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R.S. Benedict
Welcome to this month’s bonus episode of Rite Gud. In this edition of the book club, we’re looking at Alfred Bester’s the demolished cat excuse me Harley. That is the Demolished Man. Winner of the first Hugo Award. Joining us is Stephen Mazur, former assistant editor of the magazine of fantasy and science fiction. And Kurt Schiller, editor in chief of blood knife magazine. Both of you guys were psyched to talk about this book. So what is it about the book that you both love so much?
KS
Kurt Schiller
Sex, telepaths guns, people, people smoking all the time and go on, you got a good pair of soldiers on your name. So this, this was one of the two or three books that got me interested in the pulp era of sci fi, and I stumbled upon it in a used bookstore in like halfway through college when I was kind of like I had I had run, I had gotten tired of reading all this stuff that I read when I was a teenager. And I was like, alright, well, let’s see what what else is out there. And I actually think I read the stars, my destination bestsellers, other really well known novel first, and then I immediately went and read this one. So it was it was a very formative novel for me. And I think I think ever since then, it’s both dramatically influenced the way that I like, see and understand sci fi, and also kind of the way that I think about like influences because there’s so much in this that just keeps like resurfacing and resurfacing and resurfacing in different different media. So plus, I think it’s just a it’s a ripping yarn.
RB
R.S. Benedict
So yeah, it’s a really fun book.
SM
Stephen Mazur
I read it later in life. I didn’t read this until 2019. But you know, I knew about it from from working at snsf. Gordon would mention Alfred Bester. John Joseph Adams, I think has said on numerous public occasions that his favorite SF novel is like Kurt said, basters other great novel stars, my destination. And I also read Stars My Destination first, probably about 10 years ago, you know, thought was really cool. And then just, you know, I had it on my shelf. And one day, I was like, Well, you know, let’s see what demolish man is like, and I don’t know, I I’m not sure which one I like best, but reading it again. It just, it’s such a good book. I mean, it’s a masterful debut. I was afraid that I wouldn’t finish this in time for the episode because you know, I’m a lot busier now than I was in 2019. But I managed to read it in exactly the same amount of time that I did. Before I had a kid which was four days. I got through it in four days. quick read. Yeah, I really love how I love how packed it is. It is just so packed with plot and character, and all sorts of SF novel ideas. But it’s also incredibly slim. It’s only like 240 pages long. And it’s so propulsive, it just goes and it keeps going and it never lets up. And I just feel like people don’t they don’t know how to write like this anymore. Yeah,
KS
Kurt Schiller
I think part of it might be that like, where where Bester was coming from when when he wrote this was was basically coming out of like, a couple of decades of writing like radio serials. Like he he very much his little I can see that. Yeah, like big chunks of his career was writing like noir and mystery murder, like 1940s radio shows where it’s all you know, it’s just dialogue. And I think that probably really comes through in this novel, which is like, I had forgotten how dialogue heavy it is. And it’s like, it’s like well written, well characterized dialogue, but it definitely has that that kind of like detective show cadence. Like, I could almost hear people like making footstep sounds like thunder crush sounds in the background with like a big sheet of metal.
RB
R.S. Benedict
Oh, that makes so much sense.
SM
Stephen Mazur
It’s really interesting to think of, you know, we think of Bester as like, oh, you know, he was a science fiction writer. You know, he wrote two of the greatest science fiction novels that you know the field has ever produced, which is true. But from his point of view, the science fiction was always was pretty much always like a fun hobby for him. His real career was in like actual entertainment. He broke in to writing In through the pulps, Nick he started off with thrilling wonder magazine. And he wrote stories there for a few years but then the the editors of thrilling wonder, I think their names were more why Zinger and Jack Schiff they jumped from thrilling wonder stories to the comics industry. I forget which one it is it might have been DC or it was later became DC. Right. And they took Bester with him. So that’s how he broke into writing for the comics. And he wrote for the comics for several years. He wrote for for Captain Marvel, the Green Lantern star spangled kid, he might have written for Superman, I’ve seen things where somebody said that he wrote for Superman but then I think he might have also said that he never wrote for Superman. And then from comics he got into radio from radio he got into television from that he he started working at as a features writer for holiday magazine, which was this big important slick back in like the 60s and 70s. It was a sister magazine to the Saturday Evening Post. So his his job entertainment was capital E entertainment. I think it’s a really great career saying before about how the writing in this book is influenced by his time in radio and comics. And I just love how cinematic, the the writing, in the Demolished Man is, you know, something that repel other episodes of this podcast that you’ve touched on before? Is that how you know how like a lot of bad SF writing just feels like it’s a bad movie script. Or, you know, it just it it reads like the writer just had, you know, like a TV show going on in their head and they’re just mechanically like, you know, describing to you what’s happening on their imagined television screen and like, that’s all bad cinematic writing, but this is great cinematic writing, especially chapter eight, when Ben Reich and Lincoln Powell are both like hunting for Barbara Courtney all those quick choppy little scenes. It’s like quick cuts in a TV show. But it’s just done for such great effect. It works as a novel and I just I love it.
RB
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, and I can see that they’re almost I’m not sure what else to call them but set pieces but some really interesting settings the the game of sardines in that rich lady’s house that is identical. That is identical to the old Penn Station that like crazy psychedelic melted chemical factory where the psychic has her whole like psychic show and then strip club review. Just all these the Spaceland I fucking love Spaceland. I love space. Graceland rules safe. Yeah, it’s fun. It’s very lean this book and that it’s like I want to I have these crazy ideas. I want to show you something I want to show you something big and crazy and ridiculous. I want to show you this weird melted psychedelic psychic, I want to show you this weird space theme park. I want to show you all these things. Let’s go. Let’s let’s pick and go for it. And it just keeps going for it. And it’s got this real fun energy to it. And I think what I love about this story is what I love about a lot of olders sci fi pulp, which is that there’s no actual science in the science fiction and frankly, the story is better for it. Science fiction is the best when there’s no legitimate science in it. There’s zero legitimate science in this novel. Thank fucking god it rocks.
KS
Kurt Schiller
Yeah, this this novel does a lot of what I really it’s like a it’s like a hallmark of this era of science fiction like before, because this is this is really right on the cusp of when like, like what we would consider modern hard sci fi like really started to take over to this is kind of like on the tail end of that pulp era. And they kind of coexisted for a little while that that much more like engineering fiction type type thing, but more like, like a cold equations where it’s very like, well, what’s what’s the science, let’s talk about the mass. But But this type of sci fi does this thing all the time. It’ll mention a name. It’s a harmonic gun. And everyone runs around in a panic. And then about two paragraphs later, you get about three sentences that explain what a harmonic gun is, and then it just never comes up again. And they just move on. It never
RB
R.S. Benedict
tells us how it works. Because it doesn’t it is bullshit. It doesn’t matter. You just don’t. And that’s all that’s all. That’s all I need to know. That’s perfect. That’s all I know.
Matthew Keeley
Exactly.
RB
R.S. Benedict
Exactly. That’s all I need to know. That’s all I want to know. I’m happy. So before we dive in, maybe we should talk about just give a brief synopsis of the novel for those who haven’t read it. I guess it, but this demolish cat. But this is a novel that takes place in future New York City. And it’s a murder mystery set in a future in which there has been no murder for 70 years. Because society is sort of kept in check by psychic civil servants mind readers called Asperger’s or sometimes called peepers as slang which is such a funny slang word which I really
KS
Kurt Schiller
that that annoyed so many contemporary sorry contemporary like now not not contemporary to when it came out. I looked through like a handful of like modern reviews of and a lot of people like I can’t stand all the 1950s stuff like like peepers and I love
RB
R.S. Benedict
- campiness of the slang I love it. Everybody talks like some sort of 1950s person. It’s so much fun. I love the bad 1950s Freudian psychoanalysis to Oh, god, it’s so bad.
SM
Stephen Mazur
It must have been in the water. It’s just all over this book. And I feel like it’s all like hardly anybody talked about back then. You know, you have an Oedipal complex, so you’re a youngin archetype is out of whack.
