Tag: john w. campbell

The Observatory: On Depression, Science Fiction, and the End of World War II

January 17th, 2025

(Cover by Alejandro. Astounding, February 1948.)

Here it is, another Observatory post that’s a couple days late, along with a short story review that’s nowhere to be found. This case is especially painful for me because I respect C. L. Moore a lot, and I irked myself when I read her Jirel of Joiry story “Jirel Meets Magic” and found that I had not read it deeply enough to write a review that’d be worth a damn about it. Unlike the last time this happened, however, it really was because I felt unprepared to deal with Moore’s level of writing, since it must be said she was a better prose stylist than most of her contemporaries, especially in the ’30s. Since I don’t feel qualified to review more Jirel stories, at least for the foreseeable future, I do hope instead to cover a Kuttner-Moore story in February, as a way to return to both of those authors whom I like a great deal. For now, let’s talk about something else. This is a sequel to the Observatory post I wrote last month, “The Origins of Depression in Science Fiction,” which is actually one of my favorite editorials I’ve written thus far, even if it was not what you’d call a “pleasure” to write—rather it was a post I felt I had to write. Turns out that despite the aforementioned post being over 2,000 words long, I still have much more to say on the topic. When I wrote that earlier editorial I did it as a way to talk about my own struggles as a manic-depressive, but I also made an argument which boiled down to this: that the massive uptick in discussing mental illness through genre SF corresponded with, or perhaps was sparked by, the end of World War II, more specifically the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What had previously been only treated as theoretical suddenly became a harsh reality for SF writers, which caused a sea change for the field.

The strange thing about all this, if you think about it, is that while the Allies won World War II, vanquishing a few fascist regimes in the process, such a sense of victory did not show itself in SF writing in the months and years following the war’s end. Why weren’t these people happy? They won! Not only did they succeed in defeating the Nazis, but long-held speculations about the possibility (even the inevitability) of nuclear weapons had been vindicated overnight. It was the closest, at least up to that point, that science fiction had come to actually predicting the future and getting it right. Perhaps the person mostly keenly aware of this change in the moment was John W. Campbell, who famously got into some hot water with some federal agents because of a story he had published in the March 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction: Cleve Cartmill’s “Deadline.” Now, having read “Deadline” for myself, I can say it’s frankly not a very good story; but then it didn’t need to be. Cartmill, who at the time was a new writer, had, much with Campbell’s assistance, written a story that serves as a rather unsubtle allegory about the use of nuclear weapons against the Axis powers. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure that the US government was working on the atomic bomb, or at least some weapon of mass destruction, and that both the Axis powers and even America’s own allies (namely the Soviet Union) were keen on finding out what these scientists were cooking. The March 1944 issue of Astounding would’ve been on newsstands in February, a whole 18 months before the US dropped an actual atomic bomb on actual human beings. Compared to Street & Smith’s other magazines, Astounding did not have a big readership, but it would be their only genre magazine to survive the wartime paper rationing and I suspect Astounding‘s power for prophecy was a big reason why it was spared.

Despite the newfound vindication, however, it seems that a savage gale had swept across the ocean of science fiction with the war’s end, and Astounding, which up to 1945 tended to published some of the most optimistic fiction in the field, took on a darker hue. This change in mood was by no means unique to Campbell’s magazine, of course: every American SF magazine at the time, be it Starling Stories or its more juvenile sister magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories, got at least a bit darker in editors’ speculations and what fiction they were willing to print. During the war years, specifically 1942 to 1945, it was not uncommon to find what you might call a propaganda story in an issue of Astounding, about a character or group of characters going up against either an obvious analog (aha) for the Nazis or just the Nazis outright; and naturally these stories are about how we will or at least should beat Hitler and his goons. Off the top of my head I’m thinking of A. E. van Vogt’s “Secret Unattainable” and J. Francis McComas’s “Flight into Darkness.” Yet following the war’s end there came, over the next handful of years, a bunch of stories in Astounding and elsewhere that could not have been reasonably published (or indeed thought of) during the war, partly because of how bleak these new stories are, including but not limited to C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Little Black Bag” and “The Marching Morons,” T. L. Sherred’s “E for Effort,” A. E. van Vogt’s “Dormant,” Theodore Sturgeon’s “Memorial” and “There Is No Defense,” Jack Williamson’s “With Folded Hands…,” Arthur C. Clarke’s “History Lesson,” too many Ray Bradbury stories from this period to count, and about half of the stories that would comprise Clifford D. Simak’s City. Perhaps the most downbeat of all these post-war stories, in fact one of the darkest stories in the genre’s whole history (which is saying a lot), is Edmond Hamilton’s “What’s It Like Out There?,” which appeared in the December 1952 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. The kicker here is that Hamilton had written an early draft of this story a whole two decades earlier, but could not get it published then; but it found a home, seven years after World War II and in the midst of the Korean War.

