Bester's Demolished Man: Panguitch reads a police procedural.
Written: Nov 12 '08
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Bester is the wellspring (gutter?) from which cyberpunk sprang.
Cons: I don't much like cyberpunk.
The Bottom Line: Shouldn't sleuthing be easier when you can read the killer's mind?
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| panguitch's Full Review: Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man Books |
The Preamble
Broad reading habits are essential for a well-rounded mind. The mark of an inquisitive intelligence is its willingness to cross new thresholds and experience new perspectives. Recognizing this I try to be eclectic when I peruse the library shelves. I've enjoyed mysteries, comedies, thrillers, war novels, even romance. Happily, I've been able to do all this without leaving the science fiction genre.
Science fiction is an amorphous, promiscuous amoeba, happy to phagocytose (engulf) elements of any other genre. Besides fantasy, the form science fiction mashes-up with most often is the detective novel. Both thrived in the pulp era, with authors like Isaac Asimov crossing freely between them. Current authors, from David Brin to Lois McMaster Bujold, have written science fiction mysteries, and the SF magazines consistently publish stories in this subgenre.
Like Asimov, Alfred Bester is another Golden Age writer who crossed genre borders, and The Demolished Man (1953), which won the first Hugo Award, is best described as a police procedural in a science fiction context.
The Story
No murder has been committed in decades. The Espers would see the intention in a person's thoughts before that person had a chance to act on it. But if anyone can get away with murder, it's Ben Reich, ruler of the transplanetary corporation Monarch Enterprises. With Monarch's wealth and power behind him he has the means. And because Monarch is failing in its struggle against Craye D'Courtney's cartel, he has the motive.
His extravagant plot involves recruiting a high-level Esper to mask his thoughts and, for backup, a successful jingle writer to give him an obscuring earworm. A parlor game at a decadent society soiree puts him alone with his victim, where he uses an old technology in a new way to kill D'Courtney without leaving many clues for Lincoln Powell, police investigator and first-rate Esper, to work with.
What Reich's plans don't include is Barbara D'Courtney, his victim's beautiful daughter, who witnesses the crime and flees in terror. Now Reich's perfect murder becomes a breakneck chase to find her before Powell does.
Crime and Punishment, circa 2301 A.D.
The Demolished Man follows in the path of police procedurals where both the reader and detective know the killer's identity from the start. The difficulty lies in proving it, and with the defenses Reich has assembled Powell has to do this the old-fashioned way, by proving opportunity, method, and motive.
But as with Poe's Auguste Dupin and Dostoevsky's Porfirii Petrovich, Powell's investigations are interesting because of the psychological tension between the detective and the villain. Also in common with Crime and Punishment, Bester makes the villain his protagonist, and Reich's passions and doubts drive the novel, with his desperation mounting as Powell applies pressure.
Unlike Dostoevsky, Bester's protagonist eventually takes a backseat to the detective, a more sympathetic character whose perspective increasingly dominates the narrative. Powell and Reich are excellent foils, each colored with light and dark shades, but the reader becomes far more invested in Powell.
Paranormal Proto-Cyberpunk
Bester creates a seething milieu of corporate dominance and gross disparity between the ruling class and a gritty, monstrous underworld. He swings from posh mansions and tyrannical office complexes to shanty towns peopled by freaks, punks and blind albino mobsters. A supremely powerful, utterly immoral man like Reich blasts his way through all these layers in pursuit of his objectives. Powell pursues him, a master Esper in a world where psychics serve a Jedi knight-like function but feel more like the jacked-in hackers of cyberpunk.
In addition to foreshadowing the pacing and visuals of cyberpunk, Bester's stylistic experiments include a street jargon and typographic rebuses representing the mind games Espers play with each other. While most of his women are vulnerable, pulpy things, some portend cyberpunk's bizarre and hyper-cool females.
The proto-cyberpunk trappings make The Demolished Man feel very modern, even as its fascination with parapsychology bears the stamp of the mid-twentieth century. Beneath the fantastical Esper elements, however, lies a serious exploration of Reich's and Powell's psychologies, a consideration of the conflict between society's constraints and moral frameworks and those individuals who are, for good and ill, exceptional. But where Dostoevsky carries this conundrum through an elevated and elevating examination, Bester gives it a more sensational treatment, one with literary value but entirely at home in the pulp milieu.
It's a swirl of paradoxes, like its two main characters, and like the science fiction genre itself.
- Panguitch
Recommended:
Yes
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