March was a bit of a marathon here at SFF Remembrance, but truth be told I had more fun writing about that very old and dusty science fiction than in the past few months. I had been suffering from fatigue, along with some real-life stuff that was getting to me and making it hard to sleep at night. Now I feel somewhat rejuvinated. I feel good enough about reviewing stuff here again, in fact, that I’m bringing back the two-short-stories two-novellas deal, although I’m still keeping it to one serial for the month. The serial in question is a three-parter, being the first appearance of one of the most important SF novels ever written—and yet one that has been totally lost to the sands of time. You might find references to The Skylark of Space if you’re a Star Wars fan, as a point of trivia, since it was this novel that in part invented the space opera subgenre. Edmond Hamilton was writing space opera at shorter lengths around the same time Smith made his debut, but there was nothing on the scale of Smith’s novel before it. Smith “revised” it for its eventual book publication, removing co-author Le Hawkins Garby’s contributions, but we’ll be reading it as it appeared in Amazing Stories. This was a long time coming for me.
For the dates of stories, we’re looking at one from the 1920s, two from the 1950s, one from the 1960s, and one from the 1990s. Both of the stories from the ’50s are from the first half of that decade, which was an incredibly productive period for magazine SF.
For the serial:
The Skylark of Space by E. E. Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby. Serialized in Amazing Stories, August to October 1928. When Smith studied chemistry at the University of Iowa, he didn’t think he would later become one of the pioneering authors of space opera. He didn’t even think he would write fiction, until he talked science fiction with Lee Hawkins Garby and her husband, who were friends from college. This was in 1915, before “science fiction” had even been coined as a label. The Skylark of Space took some years to gestate, but when it appeared in 1928 it made Smith a sensation among the then-niche SF readership. Garby’s contributions were later removed when the novel appeared belatedly in book form.
For the novellas:
“Half-Past Eternity” by John D. MacDonald. From the July 1950 issue of Super Science Stories. Fans of classic crime fiction will be familiar with MacDonald, at least by reputation. His Travis McGee series is one of the most prolific and widely read detective series ever. In 1972 he was given the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America. He also wrote a good deal of SF from the late ’40s through the early ’50s, along with nearly every other genre.
“Death in the Promised Land” by Pat Cadigan. From the November 1995 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. It was first published in the March 1995 issue of Omni, but that magazine had gone purely online by that point and the Asimov’s printing marked its first physical appearance. Cadigan is arguably the queen of cyberpunk, going back to the ’80s. She’s not as famous as William Gibson or Bruce Sterling, but she really should be more read than she is.
For the short stories:
“Dumb Martian” by John Wyndham. From the July 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s surprising to think that Wyndham had made his SF debut in the early ’30s. His career peak came later than it does with most authors, since he was deep in his forties when The Day of the Triffids was published. The ’50s were a great time to be John Wyndham, between his novels and short stories.
“Timberline” by Brian W. Aldiss. From the September 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This is the fourth installment in Aldiss’s Hothouse series, which was then published as a novel. The series of stories, rather than the novel version, won Aldiss a Hugo, which was certainly a confusing move. It’s been almost a year since I reviewed the last Hothouse story, so here we go.
(Cover by Hisaki Yasuda. Asimov’s, February 1990.)
Who Goes There?
Pat Cadigan is one of the most important writers behind the cyberpunk movement in the ’80s and early ’90s, although she doesn’t come up in conversation nearly as often as William Gibson or Bruce Sterling, probably because she’s more adept at short lengths than as a novelist. She actually made her debut a good bit before her rise to prominence in the ’80s, being an editor for one issue of the sword-and-sorcery magazine Chacal, as well as the SFF magazine Shayol. Speaking of Gibson, one strange way the two have crossed paths is that Cadigan wrote a novelization of Alien 3—not the film or the film’s script, but Gibson’s script which had gone unused, in the midst of that movie’s notoriously troubled production. She has written several film novelizations over the years, including, of all things, a novelization of Jason X. But it’s her association with cyberpunk that has secured her legacy. She even edited one of the better anthologies focused on the movement, The Ultimate Cyberpunk. “Fool to Believe” itself would serve as the germ for Cadigan’s 1992 novel Fools, although she had written the former first with the initial intent of it being a standalone story.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the February 1990 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. “Fool to Believe” has never appeared in book form, possibly because Fools has rendered it obsolete; unfortunately Fools itself is very much out of print, so neither is all that accessible.
