freud is very influential in the way we think about thinking, Bester uses ideas about disorders that were fresh at the time, but have not aged well and have become dated.
Buy the book
Go ahead and buy The Demolished Man. It truly is an influential book. Gibson echoes many of the themes and characters, and the television show, Babylon 5 has a whole organization structured around its Espers Guild. Read it for what it is, a truly influential work of science fiction from sci-fi's early days. Do not look for it to speak too much for today's society, and don't look for it to keep to the standards of current masters such as Clarke, Gibson, and Robinson (Its lack of characterization makes it even have trouble standing up to past masters like Heinlein). It is good, enjoyable, fast paced science fiction. It doesn't, though, leave the reader with either the social questions or the post-technological awe of great science fiction.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Demolished Man and The Stars, My Destination = Buy, 13 Jan 2006
It’s genuinely hard to believe that this book was written in 1951 because it reads like a cyberpunk novel written yesterday. It’s breathtakingly fast yet still manages to flesh out two of the most interesting characters in SF.The Demolished Man builds a world of hugely powerful corporations and guilds where murder has been eliminated through the use of telepaths called ‘espers’. The story revolves around Ben Reich, the head of the vast Monarch business empire. (Incidentally somehow the picture on the front cover of this particular edition just doesn’t particularly remind me of him – too Neanderthal-like; Reich should look much more intelligent). Keen to expand it he decides he must murder his business rival and take his company over. For me, the best novels are ones that supplant a genre onto the background of a typically SF setting and here it is done superbly with a crime/redemption theme. Reich’s opponent is police chief Lincoln Powell – a level one esper, and therefore the most powerful. What follows is an incredibly quick-to-read story that is both fulfilling and really exciting. Rightly, this book appears in many top 10 SF books of all time, often lurking within the top 3. Its influences on other works are quite clear to see in my opinion. Most obvious is the cyberpunkers of the 80’s but the ‘espers’ outlook towards their powers reminds me of Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside in that both books see the telepathy as an inescapable curse as well providing the obvious benefits. (In fact I recommend Dying Inside as well to see what probably most of us would do with such power!) The only problem I can foresee is how to rate this. Does the time it was made in mean that because it was ahead of its time it deserves a higher rating? Also does its reputation and the fact it won awards also artificially inflate the rating? I suspect if you gave this to a SF lover who hasn’t read anything pre-1985 they would still believe this an amazing book – it is simply timeless. Therefore – 9.5/10
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of sci-fi's most acclaimed and influential novels, 21 Aug 2003
The Demolished Man earned Alfred Bester the very first Hugo award for best science fiction novel of the year ever awarded, and the novel's influence on science fiction has been immense over the years. The novel is a wonderfully original, fascinating tale of a future society in which guns and murder are all but forgotten, yet this brave new world's very future comes to hang in the balance as a result of one powerful man's thoughts, dreams, and fears. In the world of 2301 A.D., seventy years have passed since the last murder, and guns are nothing more than forgotten museum pieces. Espers, or peepers, men and women able to read minds when called upon to do so, are able to spot anyone contemplating a violent crime long before that person is able to act. Perhaps only one man would dare to plan a cold-blooded murder and have the guts, influence, wiles, and coercive power to pull it off; such an audacious action can only be achieved with the aid of a first class peeper, and the ethics of each and every peeper is basically unassailable. Ben Reich, head of the Monarch company and one of the most powerful men in the world, is losing his decade-long fight against the firm of Craye D'Courtney, and he eventually determines that he has no choice but to kill his rival. It won't be easy, especially the bypassing of peepers, but he has the will and the means to pull off the impossible. Prefect Lincoln Powell, a first class peeper, is called on to investigate the murder; figuring out who killed D'Courtney is easy, but proving it is something else. Convincing the super-computer at the district attorney's office of an open and shut case requires every single piece of the puzzle being put into place. The bulk of the novel revolves around Reich's machinations and brilliant moves and Powell's equally brilliant countermoves, with the case (and the novel) taking on much deeper implications toward the end as Powell begins to realize that his suspect is not only a dangerous man in the normal sense but is in fact a grave danger to the very universe as it now exists.Perhaps the most interesting aspect of The Demolished Man is Bester's presentation of thought and communication among peepers. Not only does he gives us a sense of the telepathic communication of a group of peepers, he describes it in an incredibly visual way; basically, he paints fascinating word pictures of telepathic thought communication. Bester also uses a good deal of slang and invented concepts in his story, which is just one of the many aspects of the writing that cyberpunk and other avant-garde science fiction writers have been influenced by over the course of recent decades. Lest you fear that Bester's writing is overly theorized and dull, I should point out the fact that the novel is blessed with a good deal of humor, action, insightful emotional complexities, and even a love story of sorts. The ending holds a surprise or two for the reader (although the careful reader will figure out many things along the way), ensuring that the ending is in no way a let-down from the suspenseful and engaging read leading up to it. It is a pity that Alfred Bester did not publish more novels and stories than he did over the course of his distinguished career, but the science fiction legacy he did leave behind will forever be studied, emulated, cherished, and most of all enjoyed by generation after generation of readers.
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