The Nominees
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
The Actual Results
- The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
How I Would Have Voted
- (Abstain)
Explanation
I didn’t hate this book—I did finish it, after all—but I had some issues with it, especially the ending. It’s basically a futuristic murder mystery / true crime piece, where the protagonist is a telepathic detective who figures out immediately who committed the murder, but has to jump through a bunch of hoops in order to gather the evidence and prosecute the case. The story isn’t a whodunnit so much as a character piece about the motivations behind murder, with a fair amount of action and some intriguing world-building thrown in for good measure.
There’s a lot of good, old-fashioned sci-fi stuff in here, especially with the espers and the telepaths (which were all the rage back in the science fiction of the 50s), but the ending rubbed me the wrong way, because it’s not about putting the murderer behind bars, but in “demolishing” him, brainwashing him so completely that he’s not even really capable of committing such a crime. Just like telepathy and extra-sensory perception were big in golden-age sci-fi, so was the idea that an elite class of benevolent technocrats could use The Science to usher in a futuristic utopia. That was what rubbed me the wrong way about this one.
There were also some hippy/beatnik elements in it that I didn’t like, such as a dinner party with some flagrant and gratuitous nudity. For all that golden age and new wave authors loved to project a post-sexual revolution future, most of them did a really piss-poor job anticipating its second- and third-order effects (Heinlein being one of the chief offenders—but we’ll get there). In spite of all this, I wouldn’t go so far as to vote “no award” over this one. Rather, I’d probably just abstain.
As a side note, 1953 was the first Hugo Award ever issued. As such, the nominating and voting process hadn’t been ironed out yet, so The Demolished Man was the only nominee.
“…the idea that an elite class of benevolent technocrats could use The Science to usher in a futuristic utopia.”
Yeah, these days they’re called the Democratic Party elite, with some RHINOs thrown in.
Oh, and I look forward to your article(s) on Heinlein. I read him a lot in the 1980’s, and his books were where I first encountered Libertarian ideas.