An animated Keanu Reeves in the screen adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly (2006). Photograph: Warner Ind/Everett/Rex Features
The annual Hugo Awards for science fiction and fantasy have been running uninterrupted (with the exception of a brief hiatus in 1954) since 1953. Voting is open to anyone prepared to stump up the money (currently $40) and the ceremony has been held all over the world. As such, the awards can lay serious claim to being one of the most venerable, democratic and international in existence, not to mention one of the most transparent.
Outside the sci-fi community, however, the awards barely resonate. Leaving aside the (admittedly interesting) question of whether democratic voting will always select the best novel over that year's populist Dan Brown equivalent, there's the well-known snobbery around these genre books. Science fiction may be one of the defining literatures of the last century, but it's rare that its products get any kind of acceptance by the academy (and when they do, they're then generally called something else).
The 1953 winner, Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, is a case in point. Although it still makes most fan lists of the top science fiction books of all time, it's rarely mentioned in the mainstream press. Trawling through the Guardian digital archive, for instance, I uncovered only two hits for the book; one an advert placed in the Observer in 1953, one in an article by Martin Amis in 1975, who mentioned it (briefly) only so he could dismiss its author as a cult figure ("always a worrying sign"). Meanwhile in more recent Guardians there have been just two more passing mentions here and here - both written by self-confessed sci-fi junkies.
So I was curious to see if The Demolished Man deserves to have been so ghettoised, or if this is a book that could appeal to someone like me, with only a casual interest in the genre. Since I enjoyed it, I suppose the short answers are "no" and "yes", respectively. There is a rather more complex long answer, however.
The plot is intriguing. It's a kind of 24th-century how-dunnit about Ben Reich, a man who manages to commit a murder in an age when the police force is dominated by psychics and most crimes are spotted long before they happen. It's fast-paced and snappy and films like Minority Report (not to mention a mooted version of this book itself) are testament to the continuing fascination of its central premise.
The trouble is that before the action can really get rolling, Bester has to go to a lot of trouble to explain how the various levels of psychics (known as "peepers") operate in society, how people travel from planet to planet, how the anti-hero will be able to deflect the attentions of the peepers, and so on. Alongside all that, there's a lot of work to put in wading through jargon about "hydropathic beds", "multi-clocks", "espers", "v-phones" and similar.
"Information dumping", of course, is one of the sticks critics of sci-fi use to beat the genre. Such naysayers could also probably make a fairly strong case about Bester's writing and its marked pulp fiction tendencies. That Bester's prose isn't exactly subtle can be fairly well gauged from the very first words (and their accompanying punctuation): "Explosion! Concussion!" Worse yet, he doesn't hold back from bizarre, universe-warping plot twists. Towards the end, we are told (breathlessly) that Reich is set to become "the deadly enemy of Galactic reason and reality" and that this is certainly cause for "Alarm!" Sadly, the reason he might become so dangerous is never properly explained. Even if it weren't daft, it would be confusing.
All the same, I did see the appeal. Bester's quick-fire prose shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. He's no Hemingway, but there is something to be said for his lean, spare writing, while a few dabs of typographical experimentation surrounding peeper psychic communication work admirably.
Many of Bester's ideas are also fascinating as historical curiosities. It's fun seeing how the future was imagined by someone writing before the age of the microchip - when a giant ticker tape-spitting computer would seem like the most impressive machine imaginable - not to mention someone who thought that if you ventured inside a person's psyche you really would find the raging torrents of the id, the ego, the superego and other Freudian ideas made manifest. Some of his imaginative fancies, meanwhile, remain strikingly modern. Vivid descriptions of grungey post-apocalyptic brothels and cynically exploitative holiday planets wouldn't seem out of place in contemporary cyber punk, while a few neat jokes remain surprisingly fresh. (There's a particularly good line about annoying jingles being called pepsis although no one can remember why.)
Finally, as science fiction advocates are always telling us, the futuristic setting allows Bester to pose all sorts of interesting questions about man's position in the universe, not to mention the structure and values of contemporary society. The Demolished Man might be an unashamedly easy read, but that doesn't mean it's dumb. Certainly, it intrigued me enough to make me want to get my mitts on the next Hugo winner - the very special looking They'd Rather Be Right by Mark Clitfon and Frank Riley.
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