Enhancing Image
Sorry for the wait, but I decided to take a bit of a mini-vacation from working on this site. I was feeling burnt out a little, although I have to admit it doesn’t help that “Fool to Believe” is a vast and nigh-indecipherable story which uses its length to good effect. It’s easily the longest Cadigan story I’ve read so far, and aside from “Pretty Boy Crossover” it’s the straightest example of cyberpunk coming from her that I’ve read. Apparently “Fool to Believe” (and by extension Fools) is set in the same continuity as Cadigan’s first novel, Mindplayers, although while Gardner Dozois’s introduction says this, ISFDB does not acknowledge the two as being in the same series. Maybe somebody should get on that? This is a detective story, which is unsurprising given that cyberpunk is basically the bastard child of science fiction and detective fiction. When you read Neuromancer you’re seeing Raymond Chandler’s influence at work, including a propensity for murky plotting. I’m gonna be upfront and say I barely understood what the fuck was happening in “Fool to Believe,” it being the kind of story one really ought to read twice, and unfortunately I was only able to get through it once. If I had my physical copy of this issue of Asimov’s on me I might’ve been able to do a second reading, but most of my SFF magazines are still at my parents’ house. Oh well. Cadigan is hunting intellectual big game and she crams a lot (maybe too much) into sixty magazine pages. I can see why she decided at some point to expand the thing into a novel.
What is the plot? Or rather, what is the premise? This is a murder mystery, of sorts, although a murder strictly speaking hasn’t happened. An up-and-coming actor named Sovay has had his mind wiped, his body technically alive but now a hollowed-out shell that will probably get refitted with a new personality. Personalities mean about as much as bodies in this future, wherein on top of the usual organ transplants you also have personality transplants—sometimes voluntarily, but sometimes not. There’s the regular police, but then there’s the Brain Police, having been founded to deal with such crimes as the involuntary wiping of people’s brains. (In one of the more unsettling little touches of how the Brain Police work, they remove the hollowed-out Sovay’s eyeballs, since apparently people change eyes in this world almost like one would change shoes, and linking and wiping minds is done via the optic nerve.) The mystery then is who wiped Sovay’s mind and who bought his personality.
As Mersine explains:
The involuntary mindwipe—mindsuck—is just as gone, except the trappings of a live body remain to confound the survivors. A mindsuck is interred not in a grave but in a special quarantine to allow the development of a new mind and personality. Sometimes the new person is a lot like the old one. Most of the time, however, it’s only spottily reminiscent of the person that had been, as though the suck had freed an auxiliary person that had always been there, just waiting for the elimination of the primary personality.
Mersine herself is part of the Brain Police, so this case falls to her. Her job is to go undercover and coax information out of people working in the criminal underworld, specifically the black market for personalities. She’s fitted with a second personality for this job, an “imp” (a personality implant) named Marya, who’s a “memory-junkie” and so is familiar with how the black market works—or rather she has memories of the black market. Cadigan depicts the alternating of the two personalities in a simple but effective way, not only changing fonts (actually it might be the same font for Marya but bolded, I’m not sure) but changing tenses, with Mersine narrating in the past tense while Marya narrates in the present tense. This changing of tenses, especially for first-person narration, is an odd choice that takes some getting used to, but given what happens near the end of the story I can see why they’re different. The metaphysical implications of mindswapping and mindsucking in “Fool to Believe” are a bit disturbing, since typically we think of the human body and the human personality as separate, to an extent, but ultimately necessary to each other’s existence. What qualifies as the soul and where does it lurk? The ancient Egyptians thought it was in one’s heart, but modern medicine has taught us that a person can survive without the heart they were given at birth—indeed, they can continue to live and be “themselves” with damn near every organ replaced. Except for the brain. The human personality seems to boil down to a working brain and at least one of the senses, which for the purposes of “Fool to Believe” is the sense of vision. Thus this is a story about personality and perception.
There is not a plot so much as there is a network of characters whose interests intersect and run at odds with each other, thus giving the appearance of a plot. I’m not sure if this is a negative criticism or just stemming from me being a dumbass who didn’t read the story thoroughly enough, but while the setting of “Fool to Believe” is gripping and at times disturbing, the actual mystery surrounding Sovay is not. We have quite a few characters, but aside from Marya each of them is only drawn so vividly. We’ve got Rowan, Sovay’s wife (or widow, it’s ambiguous when it comes to cases like this), who from the beginning acts suspiciously and who might have been plotting behind her husband’s back. We have Coney Loe, who’s arguably the closest the story has to a villain, a “hype-head” who peddles mind-altering procedures like one peddles drugs. I should probably take this as an opportunity to talk about mental illness in the context of “Fool to Believe,” namely what used to be called multiple personality disorder. Damn near everybody here has some kind of mental disorder, but it depression, mania (there’s a parlor for experiencing religious mania called Sojourn For Truth, which I might add is a good pun), schizophrenia, or what is now called dissociative identity disorder. Mersine is basically made to have DID, if only temporarily, but the effect sharing a head with Marya has on her psyche is considerable. The two personalities, both being quite individual and assertive, regularly alternate as to who gets to be the dominant personality, and the switching is not always voluntary. Of course, since personalities can be transplanted from body to body, and even appear in multiple bodies at the same time, this raises the question of if Mersine has always been in control of the body she currently has.