KS
Kurt Schiller
I watched a bunch of and or read a couple of interviews with Bester there’s a really entertaining one on YouTube. I think it’s the 1972 Worldcon where he’s kind of like shows up and he just thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I 76 He just sits there like smoking a cigarette, just kind of like telling stories and like shooting the shit nice. And one of the things he says is that he liked young in and Freudian stuff, because it was a good like tool to play with while making a story. And he didn’t seem super invested in it personally. So I think it’s kind of an open question, whether it’s something he believed in, or whether he just thought it was something fun to like Institute to use in stories. But yeah, there’s definitely was something in the water in general. And I think a big part of it is the same thing that you see in the foundation books by Asimov, where it’s this idea that like, well, we’ve unlocked the hard sciences, you know, now we have harnessed the power of science to build industry and technology. And there was this assumption, I think, around those around around this era, and like the 40s and 50s, that the same thing was going to happen with psychology and the social science and that within 20 or 30 years, we’d be able to predict and model the behavior and alter the behavior of the human mind and society and culture. And clearly, it didn’t, didn’t exactly play out like that. But like, you know, this is the era and this shows up in the story to win, like, the modern discipline of marketing was being created. And this idea of like marketing, altering people’s minds and behaviors. And so I think it was, you know, it was something that was a genuine like, social concern and idea at the same time as well as fertile ground for fiction.
RB
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, there’s a lot of sort of social commentary in this book. And in sort of a fun way it is very mad men in some ways, it’s very, like, consumer land. Look at this. Weird I mean, like advertising and rich and wealth play a huge role in this there’s a, there’s a whole bit about an advertising jingle, the guy uses an a really obnoxious ear worm of an advertising jingle, in order to like, put up a mental block to keep the psychics from reading his mind, because he’s just keeps, like having this really irritating song. And that’s all they’re getting out of them. Such a great idea. It’s just great. It’s brilliant.
KS
Kurt Schiller
I think that a lot of that benefits from the fact that there wasn’t a like pop cultural idea of what does it mean to be a telepath here, and now there’s a hundreds, if not 1000s of movies and TV shows about people with you know, telepathy, there’s Professor X, who says comic book characters, just movies, blah, blah, blah. Like, if you say, a telepath, people immediately have an idea of like, what that means what it looks like, what it looks like, you’re imagining someone like touching their hand to their forehead and squinting. And Bester, you know, was writing at a time when that wasn’t so much of a pop culture thing. And so he has a much more open canvas, and he’s just kind of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. And, uh, what he winds up doing is kind of saying, Okay, well, what if there was a society where there were telepaths everywhere? What would that look like? And you know, he’s not really trying to do super serious, like, social modeling or anything, but I think he does a good job of, you know, integrating it like what what would a lawyer do? Well, obviously, your lawyer would have to be a telepath to know if the other guy’s telepathic lawyer was spying on you. So obviously, all of the like professional careers are going to be held by telepath and so on. And so he so he kind of is he’s able to reason from like first principles in a way that I think modern writers struggle to because first you have to get away from like the kind of like tried and true pop culture cliche 80 that everybody already has access to, because nobody wants to read that, you know, an 800 of time.
RB
R.S. Benedict
Let’s talk a little bit about the way he portrays psychic reading and psychic thought using some kind of interesting text formatting. If you’ve read House of Leaves, you’re familiar with how the writer might use text on the page. And the way it’s formatted to show ideas falling. And in this one, he uses text formatting to show people’s ideas overlapping as a bunch of psychics go to a dinner party to have a discussion, like their thoughts sort of wrap together and intersect and bounce off of each other. I love the bit where they’re playing a mind game where they’re each, they each get like a psychic sentence, and they’re supposed to weave them together into a grid. And there’s a lot of these really great little touches in there. And something I thought that was kind of fun and kind of charming is that there’s a lot of uses of special characters and people’s names, a little bit late screen names, like there’s someone named like Weigand, and the end is like an ampersand
KS
Kurt Schiller
at kids. So that’s one of two or three things that I wonder if William Gibson didn’t just take directly because I I know that he’s a big fan of pester, and he’s a big fan of this book in the stars. My destination has talked about it, it influencing his kind of ideas of cyberpunk when he was writing Neuromancer. And there’s similar things. There’s like there’s a character named F three, Jane, for instance, there’s also an orbital space station that’s filled with rich people that they’ve kind of cobbled together this is there’s a lot of ideas that appear in both works. And yeah, I love the use of like special characters. And it’s funny because as you say, Raquel this is like more mad men than it is Mad Max. So like, you know, he’s thinking of like typewriters. There is a computer that prominently appears Oh, but like, it feels much more like it’s a form by telephones and typewriters than it is by you know, computers and fax machines.
RB
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, I keep thinking there’s a character in Mad Men who ended up I think, with an eyepatch who secretly wrote sci fi on the side. I’m thinking like, this is the book he would write. This is a book that guy would write. I love it. I love how the author briefly admits that Lea Spaceland, slit Yeah, it makes no sense. Fuck it. It looks cool. Just roll with it. Okay, guys. I know. Before we had a cinema since guy to make dings sounds and say what is it like that? Was knitting or is it looks cooler this way? Fuck you.
KS
Kurt Schiller
One of the things that I think is also kind of just done just because it’s cool. Yeah. Is that almost all of the characters have some kind of weird mental complication, Lincoln Powell, who is our kind of heroic detective. I’m curious about how heroic he was meant to read at the time. Because I think, you know, to modern readers, he also reads like a sleazeball. But he has this thing called dishonest ape, where he suddenly feels a compulsion to just like, make shit up. And he kind of blames it on like, how smart he is kind of he’s like, Well, I’m so smart that like, I can’t I can’t help myself I just start making up lies. And it’s funny because it’s very much like principles Skinner in the steamed hands where he just start saying things that are like kind of plausible, and people will ask him like, like, like really? Because a Never mind I’ll tell you about it. Like at one point he claims that like all telepaths use the opposite hand they should or something and he’s like, they all behave as if they’re left handed or something. It’s just like a weird random thing. There’s a recurring thing of characters in this being self defeating. Oh, yeah, where like, right, you know, is done in by himself. Lincoln Powell has kind of, you know, a dark version of himself. Everybody has their weird vices. I really like the guilt corpse she’s called her the gilded horse. I forget her name, but she’s like a rich socialite, and she constantly throws like nude parties and tries to like check up with people and is just like flirting constantly and super horny all the time. Apparently the style at her parties is to wear ultra violet treated clothing so that when they turn the lights off and turn on like the special lights everybody’s clothing disappear.
SM
Stephen Mazur
It’s Maria Beaumont,
KS
Kurt Schiller
Maria Thank you. Yes.
RB
R.S. Benedict
Who calls everybody totally so it’s very very over the top social like character but it’s somehow it works just because of it. So yeah, we’re going over the top Fuck it. Let’s do it. Darlings Ivan simply divine game we must play.
SM
Stephen Mazur
I wonder how much of that the what you said the characters having self defeating mental complications comes from Bester himself because it seems to me like there’s quite a bit of him on the page. Having watched that, that MidAmerican interview. He’s you know, some people are different from the way you think they would be. And then some people turn out to be like exactly how you think they would be and he seems exactly that the kind of guy who would write this in the Stars My Destination, but you know, just very animated he’s always on. But speaking about Maria Beaumont, I, one of the things that I’d forgotten about this book, from the first time I read it is that, you know, especially for, you know, when it was, it was written in, you know, I guess probably like 1951 because it was serialized in early 1952 in galaxy, is just how sexy the book is. And like, kind of kinky, like, there, you know, it’s like, not always that explicit, but there’s also a lot going on like, you know, like you said, you know, like,
RB
R.S. Benedict
Oh, it is a very horny book. Everybody’s
SM
Stephen Mazur
very horrible. That’s what I’m trying to say. It’s a very, it’s a very horny kinky book, especially for being like 73 years old,
RB
R.S. Benedict
the fucking the sub the romantic subplot is like mind control age play.