(Funny aside about Sturgeon’s “There Is No Defense,” published in the issue of Astounding pictured above: Campbell, in the previous issue’s Of Times to Come section, had to tell readers that the upcoming Sturgeon story “is not about atomic bomb warfare,” despite what the title would naturally make people think. However, the Alejandro cover, which does not illustrate a particular story and which Campbell calls “purely symbolic,” showing an Olympian figure splitting the atom with what seems to be a pair of lightning bolts, tells me that “atomic bomb warfare” must’ve been on somebody’s mind. Given the timing, it’s not hard to see why.)

One could argue the latter half of the ’40s to the early ’50s marked a crucial turning point in the development of genre SF, as a kind of uniquely American form of fiction writing. Oh, there was of course SF written outside the US, before and after World War II; after all, arguably the biggest point of inspiration for Amazing Stories, when it launched in 1926, was H. G. Wells. There was another profoundly influential work of SF from the UK that arrived just in time to coincide with the collective turn toward depression and pessimism that American SF was seeing: George Orwell’s 1984. Rather than celebrate the defeat of Nazism, 1984 warns what was then the western side of the so-called Iron Curtain about totalitarianism—both of the Soviet variety and a more capitalistic American and British fascism. Orwell, in the wake of the war’s end and the start of the Cold War, saw not a new dawn for democracy in the “civilized” world but, to paraphrase him, a man (as in humanity) getting his faced stomped on by an authoritarian’s boot, forever. You know who seemed to agree with Orwell’s post-war pessimism? C. M. Kornbluth, and William Tenn, and Robert Sheckley, and Philip K. Dick, and Henry Kuttner, and so on. These are authors who either only debuted after the war’s end or had gotten lucky during the war years. (Kornbluth is a funny example in that he is both technically a pre-war writer and someone who, after taking a break from writing for several years, returned to a market that had changed drastically so as to better suit his perpetual bitterness.) We still got stories of daring invention and adventure, of man’s destiny as the owner of the universe, but we also got a good helping of stories that Campbell would not have approved. By the early ’50s the market had broadened such that even something as nihilistic as Tenn’s “The Liberation of Earth” got published in a pulpy magazine.

I’ve made it no secret that I find genre SF in the late ’40s through the ’50s very interesting, and not for the reasons people tend to idolize that period of American history. Sure, there was economic prosperity—for some people. The US quickly rose to the occasion as the leader of the Western allies, by virtue of largely of having escaped World War II unscathed compared to the UK and France. But there was racial strife, a revived paranoia that there’s a filthy communist lurking under ever bed, not to mention a forced marriage between Christianity and capitalism. As the Cold War kicked into high gear it was no longer enough to just be a good Christian in America (God forbid you were not a Christian to begin with), you had to also be a good capitalist, the problem being that worship of Christ and worship of the dollar make for uneasy bedfellows. Philosophically the two are like oil and water. Sadly, for almost eighty years at this point we’ve had to live with the suffocating, murderous reality of worshipping the dollar, seeing the rise of neo-liberalism and Christofascism, watching them spread and tangle like weeds in one’s garden. What’s not to be depressed about? The future is looking bleak. As famous as they are, generally optimistic writers like Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov are nowadays plagued by controversy, or even simply ambivalence from the modern SF reading crowd. It’s not uncommon to find an earnest SF reader under the age of forty nowadays who thinks Asimov is boring, or that Heinlein is too problematic; but these people would probably connect much more with someone like Kornbluth or Kuttner. Given that we’re constantly at risk of being torn down and obliterated by depression, since it seems clear to at least some of us that we’re living in the last days of industrial capitalism (or so we hope), we might not need a Heinlein or Asimov, but someone… darker.
Novella Review: “The Big Front Yard” by Clifford D. Simak

August 10th, 2022

(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Astounding, October 1958.)

Who Goes There?

Clifford D. Simak is one of the most respected writers to come out of the so-called Golden Age of science fiction—this despite the fact that he was actually a pre-Golden Age practitioner of SF, having made his debut in 1931 with “The World of the Red Sun.” Simak became one of John W. Campbell’s regular authors in the ’40s, and then, without skipping a beat, he started submitting frequently to Galaxy Science Fiction in the ’50s onward. Unlike a lot of noted Golden Age writers, Simak was thoroughly a pastoralist, and also a humanist; his fiction often involves fundamentally decent rural types in plots which are rarely life-or-death scenarios. His obvious contempt for urbanity is counterbalanced by a gentleness uncharacteristic of most SF authors of his era, and at his best he can be deeply emotionally effective.

