The Demolished Man
by Alfred Bester
Summary
In the twenty fourth century murder has effectively ceased, because the Esper Guild supplies telepaths to the police, and a peeper reading intention makes premeditation impossible to hide. There has not been a successful killing in seventy years.
Ben Reich runs Monarch, one of the two great commercial empires, and he is losing to the other one, D'Courtney. He is also being woken every night by a nightmare of a faceless man. He decides to murder Craye D'Courtney, and the first half of the novel is his preparation: he buys a corrupt Esper to shield his thoughts, commissions a jingle so aggressively catchy that running it in his head blanks a telepathic scan, and works out how to get a weapon and a moment alone with him.
He does it. And then Lincoln Powell, Prefect of the Psychotic Division and a first class Esper, knows within an hour that Reich is guilty and spends the rest of the book trying to assemble something a court will accept, because certainty is not evidence.
Bester writes it at enormous speed with typographic games on the page: telepathic conversation laid out as patterns, names printed as symbols, sentences that break formation. It still reads as modern.
Powell is the odd one. He is a decent, slightly ridiculous man with an alternate personality he calls Dishonest Abe, a compulsive liar who surfaces at inconvenient moments, and his pursuit of Reich becomes something closer to concern than to enmity.
Around two hundred and fifty pages, fast, nasty and inventive, with an Esper society, a corporate war and a manhunt all running at once.
Demolition, the punishment awaiting Reich, is not what the word implies, and the last page reframes the whole book.
Best for readers who want a psychological crime novel with the science fiction fully load bearing, and prose that still feels quicker than most things written since.
Historical Context & Significance
The Demolished Man won the first Hugo Award for Best Novel, presented in 1953 at the eleventh World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia, which makes it the beginning of everything else on this list.
It had been serialised in three parts in Galaxy Science Fiction from January 1952, and it is dedicated to Galaxy's editor Horace Gold, who pushed Alfred Bester hard through revisions.
Bester came from comics and radio, having written Superman and Green Lantern scripts and then network drama, and the pace and the visual invention on the page come out of that training rather than out of magazine science fiction.
He published only a handful of novels, of which this and The Stars My Destination are the ones that lasted, spent years as a travel writer at Holiday magazine instead, and, after his death in September 1987, was named a Grand Master posthumously in 1988