SM
Stephen Mazur
Didn’t I tell you it was bonkers? Oh, my God,
RB
R.S. Benedict
we got to talk. Let’s talk about the age play romantic subplot. Because Holy shit, this is the most like, here’s the author’s thinly veiled fetish, right? So
KS
Kurt Schiller
he falls in love. That’s a weird one with that’s a really weird,
RB
R.S. Benedict
the daughter of the murder victim and for totally legitimate reasons. The therapy to help her get over her trauma is to turn her into an adult baby. And then have her like, become an adult toddler. And then and then he, for our hero for also completely legitimate reasons that are very necessary, decides she’s going to live in my house and call and call me daddy. And this girl that likes me is going to take care of her. Okay, and then at the end, they’re dating and now we’re dating. She’s like, there’s the dialogue. That’s basically you were a toddler a week ago, and I’m like, oh, okay, this book. Alright, buddy. All right, buddy.
SM
Stephen Mazur
I gotta say that like in addition to being completely bonkers, it’s also really funny though to imagine this grown woman going for at like, just acting like a baby and then acting like a toddler. And then like, the the phase towards the end of the book, where she is like, acting like an insecure teenager is just so funny to me.
KS
Kurt Schiller
I will say I feel like especially investors like early writing, he has a tendency to fall into a very clear cut, like noir, Hard Boiled crime fiction, Dame trip, you know, tropes or cliches, if you will. Yeah. Where every woman is, is either, and an elderly rich woman. They are a wealthy tramp. They are less wealthy tramp, like a mall. Like, what’s your name? Duffy? Oh, yeah. Or they’re like a helpless innocent baby who is in trouble in some way, who’s caught up in intrigue, sometimes a literal baby, as it turns out, but he does much the same thing in a lot of his other writing around the same time. And I have to question how much of that is trying to do something on purpose and how much of it is just like this is how I write women?
RB
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, I mean, it’s this is a 1950s. So I am willing to accept the premise that a man writing in the 1950s had questionable views about women. Yeah. Look how
KS
Kurt Schiller
progressive I am. She lives by herself. She’s not married. I especially speaking of like the horniness, it is funny that Maria Beaumont faxes him a nude picture of herself. I just want to call attention to that’s Shubhra specific good for the central murder. Part of the plan. What’s the plan is is absurdly complicated, it is perhaps more complicated than it needed to be. I will say part of it involves convincing this horny socialite to organize a nude party game. And our villain Ben Reich accomplishes this by buying an ancient book of party games, destroying most of the book except for one game called sardine which involves everybody taking off their clothes and getting into it.
RB
R.S. Benedict
The normal way to play sardine was just like hide and seek. But you know, Maria Bowman’s like, No, we’re we’re doing horny sardines. We’re gonna do
KS
Kurt Schiller
like, as Ben Reich is on his way to murder his business rival something to Courtney. I forget. His first name is weird. It’s like Curie or AI or is a crank. Yes, that sounds right. He’s literally described as stepping over an octopus of grasping flesh. Like people just like rolling around on the floor having sex. Or he gets into a closet and there’s like a nude woman in there. And she’s like, Oh, hello. And she feels that he’s all dressed. And she’s all pissed off because he’s dressed. The sexuality is written in a slightly evasive way. Like it’s pretty clear what’s going on, but It’s not for the most part coming right out and saying things, but I was surprised at especially the scription of Maria Beaumont. Basically, I think she’s already topless when he gets to the party, and it describes her as like trying to grab his hand and like put it into her cleavage.
SM
Stephen Mazur
Yep. Yeah. I love the joke that he makes when they meet at the party. benriach Maria Beaumont and you know, they’re hugging and she says, Oh, darling, it’s just too too much and benriach whispers in your ear. It’s too too plastic. Brutal.
RB
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, what it sherek rude.
KS
Kurt Schiller
The depictions of wealthy high society and the Esper society, I think are some of my favorite parts in in the novel, like the whole sequence at the kind of high society Orgy Party, I think it will feel familiar to anyone who’s read science fiction, featuring, you know, like, decadent, rich people. They’re either shallow or maniacal or self obsessed, or they’re all portrayed as, like, broken like the rich in this world all seem to be broken. Either because they are literally old and decrepit, or because they are megalomaniacs like Ben Reich, Ben Reich, there’s a lot of stuff that feels very relevant. For instance, when Reich goes to see Duffy, who is the songwriter who gives him the irritating ear worm, he mentioned that she did work for him in the past writing like a strike breaking song. Oh, right.
RB
R.S. Benedict
There’s a lot in here about like labor and politics. I think something that a lot of people who look at the 50s with nostalgia don’t realize is that people in the 50s also recognize that this sort of consumeristic lifestyle was really superficial and solace. Like so much art from that era is about Yeah, okay, I live in a nice house in the suburbs, but I feel like I’m dying inside. So a lot of that comes back into the book and I’m just thinking about how fucking weird it must have been if like, okay to come back from World War Two, you know, you you liberate a concentration camp, you storm the beach or whatever. And now it’s like, okay, let’s watch TV and go to the mall, I guess. And I’m supposed to just like, feel like this is enough. All right. And a lot of people did not feel like that was enough. A lot of people did feel like this is this is weird. This doesn’t make sense. This isn’t real. None of this is real. What the fuck, and a lot of that kind of comes through in this book. But something that was so interesting is that the psychics, they have a guild to sort of labor union type, professional organization that has very strict rules about like ethics and how you’re allowed to use your gift. And there are very strict punishments doled out to people who misuse that gift. And there’s also eugenics in it, which is not really questioned, you are required to marry another Esper, and like have a kid or else Fuck you, I guess. And it’s a big feature of our sort of hero in that he’s unmarried. And a lot of psychic women, of course, are throwing themselves at him. Because of course they are. He’s the hero. He’s the most eligible bachelor. He’s the most eligible bachelor, and he’s just like, No, I’m not into it. I’m not marriage shy. If only I could meet a weird, rich baby woman toddler.
KS
Kurt Schiller
You Yeah, the Well, I must say the Esper guild is not a very good union. Terrible. We are told that Augustus Tate who is the Esper that Ben Reich hires to kind of help him pull off the murder. So first of all, he’s a member of an extreme right wing political group within the guild called the League of Esper patriots.
SM
Stephen Mazur
I can’t believe this wasn’t written two years ago. I know,
RB
R.S. Benedict
they have this. And it’s funded in part by Ben Reich. It’s like this astroturfed political right wing movement,
SM
Stephen Mazur
and all they want is to not pay taxes. That’s
RB
R.S. Benedict
it literally, that’s all they want is to not pay taxes. And I think to cut back on some of the ethical rules and stuff, I think there’s another
KS
Kurt Schiller
right because you have to give 95% of your income to the guild.
RB
R.S. Benedict
I was wondering if that was a comment on the sort of the like, the really high marginal tax rates 50s or something like it used to be a rule where for every dollar you made over I forget what the top rate was, it was like $10 million a year but for every dollar over that you made, you had to pay something some insane like 75 to 90% of it. Like super high taxes.
KS
Kurt Schiller
Obviously, we’re talking about the US and not the UK. But that is the literal subject of the Beatles song the tax man. That is the one for you nine or one for me. 19 for you. That is the that’s the 95% that we’re talking about there. Yeah, that’s a good point. I didn’t think about that. It would make sense Bester is also very much a fuck you pay me type person so I can definitely see him being pissed off about anything. thing that takes money out of his hand. The other thing that we find out though, speaking of like modern political overtones, is that Ben Reich also funds an anti Esper smear campaign to increase discrimination against the Esper. So he’s simultaneously funding like an extremist Esper rights movement, and also like an anti Esper, reactionary smear campaign.
RB
R.S. Benedict
And meanwhile, he employs some of the best experts around because he’s rich, he’s he’s got an Esper psychiatrist, as per this, and as per that he’s got he’s just surrounded by Asperger’s. There was a bit around the end of the book, where the guild basically says, You guys gotta leave this fucking guy. Or else you’re out of the guild, you’re you’re gonna face some serious shunning if you don’t do what we say. And he’s just like, completely fucks.
