In The Demolished Man, Espers make up the population at all levels and work in concert to prevent murder through dissuasion – there’s no point in committing because the psychic population will detect your guilt. In Dick’s world, his “precogs” have been co-opted by the government and are systemically used by the police department to stop murder through preemptive arrests. Dick’s posthumously famous short story, “ The Minority Report.” Both stories feature a society in which murder has been rendered impossible thanks to the emergence of psychics capable of reading minds and predicting murders before they happen. Skimming over a summary of The Demolished Man, one can’t help but notice similarities to Philip K. For Bester, our true selves are what destroy us. In The Demolished Man, the Espers, and by extension pyschoanalists and psychoanalysis, are the most fearful characters, for it is these entities that are able to look within us and show us our true selves, and it is our true selves that we fear the most. Instead it is a deepening nervousness about the power of the emerging field of personal psychoanalysis that is represented by the Espers, a large group of human beings who have evolved the power of ESP or mind-reading. But it’s not the economics that drive this novel. In the introduction to the 1996 Vintage edition (which I read), fellow sci-fi author Harry Harrison quickly synopsizes the book with a heavy focus on the capitalist structure of Bester’s future. Originally serialized in 1951, the novel appeared during the golden 1950s, in the midst of the baby boom, and at the dawning of the age of the expert.
Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man became the first Hugo winner in 1953.
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