Re: Reading List: Alfred Bester (The Demolished Man)

In 1951 The Catcher in the Rye was published. James Stewart, Spencer Tracey, William Holden and Louis Calhern lost out on the Best Actor Oscar to Jose Ferrer, winning for Cyarno de Bergerac [note: a story in the public domain]. Seoul fell to communists. The Rosenbergs were sentenced to death for treason. The first color television was introduced into the states, and the UNIVAC I mainframe computer was announced--the next year it became famous for successfully predicting the outcome of the US presidential election. Johnnie Ray released "Cry," possibly the first rock n' roll record. Leo Fender patented his Fender Esquire (later Telecaster) guitar, and Alfred Bester's novel The Demolished Man was published.

Why the history lesson? Whenever I look at a historical event--like the publishing of a book--I like to put it into context. All of the events I mentioned, when I think about them, firmly place me in the beginning of the 50s. You can see the decade unfurling in front of you--cold war, literature, music. But Bester kind of existed outside of time, it would seem. Reading this novel gives you very few clues to it's publishing date.

Shockah lent me the two Alfred Bester books he talked about recently since I had never read them, and I was terrifically impressed. This may be old hat to some of you--Oh, sure, Bester. I covered him in Sci-Fi 101--but everybody has gaps in their knowledge in some ways, and obviously Bester was mine.

What Bester does so magnificiently is to capture language. His multiple written puns for names, as mentioned by Shockah, include @kins, ¼mane, Wyg&. His conceits--that there are people who can read each others thoughts--are not clumsy concepts, but deeply thought out systems that take into account humans and how we departmentalize and organize.

So his psychics have a rigidly hierarchical society, with different grades depending on talent and ability. The higher abilities have tremendous wealth and power--so, necessarily, politics plays a large roll in their choices and actions. He never loses site of the human frailties within these bureaucracies.

Like Shockah I don't want to give anything away, but again I would like to impress how this is a novel that it is nearly impossible to place the time period that it was written. Only one thing gives it away, and that is the way that Bester handled his women. They are extensions of 50s women, and carry the cultural assumptions from that period--and not women who had gone through the three decades that followed, with the huge cultural shifts that happened. Even some characters sexual liberation was born out of a society of subordinate social roles, and not out of an independence movement, and the social gains and complexities that arose from it. This is a quibble insomuch as the women didn't read as well to me, but I'm not implying that Bester should have known better--and this is only a minor point in an otherwise brilliant book. Only one female character didn't read like that to me--Wyg&, who seemed much more contemporary.

So for those of you, like me, who have somehow missed this book--you get both of us pitching it with high recommendations. It'll keep you guessing, and wanting to set aside everything else so you can read it.