The Demolished Man

The Demolished Man is a 1951 science-fiction novel by Alfred Bester, and was the first Hugo Award winner in 1953.

The Landscape

The action takes place in a future New York City, one in which a major war has occurred, leaving behind some remarkable features. One location is known as Bomb Inlet, but the most bizarre is an installation called 99 Bastion West Side, a mega-brothel built where a nuclear explosion caused thousands of tons of liquid glass and ceramics to melt in an underground chamber. The result is a multi-colored, singing, solid lake which the owner, Chooka Frood, uses as part of a mystic fortune-telling act. It is here that Barbara D'Courtney is eventually found, in a zombie-like state, participating in the act. The building above is a 3-D maze of odd-sized chambers used variously for vice and for evading pursuit by the authorities.

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This combination of low-life characters in wrecked and run-down locations is one of the reasons the novel is regarded as a prototype of the style that later became known as cyberpunk.

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On the other side of the coin, there is much hi-tech in evidence, though it is used in comic-book fashion to propel the plot, without regard for long-term consequences. Thus there are fast space-ships, artificial gravity, Neuron Scrambler guns, aerial cars known as Jumpers, force-shields, "temporal phase" technology used to hide a safe, and so on. The weapon used in the murder, however, comes from that most ancient establishment, a seedy pawnshop, run by an ostracized telepath who made the mistake of breaking Guild rules for money offered by Reich.

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