KS
Kurt Schiller
I think the inclination, in a lot of stories like this is to say, Okay, well, the telepaths are the ones who are in charge. Now, they have powers and abilities that nobody else does. But it’s explicitly first of all indicated that a there’s like prejudice against experts, which kind of makes sense. If you couldn’t read minds in a budget, you knew a bunch of people around, you could read your mind, you can understand there being some tension there. And so the way that the guild maintains power is by at least nominally protecting them from the prejudice against them, and kind of uniting them as like a power block. But the telepaths are very much not the ones who are in control. It’s rich, non telepaths, who are in control, and they have hired all the telepath to basically serve their every whim. Ben Reich has a therapist who’s on call 24/7, who he jumps out of bed at like three in the morning, and goes to get psychoanalyzed he’s got like a bunch of like, accountants and secretaries who follow him around. And the reason that he wants them to be telepaths isn’t even so that they can use their telepathy, do telepathic stuff, but literally so that his every whim can be catered to without him needing to tell someone so like, he gets home, they immediately know, Oh, he wants dinner right away. He wants you to cancel his appointments tomorrow. It’s literally and I think it makes sense. And it reflects like a supernatural ability effectively, as like a labor issue of like, okay, well, this is a valuable skill. In fact, it’s even stated by one of the characters that extrasensory perception is not a miracle, but a skill subject to wage our limitations.
RB
R.S. Benedict
It’s emotional labor.
SM
Stephen Mazur
Yeah. Kurt, I think you know, what you’ve been talking about it, it really ties in with what you were saying earlier about best or not having to labor under the preconceived notions of what a telepath is, or what they can do, or what it would mean, if you’re going to write that story. Because I think part of why the novel is so compelling and so entertaining is, you know, like you said, even though there’s many telepaths out there in society, you would think they’re in control, but they’re not the top heap. You know, at best. They’re salaried professionals, like doctors or lawyers. And I just feel like a lot of other writers who try to write telepaths would just make the same sort of, you know, they’re just say, Oh, well, they have mind control powers. So like, they’d be in charge, right? You know, something that, like you said, the book goes out of its way to point out that like, No, probably not, they would, they would probably just be like regular old people who have this interesting skill, but they would still be, you know, subject to the demands of, you know, the people who have the real wealth and power in society. And it makes for a much more interesting book than just mind power kings.
RB
R.S. Benedict
They’re sort of intellectuals, I guess.
SM
Stephen Mazur
Okay, you know what, that’s probably why they’re not in charge. They’re all just a bunch of eggheads,
RB
R.S. Benedict
a bunch of goddamn nerds.
KS
Kurt Schiller
Yeah, we see this telepath party first that Raquel was talking about earlier with like the interestingly laid out text where it kind of shows all their conversations criss crossing. And one of the things that that really reminded me of is it made me regard the telepath as being kind of like IV Yeah, graduates, like they’re all very snobby. They’re all like well, who’s whose son? Is that whose nephew is that who’s nice is that oh, well, he’s gonna get this internship because his uncle is in charge of such and such company and he’s gonna go here or at one point, Lincoln Powell, he sees a second class Esper, kind of like being rude to his his third class fiance or girlfriend, and he kind of like dresses him down by calling him effectively like new money almost was like oh, he’s like a second come lately. And we’re, I guess, like, he’s finally reached like high Esper society. And so he thinks he’s like hot shit. And the other experts who are much more skilled and powerful than him are like, Yeah, shut the fuck up, buddy. And sit down. Mind your manners. You’re in high society here. Real men are talking to real business. Now, please leave that nonsense out for the normies out on the street. But they come across as Yeah, like upwardly mobile educated careerists. Essentially, and they’re not in charge, but they’re the most in charge of the people who aren’t in charge. They’re PMC effectively and
SM
Stephen Mazur
it’s also the Esper party is a field draws a sharp contrast between, you know, they’re sort of like you said Ivy League buttoned up, sort of upwardly mobile ethics based class and you know, Maria Boehm, Hans Welty, degenerate sex, Bach and all.
KS
Kurt Schiller
I gotta say, I know which party I’m going to.
SM
Stephen Mazur
I know which party I wish I were cool enough to go to, but I probably just be chit chatting like, oh, so and so God into telepath. Harvard,
KS
Kurt Schiller
good for you. The other thing that I like is that the really wealthy people that we see it’s not really clear what their companies do. Apart from just like business stuff. Ben rakes company has seems to make weapons, weird science stuff. They just kind of do whatever they seem to be a giant conglomerate. The only power that can challenge them as another giant conglomerate. But it’s not like Ben rakes does business deals all day he mostly runs around being psychoanalyzed. And having like manic episodes,
RB
R.S. Benedict
that’s kind of what I imagined Elon Musk does during the day when he’s not exhausting yourself into another divorce.
KS
Kurt Schiller
I think Elon Musk would totally convinced himself that he could be the first man to commit murder in 70 years. I think he would just also go around telling everyone
RB
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, Grimes make a song that gets stuck in my head, Grimes.
SM
Stephen Mazur
Tweeting, I think I might have just gotten away with murder.
KS
Kurt Schiller
But murder isn’t like a vocation. He
RB
R.S. Benedict
decides on his victim based on the whims of some like weird fucking anime Nazi disease, you kill that guy. He’s an SJW.
KS
Kurt Schiller
You know, speaking of that, there is a great part where Ben Reich realizes the whole reason for the murder plot is I think the one part of the book that I agree with some of the critics that is a bit weak, which is that Ben Reich, like misunderstands a code, where Yeah, Courtney, a merger between their two companies for equal shares. And he sends it in this this, like corporate code, which is only available to basically like CEOs of like fortune 500 companies, they have like a special code that they use to communicate with, but it’s like, it seems to be like a well known code that everyone has access to. And he’s waiting for a response and he gets it. And it’s the response for deal accepted. Let’s merge our companies. And he sees it and goes, he rejected me. And it’s never really explained apart from just, you know, him being off, or having like a weird, like a psychotic episode for what why he thinks it was rejected. And it is kind of, I feel like it could have been a little less convenient to start, oh, really, I
SM
Stephen Mazur
actually I kind of disagree, I think it works really well, we have nothing
KS
Kurt Schiller
to say to each other. That’s
SM
Stephen Mazur
not well, because a big theme in the novel is self knowledge, knowing yourself. And like we’ve said, benriach is clearly a psychotic, something that I read in a couple of interviews and materials about Bester. And I think he says it as well, in that that min Americana interview from the 70s Is that a plot that he comes back to a lot in his work is a man who’s under a compulsion that he doesn’t know, or he doesn’t understand. And that is right to a tee here, you know, for most of the book is presented to the reader. And, you know, everybody thinks this, you know, Powell and the rest of the police, and even benriach himself presents this to himself, you know, he’s like saying this to himself, you know, it’s it’s all about economics, like oh, the the Courtney cartels got me on the ropes. It’s a it’s a fight for survival. You know, I’ve I’ve got to take out my business rival, but the, you know, the real motive for his murder doesn’t have anything to do with with profit or money at all. It’s that subconsciously, Ben Reich, either knows, or has learned or like, you know, somehow subconsciously feels and understands that, Craig Courtney is his father that, you know, to coordinate his mother, you know, had an affair and according just left it at that and never acknowledged him so like, it’s a crime of passion. You know, he’s he’s laboring under this giant emotional weight that he doesn’t understand because he can’t see it. He gets peep from time to time and like, some of the experts can see like, whoa, you’ve got this like, big emotion. No block that like you’re completely blind to, you should maybe work on that. And he just goes, What do you talk about? Talking about? There’s a guy who has no face admit
KS
Kurt Schiller
the first murder in 70 years. Yeah,
SM
Stephen Mazur
exactly. Yeah, but So in light of all that, and I feel like it really works that he would get a code that says, accepting this be like that son of a bitch. He rejected me, I gotta kill him. Because you know, it’s not about the money, he keeps making up these lies to himself and doesn’t even realize that he’s doing it because he’s just compelled by this weird death drive that in a way, recode it’s kind of like a tip tree story. It’s a character who’s laboring under this weird compulsion. That’s like rewriting their code, but they have no idea that it’s going on and that it’s affecting their behavior. Because it’s not just that he wants to kill the man that deep down. He knows his his father, like he also really really wants to get caught and punished for doing it.
