There’s a crescendo of additional speculative elements. Justifications for that stupid behavior are one-dimensional (or power, or self-deception, or love).

Highly intelligent characters behave foolishly. The prose is sharp and the tension alright. It’s finished in a couple of hours easily. Bester knew how to write. 250 pages, nothing complex, the pacing is spectacular. If not taken too seriously, it has aged quite well.

Within that frame The Demolished Man is mainly a police procedural about a megalomaniacal murderer and a psychic cop. It is science fiction because Freudian psychoanalysis was still considered scientific at the time, and Bester imagines a future time wherein a certain percentage of humans have discovered their telepathic powers. And not because the judge is a computer, as that could have been any bureaucrat. Not because cars are called jumpers and can fly. The fact that humans colonized the solar system is not explored one bit – the most comical moment of the book is when a character wonders if he’ll catch the “10 o’clock rocket” to someplace off-planet. Not because it features Venus or Ganymede as locations, as that doesn’t matter either, it could have been Hawaii and Malawi too. Is this book science fiction? Not because it’s set in 2301 AD, as that doesn’t matter for the story: it could have been 1981 AD just as well. It were trippy times, and the belief in the potential powers of the mind was hopeful and naive.

Clarke dabbled in the paranormal: see the few lines I quoted from the foreword to Childhood’s End – also published in 1953, Asimov had telepaths living in a second Foundation, and Frank Herbert wrote The Santaroga Barrieras late as 1968. The CIA had a secret program (‘Project MKULtra’) trying to gain insight into mind control during the 1950s and the early sixties. What to write about this first ever winner of the Hugo award? The main conclusion must be this: times have changed.

The demolished man