When Simak wrote “The Big Front Yard” in 1958, he had already been in the game for 27 years, and he would remain quietly yet consistently active for 27 more. According to David W. Wixon’s introduction to the story in the collection The Big Front Yard and Other Stories, Simak had originally submitted this piece to H. L. Gold over at Galaxy, but Gold rejected it; he then took it to Campbell, and Campbell bought it without hesitation. “The Big Front Yard” would go on to win the 1959 Hugo for Best Novelette (the Best Novella category had not yet been invented), and it would go down as one of Simak’s most famous stories.

Placing Coordinates

“The Big Front Yard” has been reprinted a fair number of times, so you’ll have no problem finding it. Assuming you don’t mind reading online or with a PDF, the October 1958 issue of Astounding in which it originally appeared is on the Archive. As far as book reprints go we have some easy-to-find options, including the aforementioned The Big Front Yard and Other Stories in ebook and paperback—though I must warn you that Open Road Media is, at best, a second-rate publisher, and I seriously lament the fact that so many books by authors I love have fallen into their hands. Typos and weird formatting decisions abound, such as the fact that FOR NO REASON the scene breaks were removed in their series of Simak’s collected short fiction. Chapter breaks are still intact, but scene breaks, which are arguably more important? Gone. How shitty.

If you want (in my opinion) more reputable reprints, I would recommend the anthology The Hugo Winners, Volumes One and Two; it’s super-duper out of print, but since this tome seemed to get around a lot back in the ’70s, used copies are pretty easy to find without breaking the bank. You also get the rest of the short fiction Hugo winners between 1955 and 1970, so that’s a big plus. Another great option is The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume Two B, the second half of (you guessed it) The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume Two. Unlike the former anthology, this one is very much in print, and seems to have remained so since its initial publication.

Enhancing Image

This is a first contact story, and maybe one of the most upbeat of its kind, though Simak misdirects us at first into thinking it won’t be.

We follow Hiram Taine, a handyman and trader of “antiques” (in reality just old junky furniture he cleans up and sells at a hefty price), just your average rural Wisconsin dude. He has a dog named Towser and he likes to chat with another local man named Beasly, who’s apparently not very bright but who likes to hang out with Taine and help him with his work. Random, but I couldn’t help but notice the dog has the same name as the protagonist’s dog in Simak’s earlier story, “Desertion.” Is this supposed to mean anything? How many Simak stories have dogs named Towser?

Anyway, Taine is hired to fix a TV set owned by the Hortons, Henry and Abbie, with Henry being boss man at a local plant (a computer plant, apparently). The TV is old and, according to Taine anyway, replacing it would probably be cheaper than repairing it, but it comes with a radio and a record player, and Abbie won’t replace it. Taine and Beasly move the bulky TV into the basement when this happens:

“Well, Hiram,” she said, excited, “you put a ceiling in the basement. It looks a whole lot better.”

“Huh?” asked Taine.

“The ceiling. I said you put in a ceiling.”

Taine jerked his head up and what she said was true. There was a ceiling there, but he’d never put it in.

Taine has one of those unfinished basements—only now it’s a little less unfinished. Not only does his basement have a ceiling that he didn’t have installed, but it seems to be of a metallic substance, except it’s not any kind of metal Taine recognizes. Later that day, he tests the ceiling and finds that a drill won’t penetrate it, or even leave so much as a scratch. Well that’s weird. At this early point in the story, Taine notices some things are different about his house, and normally this would be played for suspense, which is kind of is—but, as I said, this is misdirection.

Indeed the first stretch of “The Big Front Yard” feels almost like a subversion of what would, even in 1958, sound like the set-up for a spooky alien invasion story. You know how superstitious people will sometimes say dogs can see ghosts or some goofy shit like that? Towser spends much of the story trying to find a woodchuck that doesn’t exist, but we’ll get back to that in the spoilers section. Clearly something has started living in or around the property, and it doesn’t stop with Taine’s basement getting refurbished. Several of the junky odds and ends have been mysteriously repaired, even improved in some cases; the big TV set Taine got for repairs is now not only fixed without his help, but it now also plays in color (remember, 1958). You and I know, even going into this, that aliens are involved, yet the surprising part is that rather than hint ominously at a future attack on humanity, these aliens seem, if anything, to be pretty benign, if not outright friendly.

What I like about a lot of Simak’s work, and what he does to an almost perfect degree here, is he refuses to bend to the Golden Age cliché of aliens being depicted as evil outsiders, along with the xenophobic implications; aliens rarely play the villains in Simak’s fiction, but then Simak’s fiction tends to be light on conventional villains. Taine is also not your typical Golden Age protagonist: he’s not a scientist or a politician, he’s not what you’d call a genius, and he’s by no means the physical encapsulation of what Campbell would’ve considered the “ideal” man. Like a lot of Simak protagonists, Taine is a hard-working (if not entirely honest) Midwesterner who’s just looking to make a buck. Honestly I scratch my head as to why Gold rejected “The Big Front Yard” and Campbell bought it; it feels like the roles should’ve been reversed.

