The Eureka Years
The Eureka Years
In the early 1950s, working closely with Galaxy magazine editor Horace L. Gold, Bester wrote a highly experimental novel, The Demolished Man. In addition to hybridizing the SF and detective novel, a feat Campbell had declared impossible, The Demolished Man also reimagined telepathy via sociolinguistics, thinking of it in terms of language change. Bester’s telepaths, which he calls “espers,” develop their own idioms, metaphors, and in-jokes, all of which Bester captures through nonstandard orthography, extra-coding, and other forms of innovative, modernist-style language play. This chapter also chronicles Boucher’s continuing influence on Bester’s development as a writer and examines Bester’s preoccupation with the wish fulfillment theme in short stories such as “Hobson’s Choice” and “5,271,009.”
Keywords: antihero, code-switching, linguistics, open mystery, orthography, paralanguage, telepathy, Tony Boucher, typography, time travel, world-building
Illinois Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.