The Demolished Man

The Demolished Man is a science fiction novel by American writer Alfred Bester, which won the first Hugo Award in 1953. An inverted detective story, the novel was first serialized in three parts, beginning with the January 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, followed by publication of the novel in 1953. The novel is dedicated to Galaxy's editor, H. L. Gold, who offered suggestions during its writing. Bester's original title was Demolition!, but Gold persuaded him to change it.

Plot introduction

The Demolished Man is a science fiction police procedural set in a future where telepathy is common, although much of its effectiveness is derived from one individual having greater telepathic skill than another.
In the 24th century, telepaths—called Espers or "peepers"—are integrated into all levels of society. They are classed according to their abilities: an Esper 3 can read the surface thoughts of a mind; an Esper 2 can read also from the subconscious mind; an Esper 1 can read from even the deepest levels of the mind, such as the id.
All Espers can telepathically communicate amongst themselves, and the more powerful Espers can overwhelm their juniors. Telepathic ability is innate and heritable but can remain latent and undetected in untrained persons. Once recognized, natural aptitude can be developed through instruction and exercise. There is a guild to improve Espers' telepathic skills, to set and enforce ethical conduct guidelines, and to increase the Esper population through intermarriage.
Some latent telepaths are undiscovered, or are aware of their abilities but refuse to submit to Guild rule. Some are ostracized as punishment for breaking the rules. One character in the story has suffered this fate for ten years, leaving him desperate for even vicarious contact with other telepaths.

Plot summary

Ben Reich is the paranoid, impetuous owner of Monarch Utilities & Resources, a commercial cartel that the Reich family has possessed for generations. Monarch is in danger of bankruptcy because of its chief rival, the D'Courtney Cartel, headed by the older Craye D'Courtney. Reich suffers recurring nightmares in which a "Man with No Face" persecutes him.
Desperate to end his suffering, Reich contacts D'Courtney and proposes a merger of their concerns, but Reich's damaged psychological state causes him to misread D'Courtney's positive response as a refusal. Frustrated and desperate, Reich determines to kill D'Courtney. The presence of "peepers" has prevented the commission of murder for more than seventy years, so Reich devises an elaborate plan to ensure his freedom. If caught, Reich will certainly face "Demolition", a terrible punishment described only at the end of the story.
Reich hires an Esper to "run interference" for him—hiding his murderous thoughts from any peepers present at the scene of the planned crime. Reich bribes Dr. Augustus Tate, a prominent peeper psychiatrist, and uses him to mentally steal information about D'Courtney's planned attendance at a party. To further conceal his intentions from telepaths, Reich visits a songwriter, Duffy Wygand, to teach him a jingle that makes his real thoughts hard to read.
From Monarch's research facility, Reich secures a small flash grenade which can disrupt a victim's perception of time by temporarily destroying the eyes' rhodopsin. He acquires an antique handgun from a pawn shop, making sure to have the bullets removed from the cartridges when he buys it. He knows how to replace the bullet in the handgun's ammunition with a gelatin capsule filled with water in order to eliminate ballistics evidence.
At the party, he influences the host to play a game of Sardines in total darkness. Reich executes his plan during the game, but there is an unforeseen hitch: at the moment he shoots D'Courtney, D'Courtney's daughter Barbara witnesses the murder, struggles with Reich, grabs the gun, and runs away. She is later found suffering severe psychological shock that renders her catatonic and mute. Nobody but the party's hostess Maria knew that Barbara was with her father. Reich recovers his composure, returns to the party, and pretends to be lost. Just as he is about to leave, completing his getaway, a drop of blood from D'Courtney's body in the room above lands on him, and the party ends in chaos as the police are called.
A telepathic police detective, Lincoln Powell, is assigned to the case. As telepathically gathered evidence is legally inadmissible in court, but can be used to guide an investigation, the detective is obliged to assemble the murder case with traditional police procedures and to establish motive, means, and opportunity. The detective manages to read Reich's thoughts, sees that he is the murderer, and asks him to surrender. Reich refuses, relishing the thrill of the hunt to come.
Both sides center on finding and questioning Barbara D'Courtney. Although Reich finds her first, he is unable to kill her before Powell rescues her. The pursuit traverses the Solar System as Reich escapes the police and a series of mysterious assassination attempts. Others are attacked also: during Powell's attempt to interrogate the pawnbroker from whom Reich bought the gun, an unknown person attacks the pawnshop with a "harmonic gun" that destroys by resonant sonic vibration. Reich tries but fails to murder Hassop, his own chief of communications, and Powell succeeds in abducting Hassop.
Powell has already established opportunity, and eventually method, through discovery of a tiny fragment of gelatin in the body. Just as Powell believes that he has wrapped the case up entirely, the interrogation of Hassop yields disturbing results: D'Courtney had accepted the merger proposal. That dashes Powell's case; as he remarks, no court in the Solar System would believe Reich murdered D'Courtney when D'Courtney was needed alive for the merger to succeed.
Reich's tortured mental state is unknown to Reich himself, so Powell does not suspect that the motive for the murder was something other than financial. After more attempts on his life, and more dreams of the "Man with No Face", Reich attempts to kill Powell. Powell easily disarms him and then reads his mind. Suddenly Powell recognizes that the forces behind Reich's crime are greater than anticipated. He asks the help of every Esper in attempting to arrest Reich, channeling their collective mental energy through Powell in the dangerous telepathic procedure called the "Mass Cathexis Measure". He justifies this by claiming that Reich is an embryonic megalomaniac who will remake society in his own twisted image if not stopped.
Powell uses the power to construct a solipsistic fantasy for Reich to experience. One by one, he removes elements of reality, beginning with the stars in the sky, until Reich is left believing that he is the only real being in a world constructed around him, as a game. Finally Reich is left facing the "Man with No Face", who is both himself and Craye D'Courtney.
Reich is revealed to be the natural son of Craye D'Courtney, from an affair with Reich's mother—Reich's hatred of him was probably due to a latent, telepathic knowledge of that fact. Reich's knowledge is not explicitly stated, but Barbara D'Courtney, whom Powell discovers to be Reich's half-sister, is herself revealed to be a peeper. The assassination attempts on Reich were carried out by Reich himself as a result of his disturbed state. Once arrested and convicted, Reich is sentenced to the dreaded Demolition—the stripping away of his memories and the upper layers of his personality, emptying his mind for re-education. This 24th-century society uses psychological demolition because it recognizes the social value of strong personalities able to successfully defy the law, seeking the salvaging of positive traits while ridding the person of the evil consciousness of the criminal.

