A Sense of Doubt blog post #1681 - There will be joy again
I am still buried with work and struggling to keep up. I pray for reprieve and time to devote to some wholly original content as I have so many things in the works. For now, just this, as I loved it, love it, cherish it.
FROM:
Road To Nowhen - Orbital Operations 22 September 2019
Yeah, well. We're all having fun here in the End Times. There's nothing worse than American friends messaging me with "oh my god I am so sorry about your country."
Hold on tight. Something will happen to make you smile. It's never rained forever. Llke the man said: There has been joy. There will be joy again. See you next week.
THE DEMOLISHED MAN by Alfred Bester is one of my favourite books and one of the first SF books that I really adored with all of my heart.
Surely, Ellis loves Bester, too, and quoted from him at the end of his 1909.22 newsletter (quoted above).
Here's the article he linked.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/book-of-a-lifetime-the-demolished-man-by-alfred-bester-2343714.html
Book Of A Lifetime: The Demolished Man, By Alfred Bester
In 1985 I bought a 30p second-hand paperback because I liked the title: 'The Demolished Man', by Alfred Bester. This fits into a rare category of novel - short science-fiction - and I read it during my first two days as a student. University promised friends, drinks, adventures, but I preferred life on Mars. On the third day, I read it again.
Since then, for me, 'The Demolished Man' has become a comfort book. All writers should have them. Instead of reading for research, or reading to steal, there are books that recalibrate the original, childish joy of reading to escape. This in turn reignites the urge to write and, for me, 'The Demolished Man' is one of those books. Geoffrey Household's 'Rogue Male' (1939) is another.
Both these short novels are full of vigorous action. 'The Demolished Man' (winner of the inaugural Hugo award on publication in 1953) is an American cop novel set in the future, a genre combination later exploited by Philip K Dick and William Gibson. For Bester, familiar police procedures are given an original edge because the investigating cop, Lincoln Powell, PH.D 1, is a first grade ESPER.
"Esper for Extra Sensory Perception ... for Telepaths, Mind Readers, Brain Peepers." He knows and the reader knows right from the start whodunit. It was Ben Reich, evil industrialist (an ever-contemporary touch) who lives by the flawed motto, "Be audacious, be brave, be confident and you will not fail".Powell's challenge is to trick the murderer into revealing his method and motives, because not everybody in the future can read minds. Reich himself, for example, attempts to outwit Powell by filling his head with a popular song and acting before he thinks. In this way the ripping pace of the book becomes part of what it's about.
Each time I re-read the novel I'm impressed by the formal daring. Bester experiments with fonts and layouts to convey different types of unspoken thought, and his prescient characters include Sam @tkins, Jo ¼maine and the very sexy Miss Duffy Wyg&.
Not all his future projections have worn so well. Reich's motives are stiffly dependent on Freudian theory, but most glaringly Bester fails to predict any type of feminism. The words girl and pretty always come as a pair.
My edition is the 1966 Penguin with the ugly Halloween cover and a glut of hard-boiled typos, and I doubt it will survive many more readings. If anything, the story itself gets younger. I'm now older than the characters, who in their late thirties once seemed impossibly experienced in the ways of the future world. And however many times I re-read 'The Demolished Man', I never tire of the ending: "There has been joy. There will be joy again." Yes, I think. That must be so. It is 1985 and time to go out.
Richard Beard's new novel, 'Lazarus is Dead', is published by Harvill Secker
If you're just joining me and have forgotten why you subscribed: I'm Warren Ellis, author, comics writer, public speaker, screenwriter, producer, Doctor of the University of Essex, Patron to Humanists UK and writer & Executive Producer of CASTLEVANIA on Netflix.
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I post during the week at LTD.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1909.25 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1544 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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