There Be Spoilers Here
After figuring out the conspiracy behind Sovay’s mindsucking (basically having his mind held for ransom, which Rowan was willing to pay with anything or anyone to get back) and narrowly avoided getting mindsucked herself, Mersine/Marya has encountered an existential problem: neither of them is the original personality behind Mersine’s body. Mersine goes dormant, leaving Marya in charge of the body. She decides to quit the force, although technically she chooses not to renew her contract, since it was about to expire anyway. The case proved to be too much. In fairness, being on the Brain Police sounds like a huge—well, you can guess what I’m about to say. The sharing of the minds ends up being permanent. The only question then is, what happens next? I assume Fools answers that question, in that it follows Mersine/Marya after this case, but we’ll have to wait and see. I’m intrigued enough that I might seek it out.
A Step Farther Out
When I finished reading “Fool to Believe” I was worried I wouldn’t have much to write about, hence another reason why this review got delayed—not because there wasn’t enough to write about, but simply because I didn’t understand what I was dealing with well enough. Cadigan is a challenging writer at times, which makes me wonder what her novels (well, her originals, not the novelizations) read like. I do not recommend getting into her with “Fool to Believe,” instead going for something that’s shorter and more satisfying on a conventional level, like “Roadside Rescue” or “Pretty Boy Crossover.” This has also been an object lesson in how if I have a physical copy of a story on hand, I really should go for that rather than trudge through a digital copy.
Not much to say this month, except of course it is the start of Pride Month. For me Pride Month is every month of the year, so I don’t put that much significance in it; maybe I would if I went out more, attended some events in my city, which I should probably do. I’m only now realizing, as I’m finishing up this forecast post, that I could’ve also given more space to authors I know to be queer, but oh well. I focus more on old-timey SF (What even counts as “old-timey” at this point, like pre-2000?), and unfortunately there aren’t many confirmed-queer authors from before maybe the ’70s. You’ve got Frank M. Robinson, who was gay. Ditto for Samuel R. Delany. I’ve heard from a respectable source that Theodore Sturgeon was bisexual, but I’ve yet to dig into this and find actual evidence of it. Marion Zimmer Bradley was queer, but she was also a heinous sex criminal so I’m not sure about counting that. Joanna Russ was a lesbian, although I forget when she came out. You can see what my problem is there.
More so I thought about using this month to inject a bit more variety into my reviewing plate, so that it’s not all science fiction. Obviously I have to finish the Zelazny serial, which I’m liking quite a bit so far, but I also got the itch to tackle some sword-and-sorcery fantasy that isn’t Fritz Leiber or Robert E. Howard. Fuck it, John Jakes’s Brak the Barbarian. We’re also finally returning to Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse “series” with the third entry, this “series” being very much science-fantasy rather than straight SF. We’ve got a ’50s Cold War story from Philip K. Dick, who I love, and who in the ’50s seemed preoccupied with the possibility of nuclear annihilation. Relatable. Last but not least I’ve got a cyberpunk novella from Pat Cadigan, who on reflection I think is one of my favorite short fiction writers from the ’80s and ’90s. Then there’s Sonya Dorman, who I know I’ve read a few stories from in passing but I’ve not actively sought her out until now.
Going by decade, we’ve got one story from the 1950s, two from the 1960s, two from the 1970s, and one from the 1990s.
For the serials:
Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny. Serialized in Analog Science Fiction, June to August 1975. Zelazny is one of the most influential SFF writers of all time, his mark being apparent on the likes of George R. R. Martin and (God help us) Neil Gaiman; and yet despite a couple generations of writers (especially those of fantasy) owing a debt to Zelazny, much of his work remains obscure or simply out of print, including this standalone novel.
Witch of the Four Winds by John Jakes. Serialized in Fantastic, November to December 1963. Jakes later found mainstream success writing historical fiction, but his early career was defined by SF and especially fantasy. During the sword-and-sorcery revival of the ’60s Jakes came in with his own sword-swinging hero, Brak the Barbarian. This serial got published in book form under the much worse title of Brak the Barbarian Versus the Sorceress.
For the novellas:
“Fool to Believe” by Pat Cadigan. From the February 1990 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. When it comes to naming the architects of cyberpunk the first to come up are William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, but Cadigan was also instrumental in shaping the movement. She had actually made her debut in the late ’70s, but as she did not write her first novel for several years she initially made her name as one of the best short fiction writers in the field.
“Undergrowth” by Brian W. Aldiss. From the July 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Aldiss started as a brave new talent in the UK before quickly (much faster than most of his peers, it must be said) making a name for himself in the US. “Undergrowth” is the third Hothouse story, out of five, all of which would then form the “novel” Hothouse. Aldiss won a Hugo for these stories collectively, as opposed to the novel version.
For the short stories:
“Breakfast at Twilight” by Philip K. Dick. From the July 1954 issue of Amazing Stories. In the ’50s, before he turned more to writing novels, Dick was one of the most prolific and awesome short story writers in the field. Not everything he churned out was a hit, but he had a respectably high batting average. Of course it’s very hard for me to be objective with Dick since he’s one of my favorites.
“Journey” by Sonya Dorman. From the November-December 1972 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Dorman was a poet as well as a short story writer who only wrote SF sporadically, and mostly for original anthologies, even appearing in Dangerous Visions. Most of her short fiction has been reprinted rarely or not at all, with “Journey” never appearing in book form as of yet.
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.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 