KS
Kurt Schiller
It does present an interesting twist on the detective narrative where Lincoln Powell has basically all the information from the beginning, there’s a few bits and pieces that he doesn’t quite understand that he has to figure out that write us a wetter capsule instead of a bullet so that there was no evidence, but at one point, he is kind of stymied, because he gets access to Ben Reich’s like code chief. And he finds out about the messages and it turns out that Courtney accepted the merger offer and he goes, Well, shit. Maybe he’s not guilty, because it doesn’t make any sense. Why would he murder someone that he needs to have alive so that they can merge their companies together and it is a neat, like complication of the fact that rake doesn’t really know why he’s doing what he’s doing, makes him a better murderer, because his motive doesn’t really make sense to an outside observer, until eventually Powell kind of realizes what’s going on that rake is among other things, also hiring hitman to try to kill him himself. Which is a neat touch
SM
Stephen Mazur
card. It’s it’s a reverse who done it. It’s, you know, instead of like, like Columbo
RB
R.S. Benedict
where he knows the murderer did it? Yes. It’s got to figure out how to prove it. Well, yeah,
SM
Stephen Mazur
no, yeah, that’s exactly this was instead of, you know, a crime happening. And you know, the reader following the cop and like, gosh, who did it what happened? Like, we know all the information from the outset and you know, it’s just a matter of is he going to catch the guy? I think it’s uh, I don’t read that many mysteries. But like I said, it’s it’s an interesting reversal. The only like Poindexter II type of nerd thing that bugs doesn’t really bug me, but just like, I feel like I have to point out, it is needlessly complicated, where in the plot Bester goes out of his way to say that Ben Reich has ingeniously figured out a way to kill a guy with a gun with no bullet, you know, like the water gel cabinet like, oh, wow, it’s so great. I guess pester didn’t know that blanks are very deadly. He’s certainly if you put a gun in somebody’s mouth and then pull the trigger. It’s a little explosion. It’ll do just what’s described in the book but you don’t need a water bullet. You can just kill somebody with a blank if if you’re close enough.
KS
Kurt Schiller
So I thought the reason for the water bullet was twofold. One, because yes, he buys the gun and he makes this big show of like, Oh, you have to take all the bullets out. So you person I’m buying this gun from we’ll see. I don’t have any bullets for the gun, wink wink. But also because unlike a blank for instance, it wouldn’t leave like a bullet or wadding or anything because all it leaves behind is like this little gel tab because the water is just water. So like it, you know, it gets swallowed or it goes away. I thought that that was more the reason less so than just like needing it to not use a bullet, which it still kind of leaves evidence. So I think to an earlier point that Raquel made I think it’s just there because it is cool. You know, it’s it’s like an ice bullet thing. Oh, what I was gonna say earlier is this is really odd sequence that I love a great deal where right goes back to his like family vault, and gets out these five envelopes that one of his his ancestors left for him, like hundreds of years earlier, with a bunch of plots to be used in an emergency and we don’t get to find out exactly what they are. Apart from that they all seem like variations on like the perfect murder, although Reich does say that they’re all pretty outdated, but it’s accompanied by this letter that kind of is filled with this weird stuff about how to commit a murder. So it says stuff like caution the essence of murder never changes in every era. It remains the conflict of the killer against society with the victim as the prize and the ABC of conflict. plus society remains constant. Be audacious. Be brave, be confident, and you will not fail against these assets. Society can have no defense. And I read that and I was like, this is some like Jordan Peterson menses mold bug Peter Thiel shit. This is very much like the weird think brain mining genius stuff that rich guys imbibed to this day to tell them like you are the master of reality, you must go out there and see the world methods rant
RB
R.S. Benedict
and rakes ancestor definitely had a bro podcast. He probably gave really questionable diet advice about how you shouldn’t eat vegetables because vegetables are gay, stuff like that.
SM
Stephen Mazur
It’s very convincing.
RB
R.S. Benedict
Can’t argue with that.
SM
Stephen Mazur
It’s ABC.
KS
Kurt Schiller
I’m trying to think of like, there’s just so much random stuff, like one of the things that I like about pretty much any bestar novel, although in his later ones, it kind of gets away from a little bit. He just has weird ideas and just puts them on the page. And it’s like, I’ll just put this in here. Like for instance, there’s a part where Lincoln Powell needs to calm down, Ben, right. Oh, that’s a neat touch is that in a very like Pacino De Niro in heat sort of thing. They have a couple of one on one meetings where Lincoln Powell knows that Ben Wright did it because he very briefly was able to like eavesdrop on his mind, like not enough to get all the information but enough to know that he did it. But expert testimony is not admissible in computer court. I always love the thing where the cop and the criminal meet. And they’re like kind of even like we could have been friends under other circumstances. And they even say that to each other outright at one point, but there’s a part where he has to give Ben Reich basically a drink to like calm his nerves. And he gives him whiskey capsules, which is a very 1950s like Jetson thing. It doesn’t serve any purpose apart from like, in the future, they’ll eat future food.
RB
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, that was the era of like food pills. So we got whiskey pills to you know,
KS
Kurt Schiller
everybody is also using drugs all the time in this as mentioned, but yes, I love that. And also I’m trying to think of like other random stuff. The experts have some kind of like brain karate that they use on people because there’s a part where Yeah, Lincoln Powell disables Ben right by like punching all of his pressure points. Like it’s like a secret like karate way that like causes like a nerve block on him. It’s very much like, again, it’s it’s there was a lot of that going around. Like that’s basically what the weirding way in Dune is also,
RB
R.S. Benedict
yeah, there’s so much fun, weird stuff in here. There’s the space camping trip. I love how Powell uses a bunch of campers and tourists basically as a almost antenna for him. In that it’s like weirdly manipulative, but also kind of clever.
SM
Stephen Mazur
It’s so funny, though, like when they’re all eSpring to each other. And one of the Espers is like some sort of interplanetary diplomat and he’s like, Guys, what do you do when a tiger comes along and somebody says us diplomacy? It’s a funny book is really gonna say something earlier about Tate and the esprit de of patriots, I think we knocked you off course.
KS
Kurt Schiller
No, I think I’m more or less covered. It was like the idea of the Espers as like the ascendant middle class, they’re all like the careerist professionals and that they have power, but they’re not really in charge. And as a result, they kind of band together, but they also band together in a very, like, selfish, exploitative way. So basically, the whole Esper society guild thing was taken in wholecloth. With acknowledgment to be fair, for the TV series, Babylon five, which also has telepaths as like a big figure, the leader of the evil telepaths is named Alfred Bester. Babylon five, yes, and almost everything about the telepathic guild is reused in Babylon five, almost verbatim. The thing about like the eugenics program, although it’s portrayed is much more like sinister and evil in Babylon five, it’s the same basic idea. The idea of if you break one of the rules, you’ll be ostracized and like, lose your mind because no other telepath will talk to you. And I really wonder how much of our modern depiction of science fiction telepathy literally comes from here, because there’s so much of it that just I’ve never tried to look and see what if anything Bester himself was drawing from, but a lot of these things feel like they just appear and reappear throughout subsequent science fiction. And I think that in and of itself is like a very, it’s just a very influential depiction. And it’s funny because we don’t even really think that much of telepathy as being science fiction anymore. It’s kind of become the realm of like weird kids. bureaucracy, literature or just outright fantasy.
SM
Stephen Mazur
I think once the decades started to go by and telepathy never really panned out, it went from being, you know, oh, science fiction, that’s just, you know, somewhere for 10 to 30 years down the road to like, Okay, this is this is just fantasy bullshit. It’s never it’s never going to happen strike, strike that one off the list.
