Book Review: The Demolished Man
Saturday, 20 October 2007 09:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daA bit over a month ago, I saw Paprika, and its plot reminded me of one of the novels that turned me on to Greg Bear- Queen of Angels, a police thriller set in 2048 where an illegal device can read the "Geography of the Mind"- a remapping of one person's brain so it will make sense to others. I remember I had been really impressed by this book, when I read it in high school. Well, it seems my tastes change. It seemed so overdone when I re-read it last month. The poetry conceits were just conceits, the characterizations felt 2-d, and I couldn't finish it.
Contrast with Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, which I finished last night. First published in serial form in 1952 (and the very first Hugo Award winner), it has lent elements to science fiction from PK Dick to everything cyberpunk- it's set in 24th century New York City, where portions of the city are ruined by atomic blasts, some humans have developed ESP, and the mega-rich amuse themselves with vaguely magical-appearing extravagances.
The plot has surface-level similarities with Queen of Angels- it's a police whodunnit in a society which hasn't experienced murder in ages- in this case, because the "ESPers" keep track on the normals. The richest man in the world has decided he must kill his major rival, and we watch the esper police agent who tries to track him down.
The first third of the book was highly amusing, with sly in-jokes about 1950s-era New York and really funny slang that seems to be based on a prediction of the 60s. The middle third felt mechanically clunky to me, with the inevitable interplanetary chases. The last third made me grin quite a bit, partly with the awfully anachronistic computer with punch-tape, partly because the esper conceits (written in the style of visual poetry on the page) somehow felt new again after the dry middle part, and partly with plot developments.
This review might be a work in progress, but here are my first thoughts. I'm usually turned off by detective potboilers but I do like Bester's style. And it was fun to try and play "spot the future influences on my favourite science fiction."
Contrast with Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, which I finished last night. First published in serial form in 1952 (and the very first Hugo Award winner), it has lent elements to science fiction from PK Dick to everything cyberpunk- it's set in 24th century New York City, where portions of the city are ruined by atomic blasts, some humans have developed ESP, and the mega-rich amuse themselves with vaguely magical-appearing extravagances.
The plot has surface-level similarities with Queen of Angels- it's a police whodunnit in a society which hasn't experienced murder in ages- in this case, because the "ESPers" keep track on the normals. The richest man in the world has decided he must kill his major rival, and we watch the esper police agent who tries to track him down.
The first third of the book was highly amusing, with sly in-jokes about 1950s-era New York and really funny slang that seems to be based on a prediction of the 60s. The middle third felt mechanically clunky to me, with the inevitable interplanetary chases. The last third made me grin quite a bit, partly with the awfully anachronistic computer with punch-tape, partly because the esper conceits (written in the style of visual poetry on the page) somehow felt new again after the dry middle part, and partly with plot developments.
This review might be a work in progress, but here are my first thoughts. I'm usually turned off by detective potboilers but I do like Bester's style. And it was fun to try and play "spot the future influences on my favourite science fiction."
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Date: Saturday, 20 October 2007 09:19 pm (UTC)Bester is really good at plausible-sounding future culture extrapolation with supernatural ("psi") elements; the fact that he's extrapolating to the late 20th century from the 1950s makes him unreadable to a lot of people, though.
And, as you say, he's seminal. Going back and reading Doc Smith is fun that way too, although I find him almost unreadable in his own terms.