Before long, Towser, in his efforts to find the woodchuck, finds something else right by the house, and digs furiously for it. Already aware that something definitely strange has been going on, Taine and Beasly dig up whatever Towser sniffed out, and what they find is indeed strange: a large oval-shaped contraption buried in the ground, made of a glassy metal that Taine knows he’s never seen before. Fear runs through his veins, but he also experiences what we might call a conceptual breakthrough—a discovery of something beyond known human limits that counteracts the fear with a sense of wonder. “A sense of wonder” is a really old and cliched phrase in SF, especially Golden Age SF, but I think there are a few moments in “The Big Front Yard” alone which do it justice.

And the conviction grew: Whatever it was that had come to live with him undoubtedly had arrived in this same contraptions. From space or time, he thought, and was astonished that he thought it, for he’d never thought such a thing before.

Life on other planets? You bet. What else could it be? Like any first contact story there is at least some uncertainty involved, but as is typical of Simak, there’s also a gentle whimsy and that aforementioned sense of wonder which gives us the impression that Taine, Beasly, and the others aren’t in any real danger, despite the mysteriousness of the situation. If our boys thought the repaired junk and the large glassy contraption were weird, though, they’re about to have the sight of their lives, after they’ve finished with the digging and come back around to the front of the house.

He and Beasly went up the gravel driveway in the dark to put the tools away in the garage and there was something funny going on, for there was no garage.

There was no garage and there was no front on the house and the driveway was cut off abruptly and there was nothing but the curving wall of what apparently had been the end of the garage.

The front of the house is folded in on itself. The back is still good, though! But yeah, uhh, how did this happen? Why? Taine’s scared, but now he’s also utterly baffled. Our boys enter through the back door, and… the front of the house is still there. From the inside. Except whereas it had been nighttime outside the house, now there’s daylight breaking through the front windows which are no longer there from the outside.

“The Big Front Yard” can be more or less split into two halves, those being before and after the front of the house gets miraculously folded. If the first half of the novella has almost a magic realism feel about it, it becomes something more akin to a planetary romance in the latter half. I won’t say too much in the spoiler section, since the plot becomes more straightforward at this point, but it also becomes even more charming and readable. The whole thing can be described as “cute,” which is not a word I would use with the vast majority of Golden Age SF (FYI, I do consider the “Golden Age” to be the ’50s, not the ’40s), but “The Big Front Yard” is just a happy-go-lucky tale which refuses to take itself overly seriously.

There Be Spoilers Here

The front of the house, from the inside, opens to a different planet—a vast desert landscape with a sun different from ours. The front of Taine’s house, including his car and driveway, has been transported to this new world, in a way, and conversely the back of the house is now folded on itself. This is where we meet the aliens who have apparently taken up residence on Taine’s property: little ratlike creatures with humanoid-ish faces. These aliens pay Taine no mind and simply keep walking in a single file line through the desert. There’s also… du-dum… another house which serves the same function as Taine’s, except this one appears deserted, serving as a gateway between the desert world and a third world, this one being more jungle-like. Taine’s house seems to have become part of a network of houses which serve as portals for other worlds.

This was another world—there could be no doubt of that—another planet circling another star, and where it was in actual space no one on Earth could have the least idea. And yet, through some machination of those sixteen things walking straight in line, it also was lying just outside the front door of his house.

Soon we run into a different alien race, one which is decidedly more humanoid in appearance; these guys ride on what appear to be horseless saddles, though our boys gather that the humanoid aliens use some kind of anti-gravity device. Far more unfortunately, we also have to deal with the US government putting their filthy hands in things. It was a cliché, even at the time, for the government to get involved with ayy lmao affairs, though Simak’s irreverence for the soldiers and bureaucrats here is somewhat refreshing; they’re the closest thing the story has to villains, and while they are somewhat of the mustache-twirling variety, they’re not too harmful. Really the most tense thing to happen in the whole story is when Taine loses Towser in the desert world for a bit, but it’s okay, he finds him. Towser is such a good boy; there should be a Hugo for Best Dog.

What do these aliens want, though? And what will it take for the government to not take possession of Taine’s house? The solution ends up being a mighty convenient one: Beasly, while not being the sharpest tool in the shed, is able to communicate with the aliens, and as it turns out, the aliens are looking to start a trading relationship with mankind, as part of a network of interplanetary traders. Rather than wanting to trade top-secret info on weapons, the aliens want more practical things, like the very concept of paint, which is somehow foreign to them. The big twist of “The Big Front Yard” is that Beasly is telepathic; that’s right, he can communicate with others using his mind—even Towser, who’s a dog, and even the aliens, who are… aliens.