RB
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, I mean like in the 1950s. There was this was when the CIA was working on MK Ultras super secret mind control experiments. And up until like the 1970s, the US government did have this special super secret like psychic training program to try to teach people how to do what was called remote viewing, in order to like spy on Soviet troops or spy on Soviet military bases. And it was all bullshit, of course, but they recruited a lot of spoon vending, Uri Geller type motherfuckers, to try and like get them to psychically spy on the Soviets during the Cold War. And there’s a very cool Metal Gear character based on that premise. And it didn’t pan out but like there was legitimate government support for this idea of Yeah, we’re gonna we’re gonna try and do psychic shit, let’s let’s make it happen. Also,
KS
Kurt Schiller
if you read a pop magazine from the 50s archive.org has a really good selection of 30s through 60s, sci fi and fantasy pops if you’re ever and I would highly recommend if you’re interested in that kind of literature to go on there and like, just look at how they republished and like what was published with them. Because almost every single issue of that era of pulps will have multiple advertisements for some kind of like brain training program or like unlock the secrets of the human mind. It wasn’t just in the stories there were literal courses in all these pops that you can, you know, send away for and get our 10 week course in reading minds and manipulating others was a huge
RB
R.S. Benedict
part of Scientology too is that if you had a Chief Operating Phaeton level whatever, you will be able to read minds.
KS
Kurt Schiller
Thank you for mentioning Scientology because it reminded me of the very amusing Dianetics anecdote that I came across recently where Alfred Bester worked off and on a few times, I believe with notorious asshole racists. Far Right weirdo and misogynist, John Campbell, apparent misogyny, John Campbell. Well, the degree to which he is he was misogynist seems to be under debate, but the fact that he was seems not up for debate, so definitely bad, but is it like bad or really bad seems to be the part that’s up for debate. So Alfred Bester, sent a story to John Campbell, who I think at the time was at was it astounding,
SM
Stephen Mazur
it was still astounding. They didn’t change the name, I think until the late 50s. Early 60s. Okay, cool. So
KS
Kurt Schiller
this must have been like the early to mid 50s. So Campbell asks him to come out and meet with him. And Bester shows up and Campbell starts trying to tell him all about Dianetics, and showing him all this like L Ron Hubbard literature about how L Ron Hubbard has has solved war he solved all these problems. You know, he he’s cracked the Enigma of the human mind. And Bester is kind of like trying to humor him because a he respected him as an editor and B he wanted to sell his story. And Campbell just keep saying weirder and weirder stuff until it ends with Campbell accuses Bester of being unreceptive to the ideas of Dianetics, because he has trauma related to Campbell says Best to his mother trying to abort him. And he starts yelling out the fetus remembers Mr. Bester, the fetus remember, oh, according to best. And it made me wonder whether part of the reason that Campbell fought was like, I gotta tell Alfred Bester all about Dianetics is because Alfred Bester had written so much about psychology and telepathy in his own well known writing. Like, I wonder if that made I wonder if Campbell was like this guy gets.
SM
Stephen Mazur
I think it cuz I read that same hilarious anecdote to Curtis. I think it predates him writing the Demolished Man. I think it was just that the story that he sent to Campbell had some kind of Freudian overtones in it. And, you know, Campbell said, like, you know, Freud is dead. Dianetics has replaced it. Campbell’s have a funny guy. He kind of reminds me of Aaron Rodgers the football quarterback and you know, like other Joe Rogan. I do my own research types in that he’s like an intelligent guy, but like one of those intelligent guys who like because they’re intelligent about one thing. They think they know everything about everything. And also Campbell was really good at arguing and he loved to argue like just As a pastime, it didn’t really matter. It didn’t really matter what what the point was. He was just Daymond sufferable Yeah, he was just an insufferable argue or so like just the kind of the kind of guy who would just fall hook line and sinker for Dianetics, like he did. Yeah. But I would definitely by that Bester is vision of telepaths is basically the basic template that we have for science fiction ever since then, since he was incredibly influential, much more influential than his rather comparatively small body of science fiction work would would otherwise seem to attest to master novels and a few dozen short stories, not counting his later post 1950s science fiction work.
KS
Kurt Schiller
He started trying to write almost like New Wave type stuff. I read a little bit of it. I read about half of the computer connection, very strange book and it feels like it feels like Michael Moorcock in his super strange I did a lot of drugs and wrote a story mode, which is surprising given that like, you know, it certainly it seemed like he tried to keep up with the times and science fiction, which is kind of unusual for a man born in 1930.
RB
R.S. Benedict
credit where credit’s due, I guess,
SM
Stephen Mazur
well, you can tell from his his interviews, he was one of those writers who really loved science fiction, and he loved it for its imaginative possibilities. And you know, definitely one of those guys who you see pop up every now and again, who are always decrying present state of science fiction, whatever present, they happen to be in because it’s tired, and nobody’s really doing any good imaginative work, or really trying very hard.
KS
Kurt Schiller
I don’t know anybody like that. You’re never heard of such a thing.
RB
R.S. Benedict
I don’t know this. I don’t know her.
SM
Stephen Mazur
But as far as like, the comparison between his earlier and his later work goes, I think you’re right credit is generally accepted that when he came back to the science fiction field after after getting done with working for holiday magazine, you know, just some of the old magic was lost. But in terms of novels, I have to wonder idly just how much the change from you know, say, the Stars My Destination in 53 to the computer connection? I don’t quite know when that was sometime in the mid 70s. I think, right? It’s like 7172. Yeah, I have to wonder how much of that was due to the loss of the influence of Galaxy magazine editor. Hora sell gold, because something I didn’t I mean, I knew that it was originally published in galaxy it both Demolished Man and stars, my destination. But what I didn’t know before I started reading for this was just how much of an input gold had into the writing of the book. So much so that some science fiction historians almost view it to be like a co written novel because of Panama. Yeah, well, apparently, you know, after Bester got done being harangued by Campbell, he never bothered to try and sell to him again. Apparently, it was it was a very disappointing meeting, because, you know, he really looked up to Campbell, because he had sold him in the early 40s, before he got involved in in comics and radio and television. But so in the 50s, his main novel market was was Galaxy magazine, and his best his main short story market was was NSF. And so it came about gold pursued best or to write for him. Apparently, the genesis of the demolish man came from these long phone conversations that Bester and gold would have regularly like sometimes daily, or at least weekly, they were in very close contact and Bester had these two ideas, one about you know, ESP, and he had another idea about writing a story about police who have time machines, and time travel would make crime impossible. So you know, like how could a clever criminal outwit time traveling cops and gold suggested to him to combine those two ideas into one story and gold also thought that time travel was a worn out idea and suggested to him to to use the the ESP angle, instead. So they they talked about it a lot. And let’s see. So one of the things that I took a quote from one of my notes, this came from transformations the story of the science fiction magazines from 1950 to 1970 by Mike Ashley, and he quotes gold as saying for a year and a half, Alfie and I spent four hours a week on the telephone, talking about the Demolished Man and then he finally sat down and write it in less than three months. And you know, gold had a notoriously heavy editorial hand it’s funny when you look back at like editor’s and their esteem in the field, you know, for all that John W. Campbell was all the things that people says that he was and he alienated a lot of his top writers like Heinlein, for instance with In all of his heavy handed crank ways, he was still very much loved in the field for what he did as an editor. But gold on the other hand, he edited galaxy from 1950 to 1960. And then I think he died in 1980. And like he wasn’t hated in the field, but he’s never been sung as many hymns of praise as as Campbell was, and I think part of that just has to do the Campbell’s somewhat predates him, and also Campbell edited for much longer time. But also because gold he had a bad reputation for sometimes changing authors stories around like rewriting large portions of them changing paragraphs editing, without their knowledge, sometimes even changing endings to do what, you know, he thought would make a better story. And you know, maybe it wasn’t, maybe it wasn’t, but no, honestly, that would, you know, get under a lot of writers skins. But so anyway, and thankfully, I’m actually remembering my train of thought for once. So even though that’s all true, and so gold wasn’t very much as well, like best or spoke highly of him in the Mid American interview. Bester spoke highly of gold saying that gold demanded perfection. And he demanded a lot of rewriting because gold wanted the best story. And you know, that was just something that worked for Bester. It might be a mark of professionalism, because Bester said that he was used to that style of editorial work from his days in television, where I guess rewriting is demanded a lot more on scripts. But so I wonder how much of the decline in investors late period could be attributed to the lack of influence from gold because Bester seemed to have had a very good and fruitful working relationship with him. Whoa, gosh, so this, this is supposed to be about the Demolished Man, not about science fiction editors. Everything you
KS
Kurt Schiller
said, aligns with what I’ve heard from him, even just talking about the writing and editing process in interviews, because I think, again, in that Worldcon interview that we mentioned earlier, he talks about, like, what does it take to write a story and from his point of view, basically, like, first drafts are just like shit, like, the goal is to just get things on the page, he talks about having been both a writer and an editor, and saying, he understands why writers hate editors and vice versa. And it’s because as he explains it anyway, like, editors are trying to envision what they believe is the best possible story. And writers are trying to make the thing that they have written into the best possible thing, but it’s not necessarily the same thing. And he even says, like, if I as a writer think I’ve nailed it, it’s going to be instantly rejected. If I write something that I think is only Okay, suddenly everyone’s like, Oh, this is amazing. And again, it’s kind of embarrassing, because you still feel in your head, that it’s not, but he definitely seems to have much more of like an editorial mindset, even about his own writing, and he doesn’t seem overly attached to it. About the Demolished Man, we should talk about how they catch right are how they entrap him ultimately. And then, of course, what the mysterious demolition actually, yeah, I remember being a Gog at that ending.
