As much as I am a champion of genre related things, there are some problems with these classifications. One of the main problems stems from the stigma those outside of the appeal of genre often thrust upon books associated with a particular genre. That is to say, those who read only “literature” rarely, if ever, travel within the genre-ghettos, even if it means they may miss some truly great and profound works of fiction.
Place a book in the science fiction section of a book store and you automatically dictate the majority of your audience while simultaneously ostracizing a large portion of potential readers. One book that has suffered tremendously from these genre barriers is Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man: an illustrious example of fiction regardless of where one happens to find it shelved.
The Demolished Man easily stands next to, and in some ways far surpasses, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Harlen Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, and Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, as a premier example of mind-altering speculative fiction. As the winner of the first-ever Hugo Award, it is a bona fide classic, and for good reason.
Within the first few pages it is clear that the reader is in the hands of a vastly superior writer, one whose prose ignites the imagination with brevity and concrete language. Bester's prose is like a reduction of the English language, reminiscent of Dahsiell Hammett's and Raymond Chandler's. It resides in the pulp-stylings of the hardboiled detective yarns, and yet it transcends these genre conventions with powerful passages that linger in the reader's mind; passages such as:
Run, or I'll miss the Paris Pneumatique and that exquisite girl with her flower face and figure of passion. There's time if I run. But that isn't the Guard before the gate. Oh Christ! The Man With No Face. Looking. Looming. Silent. Don't scream. Stop screaming...
But I'm not screaming. I'm singing on a stage of sparkling marble while the music soars and the lights burn. But there's no one out there in the amphitheater. A great shadowed pit...empty except for one spectator. Silent. Looming. The Man With No Face.
Prose without plot, however, is akin to literary masturbation, a problem that Bester does not fall victim to. For within Bester's masterful use of language, and physical placement of words upon the page to to create visual allure, lies a story thick with memorable characterizations and a sizzling narrative burgeoning with imagination and contemplation.
The Demolished Man is an elegant detective story mired within the genesis of the cyber-punk milieu. This is science fiction! This is speculative fiction! This is an expertly told tale of a future teeming with paranoia, corruption, and humans with mind-altering abilities.
The Demolished Man tells the story of Ben Reich - a half-saintly, half-demonic corporate man determined to commit murder in a world without violent crime - and of Lincoln Powell, the cop assigned to bring Reich to justice. Because of the rampant ability of extra sensory perception, of Telepaths, pre-meditated crime is a thing of the past, and so, too, are feelings of privacy and personal space.
Written only a few short years before Dick's own excursion into a future of telepath-regulated legislation, The Minority Report, The Demolished Man's narrative is both outlandish and poignant in how it examines today's problems with a futuristic perspective. What is the cost of our personal freedom? How much of our minds and our identities are we willing to give up under the guise of security?
Now, more so than ever, these kinds of questions need to be asked, and that Bester was warning us of these problems, while simultaneously entertaining the hell out of his readers, over fifty years ago is a testament to his tremendous talent.
Accompanying the fantastic narrative is a nearly nonstop barrage of amazing ideas. Real science fiction stories are stories focusing on marvelous ideas, and Bester dishes them out with effortless ferocity. For instance, because there are so many telepaths peeping the peoples' minds, Ben Reich needs a shield to hide his thoughts behind. He decides to visit a superior marketing specialist and he asks her to play for him the most annoying jingle she's ever written. After warning him of the jingle's uncanny ability to get lodged in one's mind, the marketer reluctantly plays it for Reich. The song instantly gets stuck in his head and becomes a shield with which he annoys the telepaths peeping his mind.
Bester then goes on to explore ideas of Freudian psychology, and details a deep peeping session in which a 1st class ESPer comes face-to-face with a psychologically disturbed girl's id. This particular passage is swimming in concrete imagery and profound discovery. It seems as if there are brilliant ideas popping up and erupting forth every few pages, and part of the joy of The Demolished Man is the anticipation of discovering what Bester is going to do next.
If you are already a reader of science fiction, but have not yet read The Demolished Man, be warned, it could forever raise the bar in what you expect out of the genre. If you have avoided science fiction because of some genre-allergy, or, perhaps, you have been waiting for something more literary, The Demolished Man could be the book to win you over.
It is simply a fantastic novel overflowing with elegant prose, novel ideas, concrete characterizations, and an electrifying narrative bursting with creativity. Alfred Bester bridged the gap between the pulp of the nineteen-forties and fifties, and the new wave “jazz movement” of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, but, what's more, he set the standards for what we as admirers of science fiction literature should demand out of our genre fiction.
