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Mark Reinsberg
The story (The Demolished Man) has a breath-catching pace. The telling is tremendously dramatic. The conclusion is an extraordinary mixture of dread and joy.
Alfred Bester is a successful radio and television writer. The Demolished Man is his first novel. It originally appeared as a serial in a science fiction magazine.
Perhaps only two books of its kind are in the same class of entertainmentAldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984. Tho Bester's novel may be less significant from a political or philosophical point of view, as imaginative writing it has greater impact than either of these classics. The Demolished Man is a science fiction masterpiece.
Mark Reinsberg, "A 'Future' of Breath Catching Pace; Life of Dread and Joy in 24th Century," Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine of Books, 22 March 1953, p. 3
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Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas
Since 1940, when Robert A. Heinlein's first serial was published, no work of fiction has caused as much pleasurable excitement among readers of science fiction as the serialization of Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man. Such excitement should be renewed and intensified to an even headier pitch by the appearance of that novel, extensively revised and rewritten, in hardcovers (Shasta). A taut, surrealistic melodrama, the story is a masterful compounding of science and detective fiction.
But it is no routine puzzle of who; reader and detective know the killer's identity from the beginning. The suspense lies in the chase, in the murderer's magnificentone can't help but admire him!effort to match his mind against the better endowed telepathic detective. And the puzzlemost brilliantly conceived and fairly cluedis why; not even the murderer is consciously aware of the real motive for his crime!
Just as fascinating is Mr. Bester's setting of this criminological problem in a society, ruthless and money-mad on the surface, that is dominated and being subtly reshaped by telepaths. While his picture of that future civilization is not a perfect whole, tending at times to be a sort of piecemeal report, he does state the problem of such a culture in no uncertain terms and clearly delineates its one inevitable answer. Oddly, his telepaths emerge as more convincing people than do his "normal" characters; very likely this is due

 
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