RB
R.S. Benedict
So how do they catch him? How do they catch him? How do they get him?
KS
Kurt Schiller
So the whole time they’ve been trying to find a few significant figures to help Powell prove to basically the judge computer, there’s apparently like a judge supercomputer that you feed all the facts of the case in, and it tells you if someone is guilty or innocent, and so they’re trying to get all the facts together so that they can submit it to the computer, and it will render its judgment. And what Powell does, is he’s finally able to probe Reich’s mind. And he realizes, so he does two things. One, he creates this this hallucinatory world for Reich where he gradually removes things from it. So first, he takes away all the people that he takes away all the trains in the building, he takes away the stars, the stars, yes, I loved that, where he looks up and just goes like, you know, the stars are gone. And somebody who he’d been talking to you goes, what stars?
RB
R.S. Benedict
What’s the star and he tries to look it up. And it’s there’s, we don’t have a definition for that word that doesn’t exist.
KS
Kurt Schiller
Just like fuck, it feels very much evocative of the description of a telepath losing their mind because they’re all alone and have nobody that they can talk to while this is going on. Powell is finally able to like read his mind and realizes that he’s not just a murderer, that he’s actually a very unique type of Megillah maniacal personality, who won’t stop until he’s been able to remake the entire world if not universe to his own will. And Sao Paulo basically says, like, if I realized what you were from the beginning, I would have just killed you myself. But he contacts all the other telepaths in New York City. And I forget Do you remember what the name of the thing is? I remember I totally forget it’s like a very like the connects Ian convergence or something like that.
SM
Stephen Mazur
Oh, mass Cathexis Yes,
KS
Kurt Schiller
that’s it mass Cathexis measure, which is I guess that that’s how he harnesses all the telepaths together to create that fake reality. And then when he emerges from it, he immediately confesses, and he realizes that the man without a face is himself. He realizes that the Courtney is actually his father, and then he’s taken into custody. And then the next thing that we see is I believe it’s Barbara de Courtney and Lincoln Powell are kind of hanging out at this Lake Resort,
SM
Stephen Mazur
Kingston hospital.
KS
Kurt Schiller
Oh, thank you. Yes, a hospital serves
RB
R.S. Benedict
a sanitarium? I guess?
KS
Kurt Schiller
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Because yeah, it’s it’s very much like the thing from the long goodbye, the weird, shady, like mental clinic slash rich person retreat. So they encounter a naked yelling Ben Reich, who basically falls on top of their balcony and is just like running around yelling and screaming. And what it is revealed to us is that demolition, the primary punishment is basically annihilating your personality while retaining a lot of the fundamental inclinations. And the explanation is that future society recognizes that somebody who is able and willing to break the law and has that kind of personality is still an asset to society. They just need to be like, remade in a way that makes them you know, use it for good instead of for harm. And so basically, what’s happened is that they have annihilated Ben Reich while leaving the raw material of Ben Reich in place. And much as Barbara Courtney was remade to get out of her catatonia, they’re remaking Ben Reich so that he won’t be a psychopath while still, you know, having all that drive and ambition and stick to itiveness or whatever it is. The reformatting is hard drive. Exactly. To me, it’s a very dark ending. And it’s played off in like this very strange tone that I can’t really tell what we the reader are meant to take away from it. It feels very dystopian, but it’s not presented as if it’s a downer ending.
RB
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, it’s almost presented as haha, isn’t that funny? Yeah.
SM
Stephen Mazur
He fell into some bushes.
RB
R.S. Benedict
This was the era of casual lobotomies to it. Yeah. weird to think about. All right, was that just kind of how people thought like, they just thought, Oh, we can use science to kind of reset people. That’s cool. And they hadn’t yet experienced like, what that actually means, and how horrific it is to actually do that to a person.
SM
Stephen Mazur
Especially since the narration points out that one of the horrible things about demolition is that you know, as your mind is being erased you the person who’s being erased, like, understand what is happening to you. Yeah, like it’s presented in
KS
Kurt Schiller
a way that is horrifying. And yet the characters are all like, Oh, finally, you know, we’ll have a nice new Ben Wright who contribute to society. And so yeah, like, it’s, I, I genuinely don’t know if it’s meant to be haunting. If it’s meant to be shocking. I, I kind of suspect that a big part of it is just going for shock value, because Bester seems to very much like doing a surprise reveal for its own sake. And it certainly is surprising. It was not what I was expected. Yeah,
RB
R.S. Benedict
it was expecting some kind of weird future execution.
KS
Kurt Schiller
Yes. And it’s almost worse, especially because, again, like they encounter him naked and screaming at the hospital. It’s not like it’s not presented as a pleasant thing. No, he’s
RB
R.S. Benedict
having a bad time. But then again, he’s a real asshole. So I think we’re supposed to just be like, fuck that guy.
KS
Kurt Schiller
Yeah, and meanwhile, Lincoln Powell is like, uh, now to kiss this baby woman that I have decided to go out with.
RB
R.S. Benedict
Fortunately, she’s a small percent psychic, so I can marry her. I can do eugenics with her. It’s great. Oh, I forgot about Yeah, you’re right. I forgot. Yeah, there’s eugenics in this book. And everyone’s kind of cool with it. There’s like eugenics because if you’re psychic, you gotta marry another psychic. Well, you gotta you gotta make more psychic babies for forced
KS
Kurt Schiller
marriage program. I do feel like it’s a little bit of criticism, but not to the point where it’s it feels like it is meant as a commentary. It’s just that like, a lot of the characters don’t really like it either. Although, as you point out once Lincoln power like finds a loophole is like okay. Well, that’s fine now. Yeah, it’s
RB
R.S. Benedict
not treated as that much of a human rights abuses more of an annoyance. Well, it’s,
SM
Stephen Mazur
you know, it’s just a guild by law. Yeah. They all got together and they had a meeting.
RB
R.S. Benedict
You all got to do eugenics. That’s the rule. If you’re an Esper.
SM
Stephen Mazur
I really wonder where the idea of Oh, actually, lawbreakers and murderers are a brilliant and exceptional part of society that we can’t get rid of because they’re the ones that have gumption. Not Like the sheeple comes from cuz it’s definitely something that pops up in a lot of science fiction stories and in that one Star Trek episode where Kurt gets split into his two halves. Were one of you guys ever seen that one where he evil Kurt has the goatee?