Suddenly I can see why Campbell would’ve liked this.

I do find this twist to be the least convincing part of the story. You could say it’s far-fetched that Taine is able to walk and breathe fine on an alien planet without any technological assistance, but I would also say you’re a killjoy who probably had a really boring childhood. I guess my problem is that the telepathy thing, even if it’s used to hand-wave communications between humans and the saddle-riding aliens (which it is), doesn’t cover for the fact that our languages would be completely different. That and while I feel like Towser sensing the aliens, including a giant woodchuck-looking alien, was foreshadowed well enough, I find Beasly’s secret power to be less convincing. People were just really into ESP at this time, huh?

Even so, all is well. The aliens want to become trading partners with mankind, with Taine as mankind’s ambassador and Beasly as his interpreter. The government will keep off their backs, at least for the time being, and anyhow, in the meantime they can learn some pretty valuable things from the aliens. It all looks like the beginning of a beautiful business relationship.

A Step Farther Out

Clifford D. Simak would win two more Hugos, and was the third person to be given the Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (after Robert Heinlein and Jack Williamson). Despite this immense honor, Simak now stands as a somewhat obscure figure (not unlike Williamson, actually), and I see that as a big shame, because his work has certainly aged better than a lot of Heinlein’s. Heinlein is one of my all-time favorite authors, maybe top five material, but he can be pretty embarrassing when he doesn’t have his eye on the prize. Simak, meanwhile, continued to produce respectable work well into the ’70s, after many of his contemporaries had either died, retired, or pulled a Heinlein.

Simak would win his third Hugo in 1981, and he would remain active until just a couple years before his death in 1988. The world of SF, and even genre fiction at large, would surely be worse off without him.

“The Big Front Yard” may not be Simak’s best story, but it might be the best example of what made Simak different from so many other SF authors in the ’40s and ’50s. While there is a bit of light misogyny with Abbie Horton’s characterization (she’s described as “bossy” at one point), it’s otherwise remarkably devoid of racism and jingoism. I also get the impression, just from reading this, that Simak was probably horrified and disgusted by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; indeed his fix-up “novel” City partly feels like a cry against atrocities (be they Allied or Axis) committed during World War II. It would’ve been easy to initiate the partnership between mankind and the saddle-riding aliens for the purposes of exchanging weapons of mass destruction, but Simak did not seem keen on putting such an option on the table.

There’s a tenderness running through much of Simak’s fiction; you could say it’s an aversion to violence, and if Simak has any big weakness it’s that maybe he can be too much of a softy—a criticism one could aim at few, if any other Golden Age authors, I can assure you. “The Big Front Yard” has been held as a classic for decades, and while some classics of the field keep that title more for historical importance than enjoyability, this is a classic whose value very much persists. It’s a damn fine story, regardless of age.

See you next time.
Serial Review: The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester (Part 1/3)

August 6th, 2022

(Cover by Don Sibley. Galaxy, January 1952.)

Who Goes There?

My history with Alfred Bester is a bit complex. By all rights he should be one of my favorite SFF authors of the ’50s, given how strong his output from that period is. Bester started in the field in the late ’30s, and even submitted a few notable short works to John W. Campbell for Astounding and Unknown. Like a lot of authors during World War II, though, Bester would take a break from writing once the US joined the war effort—a break that lasted nearly a decade. From 1943 to 1949 we got jack shit from Bester, but once he returned in 1950, he quickly established himself as one of the leading voices of a new generation of authors, being more sophisticated, more experimental, and more cosmopolitan than what came before. He was perfect for Galaxy Science Fiction, H. L. Gold’s new magazine, which had claimed its throne with a speed and force unseen before or since in the field as the best SF magazine on the market.

While Bester’s short fiction, at its best, may stand as his top-to-bottom strongest work, he has become more known nowadays for his first two novels, both of them initially published in Galaxy. The Demolished Man, serialized from January to Marsh 1952, would later win the first ever Hugo for Best Novel, and no doubt contributed to Galaxy tying with Astounding for the Best Professional Magazine Hugo that year.

Placing Coordinates

The January 1952 issue of Galaxy is freely available on the Archive. Since this is a serial you can guess where you’d be able to find it. If you’re curious about reading the book version, though (which I hear is a fair bit different from the magazine version), it’s very much in print from iBooks. You can also find the SF Masterworks paperback for The Demolished Man at a pretty good price. This is a somewhat famous novel, so you won’t have too hard a time finding it.

Enhancing Image

We start with a lengthy prologue section where we meet with a series of characters in rapid succession—none of whom, at least directly, play a big part in the story. For instance we’re told about the invention of anti-gravity, called Nulgee, by a scientist named Edward Turnbul, a man who would be sort of credited with the invention but, as we’re told, screwed out of the patent for it.