Reception

Reviewer Groff Conklin characterized The Demolished Man as "a magnificent novel... as fascinating a study of character as I have ever read". Boucher and McComas praised the novel as "a taut, surrealistic melodrama a masterful compounding of science and detective fiction", singling out Bester's depiction of a "ruthless and money-mad that is dominated and being subtly reshaped by telepaths" as particularly accomplished. Imagination reviewer Mark Reinsberg received the novel favorably, citing its "brilliant depictions of future civilization and 24th century social life".
After criticizing unrealistic science fiction, Carl Sagan in 1978 listed The Demolished Man as among stories "that are so tautly constructed, so rich in the accommodating details of an unfamiliar society that they sweep me along before I have even a chance to be critical". For a 1996 reprint, author Harry Harrison wrote an introduction in which he called it "a first novel that was, and still is, one of the classics". Richard Beard described the book as "full of vigorous action", saying, "the ripping pace of the book becomes part of what it's about".
In an SF Site Featured Review, Todd Richmond wrote that the book is "a complicated game of manoeuvering, evasion, and deception, as Reich and Polwell square off against one another", adding:
In his "Books" column for F&SF, Damon Knight selected Bester's novel as one of the 10 best sf books of the 1950s.
The Demolished Man won the 1953 Hugo Award for Best Novel and placed second for the year's International Fantasy Award for fiction. The Orion Publishing Group chose the novel as its fourteenth selection for its series SF Masterworks in 1999.

Characters

Major characters

Ben Reich lacks moral integrity and is willing to take considerable risks in order to see his wishes carried out. However, he is a very charming man to many around him, especially at the story's beginning when his desperation is still in check. His personal mantra is: "Make your enemies by choice, not by accident." He is about forty, and in his own words "wouldn't trade places with God, or looks with the Devil." His ancestors have left him, in book form, advice about how to pursue his ambitions. One chapter, "Murder", lays out some ideas, including using the Sardine game. At the same time, he is tormented by dreams of "The Man with No Face", which he initially believes is the face of Murder itself.
Lincoln Powell is a Class 1 Esper in his thirties. He is Prefect of Police, which in this case means chief detective. He is handsome, intelligent, charming, and well-liked. As the story opens, he is being considered for the Presidency of the Esper Guild, but since he is not married to another Esper, as Guild policy requires, he is disqualified. He lives alone in a house, since highly skilled Espers cannot live in crowded apartment blocks where they are bombarded by the thoughts of others. He is said to have a dual personality; behind the correct role of model Esper and perfect cop hides Dishonest Abe, a compulsive liar. Often, Dishonest Abe takes the lead in conversation, with Powell finding himself lying in earnest to anybody, just for the sake of amusing himself. He invents absurd tales of heroic cops who do not exist, or accounts of how the stress of his job causes him to become left-handed temporarily. His most notorious lie gave rise to the question "Who stole the weather, Powell?" which other peepers use to embarrass him, even though few actually know the details of the incident.
Barbara D'Courtney is a very pretty, young blonde woman, daughter of Craye D'Courtney, whom Reich pursues to kill and with whom Powell falls in love despite the fact that, according to the Guild rules, he must marry an Esper. However, she is revealed to be a latent Esper herself. Having witnessed her father's murder, she becomes catatonic. She is given a treatment that regresses her to childhood mentally, expecting that she will come to terms with the tragedy as she returns to her adult self over a period of weeks. During this time, Powell attempts to extract information from her subconscious mind, but is blocked by strange images including one of her and Reich as conjoined twins. This is a clue on the trail to discovering Reich's real motive for murder.
Mary Noyes is an Esper 2 who is a close friend of Lincoln Powell. She is in fact in love with Powell, but he does not return the affection. Since Guild members are required to marry other Espers as part of the Guild's "Eugenic Plan", she hopes he will eventually marry her anyway. When it becomes obvious to her that Powell, in the process of peeping Barbara D'Courtney, has fallen in love with her instead, she becomes angry and distant.
Dr. Augustus "Gus" Tate is a psychiatrist and Esper 1, who becomes Reich's ally in murdering Craye D'Courtney. Although he makes millions in fees from his practice, Tate has to pay 95% in taxes to the Esper Guild to further its education, outreach, and eugenics programs. He is a member of the ultra-right-wing "League of Esper Patriots". Reich offers him riches beyond his dreams, a promise that Tate verifies by peeping Reich. In return, Tate warns Reich of Espers that threaten him, peeps the details for D'Courtney's visit to New York from D'Courtney's own physician, Sam @kins, and then after the murder participates in the cover-up, peeping the investigators. Tate also finds from his peeping that Reich's motives are not what he believes, and that the dreams of the "Man with No Face" will not stop when D'Courtney is dead. He refuses to tell Reich the truth about the dreams, believing that this gives him a hold over his partner in crime. He dies when Keno Quizzard's men attack Jerry Church's pawn shop in an attempt to kill Lincoln Powell.