RB
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, and good. Kirk is just a whiny baby. Can’t do anything?
SM
Stephen Mazur
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You know, it’s like, oh, we need you people, you assholes. And like, yeah, I guess it kind of works for what they want to do. But I always really think like, do we though?
RB
R.S. Benedict
Do we really need Ben right? Do we really need to look like a douchebag murderer with daddy issues?
SM
Stephen Mazur
I think that just comes from science fiction writers generally thinking that they’re cut above regular people. And Kurt, what you mentioned before about the or maybe it was Raquel, you know, talking about that, like the s prison bodying middle class values opposed to the decadent, idle, immoral, wealthy. I think that that definitely just comes I think anyway, from investor’s upbringing, because he has said himself that he was that he grew up firmly middle class and a writer back then was a sort of a middle class job. And he also graduated from University of Pennsylvania. So
RB
R.S. Benedict
there you go. Wow. Yeah, that’s,
KS
Kurt Schiller
he did. Yeah, it’s interesting to hear him talk about it. Because what he basically says is that he wasn’t really good at any particular thing. He was like, pretty good at a lot of stuff, right? And so he just wound up kind of like wasting his time, but something he’s also fairly critical of his own education. He says repeatedly in multiple interviews, it’s clearly like a favorite line of his. That’s after he went to college. It took him 10 years to unlearn all the dumb stuff that he learned in college to where he could start thinking actual thoughts. Again,
SM
Stephen Mazur
he seemed to think that he was stuck up into a little too self important about his, his own educational background. It’s a retelling of Oedipus.
RB
R.S. Benedict
I mean, there’s a lot of Oedipus shit going on in here. That’s true. There’s a lot of olden times 20th century Freudian psychoanalysis in here. And it’s great.
KS
Kurt Schiller
There’s a lot of like vague incest stuff as well because Barbara Courtney is is half sister at least and when she’s introduced, she’s like, running around mostly nude in like a see through. Dress, which rake is sure to comment upon. Yeah, there’s there’s a lot of stuff going on. That is definitely edit.
RB
R.S. Benedict
There’s a lot going on in this book.
SM
Stephen Mazur
And also this this isn’t this isn’t my thought I read it in the storm on readers guide on Alfred Bester by Carolyn Wendell. But she points out that the ending is a reverse Oedipus because instead of a mother marrying her son we have in Lincoln and Barbara to Courtney, spiritually at least a father marrying his daughter.
RB
R.S. Benedict
That whole subplot.
SM
Stephen Mazur
I use this I love the love sub plot. It is so bonkers. I’ve never read a love sub plot like that before. I mean, I know there’s weirder stuff out there that I could read. I’ve heard of Flowers in the Attic. But in a science fiction book, man, what a what a bonkers love plot that is. It is so weird.
RB
R.S. Benedict
It is. Alright, so we’ve been talking for a good bit over an hour. Why don’t we wind down final thoughts?
KS
Kurt Schiller
I think it’s not a perfect novel by any sense. There’s a lot that you can criticize about it. If you want to start like making a list like I think that the pros is it best years finest I think the Stars My Destination came out like three or four years later. And I think that the the prose writing is like noticeably better in that there’s quite a bit of ableism there’s like an evil albino character. For instance, this disability isn’t really reflected in an especially positive light. Gender roles are not great. But like I think it’s one of those books where Carl Sagan described it as a book that was like so fun and engaging that it just kind of like gets you before you really have a time to think too hard about it. Yeah. And that, like, if you were to sit and think about it, you’d be like, Oh, well, this is kind of bad. This is kind of bad. This doesn’t make sense. But there’s just something about how it’s written that just works on a moment by moment level, if nothing else, and I think that ultimately for me is what the book lives and dies by not the complexity of the mystery, not the quality of the prose. It’s just a fun fast novel, and it gets you and you go and you pop out the other side and go, Huh, that stuff with the adult baby was weird, but the harmonic gun was cool. Her mannequin
RB
R.S. Benedict
rule that was cool, completely nonsensical weapon it makes no sense. I don’t give a shit I love it. I
KS
Kurt Schiller
just love that it makes the one guy’s head explode. And they’re like, and I think the one telepath is like even like reading his mind when his head. But yeah, it’s not a perfect novel, but it is a fun novel. And I will I will always take a fun novel. Yeah,
RB
R.S. Benedict
it’s fun in a way that’s actually fun. Not like I do Preservation Society, for example, which is not fun. Don’t pretend to be fun. No one had fun writing that.
SM
Stephen Mazur
Never heard of it. Never. It doesn’t exist.
RB
R.S. Benedict
It’s not real. It can’t hurt you. But yeah, this is a really terrifically fun pulpy kind of silly book. And I found the 1950s dated pneus of it actually really charming. Yeah, it’s,
SM
Stephen Mazur
it’s good. It’s a lot of fun. I forgot if I said this on camera off camera now. But when I read it, the first time a few years ago, took me four days to read it. And this time around, I was worried that it was going to take me like two weeks because you know, I’ve got a toddler, there’s just a lot of stuff going on at home. And somehow, four days, it’s the same amount of time. It’s so much fun. And even though there are places in its particulars that you can criticize, I feel like the bigger stuff behind it. It’s it’s propulsive gnus, the competence and the flair of the pros. Even though it’s not as best work. It’s still good. And it keeps you moving right along just how compressed everything is. But it doesn’t feel underbaked Or half done. It feels very rich. Besser is really great at building and conveying character through action, Gordon told me that he learned that from his time writing in the comics, so that it’s a very slim book. But it just it feels JAM PACKED not only with ideas, but also with story and character. And it’s just so well done. And just done in ways that I feel like a lot of current sfsf. Writers just they don’t know how to do. They don’t know how to write this. Well, this concisely. They don’t know how to write this professionally anymore, that somebody could write this book today. But I feel like it would be three times longer, and generally not as good. So that’s just my phone number. I like it a lot. You know, it’s very old, and it has its 50s Old timeliness to it. But it’s also feels incredibly current for today. Yeah, just as one last fun little anecdote, something that I came across when I was researching this when he was working at Holiday magazine, he was on staff as an editor because he published an article on sharks. You know, it was a good article, but he said to the author, I’m gonna give you a kick in the ass this, what you’ve written here is really the start of a novel. And you gotta go write that novel. And the author was Peter Benchley. And the book that he pushed him to write was jaws. Jesus, right. Yeah. Yeah, that like Bester. It’s, we view him from, you know, the science fictional angle, but that was really just a very small part of his life. Like he worked in real entertainment. And when he was doing features and interviews for holiday, like he interviewed a lot of real capital A celebrities. He was on the very first flight of the Boeing 747. He interviewed so feel aren, Laurence Olivier, Elizabeth Taylor, and like, yeah, a lot. A lot of people I will be interested in I’ll probably I’ve never actually got around to doing this. But if I ever saw like, an issue of holiday magazine, like just in some rummage sale somewhere, I would look at that and see if I could find like if it had one of his interviews or his articles in it, because interesting guy.
KS
Kurt Schiller
I want to look at his reviews, because I’m pretty sure that Bester wrote a review column for a few years for FNS. Yes, you’re
SM
Stephen Mazur
right. He did, I think from 60 to 62.
KS
Kurt Schiller
I’m really curious to look that up. I may do so.
SM
Stephen Mazur
I must have a few of those. I’m going to look at those up later. Oh my god. I’ll actually create you know what else I can do the star mountain guide. It’s got a bibliography in the back. I can like take a picture of his Yeah, it’s got a bibliography of his book reviews. So I can I can send that to you.
KS
Kurt Schiller
Well, I appreciate this. Let’s hand it back to Rick Hill.
SM
Stephen Mazur
All right, you guys want to go for another half hour?
RB
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, I gotta, I gotta do things. I gotta feed my cats. They’re starting to give me that look. Hold on. It’s their treat time. Okay. Well, thank you both very much for coming on the show. And thank you all for listening and supporting us. Be sure to check out our Discord if you haven’t already. And until next time, keep reading and keep writing good.
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