It doesn’t matter. As the narrator tells us:

Forget Turnbul. He is not your protagonist. If you identify with him, you will be lost in this story, as Turnbul is lost in the shifting pattern that produced the Demolished Man.

We’re told about quite a few other things, both about the background of this world and about the circumstances leading to the Demolished Man. Who’s the Demolished Man? Stay tuned. We get the invention of anti-gravity, exploration of other planets in the solar system, the invention of an advanced sensory-intensive form of entertainment called a Panty (that’s right, these things are called Pantys), the bubbling of a generations-long business rivalry between two families, Reich and D’Courtney.

Most importantly for understanding the world of The Demolished Man, we’re introduced to the emerging existence of telepaths, called Espers in this novel. Much like the telepaths of A. E. van Vogt’s novel Slan, the Espers are a genetic anomaly, making up a small portion of the human population and sustained by mating within the group; unlike van Vogt’s slans, who are viciously persecuted by normal humans, the Espers are highly sought after in human society. Indeed, telepathy plays at least as much a role in how this society functions as space flight—probably more so.

Part of me wonders if Bester wrote this novel in response to van Vogt’s; it has a few of the same ingredients, but in most other ways it reads like a foil to that earlier novel. The slans, and especially their relationship with normal human society, very much read like a precursor to X-Men, whereas Bester’s novel shows what the world might look like if such mutants were still a minority, but highly respected, allowed to be themselves out in the open without fear of persecution.

Speaking of out in the open, Bester more or less gives the whole game away in this opening section, thus making the magazine version of The Demolished Man rather hard to spoil. I say the magazine version because even a cursory glance at the book version reveals that pretty much the entirety of the opening section had been thrown in the trash between versions. Usually there are revisions between a novel’s serialization and its book publication, but usually this means the author added material between versions, rather than deleted. I have to assume this is because, as entertaining as the prologue is in parts, it also frontloads the text with exposition—so much exposition you feel like your head’s about to burst, and some of it is irrelevant anyway.

I also have to assume the change was made because the prologue makes the rest of the events too easy to predict, to the point where we get to do little guessing ourselves. Even before we’re given our protagonist’s name, we’re basically told that he’s doomed.

We’re given the murder weapon, an item used to set up the murder, and presumably the murderer himself, the Demolished Man. At the end of this protracted sequence we’re introduced to Ben Reich, said protagonist and the latest in the Reich family line of pirates and scoundrels, himself the head of Sacrament, a firm which rivals the D’Courtney Cartel. Reich is not a good guy; in fact he’s going to commit a murder by the end of the first part. How do we figure this?

For Ben Reich is The Demolished Man.

What does it mean to be Demolished? Stay tuned. But once we get past the prologue, the plot hits the ground running, and it’s a deceptively simple plot, though Bester plays quite a few tricks on us to make us think otherwise. The short of it is that Reich finds his business in a bind, Sacrament being smeared aggressively by the D’Courtney Cartel in the public eye, and Reich finds he must either enter a merging agreement with his rival or stop the D’Courtney Cartel by any means necessary.

An exchange with Craye D’Courtney, the head of the Cartel, goes nowhere. Reich is a desperate man. Even before he contemplates murder he seeks help regarding night terrors he’s been having, about what he calls “the Man With No Face,” an apparition which haunts him, and whose meaning Espers in Rich’s company know about but are unwilling to tell the man himself. Okay, if you’re an even slightly astute reader then you can guess what the Man With No Face represents, but that’s part of the fun for me. Everyone seems at least somewhat aware of what’s about to happen except for Reich, who, as we’re about to find out, is not as savvy as he thinks he is.

Since Sacrament is on the brink of collapse and since D’Courtney apparently refuses to back down or meet Reich halfway, you know what that means: the prick must die. Given the premise you might think we’re about to get an episode of Columbo, a sort of reverse whodunnit—and we sort of do, but there’s an important twist which complicates things.

How do you get away with murder in a society where, due to the nigh-omnipotence of telepaths, getting away with such a crime is virtually impossible?

This is made even trickier by the fact that there is not just one type of telepath; nay, there are three. Early on, in a scene that seems humorously aware of how redundant (to the characters) the exposition it’s dishing out is, Sacrament’s chief of personnel reminds Reich of how Espers are ranked.

“The Esper 3 can peep the conscious level of a mind. The 3rd can discover what a subject is thinking at the moment of thought. The 3rd is the lowest class of telepaths.”

As for the second rank of Espers:

“They are experts like myself who can penetrate beneath the conscious level of the mind to the preconscious. Most 2nds are in the professional class… physicians, lawyers, engineers, educators, economists, architects and so on.”

