Art Deco Pulp Fiction

The Demolished Man
by Alfred Bester

Another of those classics of science fiction (like this one) that I should have read when I was a teenager. This isn’t quite Golden Age SF but its author was a figure from that era, and The Demolished Man certainly reads as if it was published in the 1930s rather than in 1953. Also, though he doesn’t make it too obvious, Bester clearly imagines his future setting as an Art Deco world, a bit like Batman’s Gotham City. The few visual descriptions he spares us all point unmistakably in that direction.
    What else to say about this book, as briefly as I can? It’s a science-fiction policier set in a world in which a powerful minority of humans are telepaths. A big tycoon murders a business rival and a telepathic detective sets out on his trail. Being telepathic, he already knows whodunit, and why, and how, and when; his problem is to find evidence that will convince a non-telepathic prosecutor (a computer, as it happens). All this is thoroughly implausible, of course, but in science fiction that’s never been a deal-breaker. 

    An equally improbable pitch of hysteria is sustained all through the narrative, as if the book had been produced by a comic-book writer, or else an advertising man. And it was: Bester really did work in both those capacities between the height of the Golden Age and the publication of The Demolished Man. People don’t talk normally in this book: they shriek, scream, howl, roar and otherwise communicate in exclamation marks. They run, or ‘jet’, more often than they walk. They are constantly getting pounded and pummelled, yet bounce back into action with more resilience than Wile E. Coyote. And no matter how long they go without food, sleep or even rest, they never, ever get tired. But all this, too, is fine; most Golden Age SF was a bit like that in any case. 
    One aspect is even, at a stretch, justifiable. Bester has created a world in which many people are telepaths, so concealing one’s emotions out of politeness or self-interest is futile. In such a society, it does seem possible that people would take to speaking their minds without restraint. A world full of telepaths may well be a world in which everyone talks like a comic strip. But that doesn’t explain why they should act like one too.
    More dated even than the Golden Age narrative style is the psychology. As an adman (PR man to be precise), Bester was well up on the psychological theory of his day, which was largely Freudian or Behaviourist. The book is chock-full of Freudian ideas and jargon, all of which have since been superseded in psychological theory as well as in therapeutic practice. In consequence, the rationales for both the plot and the characters’ actions now come across as mere far-fetched twaddle.
    Enjoyable twaddle, though. Funny, too. And if you squint hard enough, you may even detect some of the literary quality a few highbrow readers (Carl Sagan, of all people, among them) have found in the work of Alfred Bester. I’m sorry to have to admit I am not one of these readers, though I still had fun reading The Demolished Man.