And finally the top-ranking Espers:

“The 1sts are capable of deep peeping, through the conscious and preconscious layers down to the unconscious, the lowest levels of the mind. Primordial basic desires and so forth. These Espers, of course, hold premium positions.”

Now I know what you’re thinking: “This is a bunch of Freudian nonsense.” I mean, it is. What the hell does “preconscious” even mean? Maybe only a 1st or 2nd Esper could tell me that. Despite the fact that it takes place a few centuries into the future, the world of The Demolished Man is very much steeped in slang and cultural expectations that would’ve been prevalent in the early ’50s, including people’s fixation on Freud and mommy complexes and all that. How much fun you have with this story will partly depend on how much leeway you’re willing to give the pseudoscience.

What holds up much better is the way in which Bester tries to convey to us what living as a telepath might look like, including Espers usually thinking to each other instead of talking out loud, and also what several conversations between Epsers happening at the same time might look like. Spoilers: it looks like word salad, or like something out of House of Leaves. The experimental typography must’ve blown people’s minds in 1952, not to mention the references to pornography, prostitution, and the general nastiness of the characters. Even today, the scene where a bunch of Espers are thinking to each other at a cocktail party comes off as experimental, and it’s a trick Bester would pull again (with arguably even greater success) in his next novel, The Stars My Destination.

What makes The Demolished Man different from other SF novels of the period is not in its narrative complexity (which isn’t all that complex), or its depth of characterization (which is often flamboyant but not terribly deep), but rather how fucking lurid and hardboiled it is. While the prominence of telepathy and ESP in general would have appealed to Campbell, the luridness and typographical experiments would never have been allowed in the pages of Astounding, and which conversely help demonstrate why Galaxy was such a big deal at the time.

You probably have a general outline in your head as to what happens in Part 1, and you’d probably be right, but even so, the murder is in the details. How exactly does Reich plan to carry out his killing, and how does he plan on getting away with it?

There Be Spoilers Here

Ironically, in order to get away with murder in a society where a whole class of people can read (or “peep,” they call it) the deepest desires of everyone else, Reich will need the help of one of these telepaths. It’s not easy. An Esper who acts as an accomplice to a crime risks getting thrown out of the Guild, and what the Guild says is law for Espers. Thankfully, nobody’s perfect, and theoretically anyone can be… persuaded to do certain things. And an Esper who has no choice but to help Reich can be very useful.

Reich has something stashed away, ready to be called upon for situations such as this. He goes home and cracks open his safe, taking out a notebook and an envelope; the envelope reads, in all caps, “TO BE OPENED IN CASE OF MURDER.” As for the notebook, it might just have an answer as to what Esper he could catch in his spider web.

Reich flipped through the pages of the notebook… ABDUCTION… ABORTION… ANARCHISTS… ARSONISTS… BRIBERY AND CORRUPTION (ALREADY)… BRIBERY AND CORRUPTION (POSSIBLE)… Under POSSIBLE, he found the names of fifty-seven prominent people. One of them was Augustus T8, Esper Medical Doctor 1. He nodded with satisfaction.

Certain Espers have numbers and symbols as part of their names. God knows why. Gus T8, Duffy Wyg&, Sam @kins, etc. Feels like a proto-cyberpunk touch, but then The Demolished Man kind of anticipates cyberpunk by a good thirty years already. The film noir narrative, the oppressive urban setting, the prevalence of technology, it’s got a dash of what William Gibson and Pat Cadigan would do later.

So Reich has his man; convincing, or rather blackmailing T8 will come later. Normally I would complain about characters being entirely good or entirely evil, but I do think there’s a talent to writing a deliciously despicable villain, which Reich is an example of. It’s not every day you have the villain also be the protagonist, especially in a ’50s SF story. Anyway, he opens the envelope, then, and we get (for me, anyway) one of the most memorable passages in Part 1, written by one of Reich’s ancestors.

To those who come after me:

The test of intellect is the refusal to belabor the obvious. If you have opened this letter, we already understand each other. I have prepared four general murder plans which may help you. I bequeath them to you as part of the Reich inheritance. They are only outlines. The details must be filled in by yourself as your time and necessity require.

But remember this: The essence of murder never changes. It is always the conflict of the killer against society with the victim as the prize. And the ABC of conflict with society never changes. Be audacious, be brave, be confident and you will not fail. Against these qualities society has no defense.

Signed Geoffrey Reich. Villainy runs in the family.

Much of Part 1 is set-up, with Reich recruiting T8, buying the murder weapon (or rather bullying for it) from Jerry Church, an expelled Esper who had previously worked for Reich and paid the price for it. Reich also buys a very old beat-up copy of a party book titled Let’s Play Party, which will be important for the climax of Part 1.

Indeed, the climax of Part 1, the (mostly human-attended) cocktail party where Reich seeks out D’Courtney with T8’s help, is also the best sequence thus far. It’s genuinely tense, as the big house where the party’s happening goes black as part of a game of Sardines and Reich has to find his way to where D’Courtney is hiding. I will say, however, that there is a passage during this sequence that struck me as one of those rare instances where Bester shits the bed in the prose department.

See, the hostess of the climactic party, Maria Beaumont, is a real upper class New York type; this whole novel radiates that energy, but Beaumont is perhaps the character most telling of when and where this novel would’ve been written. A slight recurring element with The Demolished Man so far is that Bester is simply not as good at characterizing his women as the men, writing them as bitchy, incredibly vain, and weirdly slutty for material that would’ve been published in a relatively classic pulp zine. I’m not sure if that last part is progressive or regressive, given the context. Normally female characters written at this time would have barely any agency, more focused on being wives than autonomous people, but Bester’s women are unavashedly thirsty for some action.

Take this decription of Beaumont, though, you’ll see what I mean.

Maria Beaumont clove through the waters, arms outstretched, eyes outstretched, bosom outstretched… her body transformed by pneumatic surgery into an exaggerated East Indian figure with puffed hips, puffed calves and puffed gilt breasts.

What do you mean by this, Alfred?

Still, that awkward description is counterbalanced by when Reich finds D’Courtney, being invisible both physically because of the darkness and mentally because he’s blocking possible Esper intrusion with a jingle he keeps repeating. (As an aside, using pop songs and commercial jingles to block out conscious thoughts Espers’ peeping is clever.)

We had heard, in a previous scene, that D’Courtney is sick—possibly dying, which raises the question of why Reich doesn’t just wait for the old man to kick the bucket. We also know by now, though, that Reich is not what you’d call a reasonable man. Still, the scene where Reich finds D’Courtney is shocking, deeply evocative in its imagery, and even reminiscent of the moment in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness where Marlow meets the decrepit Kurtz.

Reich found himself in a spherical room that was the heart of a giant orchid. The walls were curling orchid petals, the pillars were stamens, the floor was a golden calyx; the chairs, tables and couches were orchid and gold. But the room was old… old… the petals faded and peeling, the golden tile floor ancient and the tessellations splitting. There was an old, old man stretched on the couch, musty and wilted, like a dried weed… like the dessication of a venomous mandrake root.

No, not even the misspelling of “desiccation” can ruin the moment. It’d be fair to say the novel has been “heightened” up to this point, but D’Courtney’s room being described as like a dying flower in conjunction with the man’s physical sickness comes as positively dreamlike—yet not necessarily running in contrast with everything else, which is knee-deep in Freudian lingo and symbolism. (As another aside, I was brutally reminded of how fucking awful the copy-editing for ’50s-era Galaxy was. That this magazine was hyped to hell and back despite having enough typos and misprints to make self-published authors blush is telling of the actual content’s quality.)

Despite D’Courtney’s protests, feebleness, and apparent denial of rejecting Reich’s request for a deal, the deed is done. For a split second it looks like Reich is about to execute his plan perfectly, only that there is one major problem: someone saw the killing.

A Step Farther Out

I do have to wonder why Bester trips over his own dick with Freudian psychology here; he didn’t exactly strike me as a Freudian type in his other stories. In fact, when Bester spoke once with Campbell and realized how fucking looney the latter was with his thoughts on ESP and Dianetics, he stopped contributing to Astounding. Not to say pseudoscience can’t be used in a compelling way for the sake of a story, as ESP plays a major part in The Demolished Man and largely informs its idiosyncrasies for the better, but the emphasis on Freud strikes me as both conspicuous and of-its-time.

I don’t want to say this novel is “dated,” because I think calling old SF dated is a worthless sentiment. Of course old SF is dated, this shit was written seventy years ago. Few things peeve me like readers dunking on classic works in the field because of their age, because let’s face it, everything is going show its age at some point. The real question is, how compelling is this thing in the current year? I would say it’s pretty good still. The pacing, once we get past the opening exposition dump, is lightning quick, and as is often true of novels from that time when paperback publishing hadn’t yet become in vogue for SF, it’s short; even if you don’t like it, you can’t be too mad about wasting your time on it.

Bester is an efficient writer, and while his economy combined with his artsy-fartsy sensibilities are demonstrated more succinctly with his short stories, he makes a good first impression at novel length with The Demolished Man. I feel like we’re just getting started with this, though; we haven’t even really met the not-Columbo who will inevitably bring Reich to justice. Because we know Reich has to fail, it’s just a question of how.

See you next time.

Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Tag: john w. campbell

The Observatory: On Depression, Science Fiction, and the End of World War II

Novella Review: “The Big Front Yard” by Clifford D. Simak

Serial Review: The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester (Part 1/3)