Tankepoliti

by Alfred Bester

Paperback, 1968

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Publication

Kbh Stig Vendelkær (1968) 224 s.

Description

In a world policed by telepaths, Ben Reich plans to commit a crime that hasn't been heard of in seventy years: murder. That's the only option left for Reich, whose company is losing a ten-year death struggle with rival D'Courtney Enterprises. Terrorized in his dreams by The Man With No Face and driven to the edge after D'Courtney refuses a merger offer, Reich murders his rival and bribes a high-ranking telepath to help him cover his tracks. But while police prefect Lincoln Powell knows Reich is guilty, his telepath's knowledge is a far cry from admissible evidence.

User reviews

LibraryThing member BenDV
My latest venture into science-fiction is probably the most disappointing one yet. Despite it’s interesting story, Bester’s The Demolished Man doesn’t live up to expectations due to just how thin the characters in this novel are. They are so two-dimensional that I simply do not care at all
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what happens to them, because they never feel like real people.

Demolished is set in the 24th century, where humans rule the galaxy and a certain percentage of the population have developed telepathic abilities. These people are called Espers or peepers. Due to their strength, major crime is basically nonexistent, since no one can hide their guilt from these people. But Ben Reich, the head of multi-planet corporation Monarch, is determined to murder a rival in order to win the battle between them that Reich is definitely losing. The novel follows Reich’s plotting and attempts to avoid detection by the Esper-led police. The other major character is Lincoln Powell, an Esper cop who is trying to prove Reich’s guilt. As the novel progresses, a lot of amusingly dated Freudian psychology comes into it, but though it’s not remotely believable it’s interesting enough for me to just go along with it.

The story is an intriguing one, in my view, and was certainly what motivated me to push through this novel. There are some very intense scenes with Reich as he slips further and further into madness, culminating in a rather unsettling and exhilarating penultimate chapter. But as I said, no one in this novel resembles a real person. Reich is the ultimate stereotype of a head of a corporation; heartless, cold, motivated only by money and his ego; even at the time I can’t imagine this was an original character type. He’s a jerk whose fate you don’t really care about, and that’s not good for a main character. Lincoln Powell is more likable, but is still just a façade. So I just didn’t care too much about what was happening in this story; there was no emotional involvement whatsoever. And I haven’t even mentioned the female characters, who are either whores or the typical needy women you would expect from a novel written in the 1950s.

So while I accept that The Demolished Man is an influential work, it’s not a novel I found easy to immerse myself in. The execution of the story is very good; it moves quickly but clearly, and Bester builds his world through the progress of the story, not by stopping the story and explaining things. While I personally don’t mind when an author takes time to explain a concept in detail, I can see the appeal of Bester’s approach, especially since you still get a decent sense of the world the story is set in. So the novel had positives, but not enough to make up for the complete lack of believable characters.
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LibraryThing member AHS-Wolfy
Science fiction thriller set against the backdrop of large corporations and telepathic abilities. The owner of one of these corporations is locked in a battle of control with one of his rivals. When his offer of merger of the two companies is rejected he feels the only way to keep his own position
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is to murder his opponent. The problem was how to do this when the cops were all "peepers" so a complicated plan was set in motion.

We get to follow this story from the perspectives of the protagonist and the lead detective and it wasn't until about 60 pages in before it really grabbed me. After that point though I was absolutely gripped by the ability of the author to describe the society while keeping up a tension packed plot. Yes, this book was written almost 60 years ago and some of the characters and technologies are reflective of this but the storytelling more than makes up for that.
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LibraryThing member pokylittlepuppy
This is a 2.5 for me and I'm hovering on which way to round it. What will I decide??

See, this book has rubbed off on me! At many turns, this book sounds overwhelmingly cheesy. I can see why these roots of sci-fi are so interesting to people, because they're such a product of their period as well as
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reaching for something forward -- thus, it's weirdly bold and corny at the same time. This book is focused on its characters, which is a very good way to write. (This was a present from Evan, who pointed that out.) Yet, allow me to quote the inner monologue that closes the first chapter: "'All right, D'Courtney. If you won't let it be merger, then I'll make it murder.'" Er. Wow. There is a lot of this level of silliness in the text, and it's not really like what I usually read. It was a bit hard to adjust to.

The most unique part of the book is of course the "Espers," the eminently well-structured class of telepathic humans. There is spoken dialogue and telepathic dialogue, and some neat layout of the text to try and show how they think. Powell's ventures deep into Barbara's unconscious as part of his police investigation are probably the coolest scenes. And I really liked when he and Mary bickered subconsciously.

In general the book got much much better to me near the end, but also more confusing. I guess the peril of establishing a genre as an author is that your work won't benefit from the refined expectations of its later fans, so in a lot of ways I felt lost as a reader -- what's this world like, what's the explanation? There is a lot of pop psychology here, and that's the main basis for everything, so a lot of the characterization doesn't make enough sense to my ear. And Reich's position as a "Universe-shaker" is properly surprising but entirely undefined. (Is it a spoiler if I really don't know what it is?) But, the revelation of what the Demolition threat really means, and the final scene about "Maybe in those days they wanted sheep," that's pretty damn good.

Like all old sci-fi, it's irresistible to compare the "future" to what's come to pass since it's written. This book is from 1951, which in pop culture terms is endearingly ancient, a decade or two off some of the most influential events of the century. (Of course, also rather nearby some others, but I don't feel the war's impact here so much.) It's fantastic to see what an author was able to conceptualize, and what just couldn't possibly happen for them yet.

So on the one hand, in this book there is a wall-sized supercomputer that doesn't even have a screen. It outputs on a typewriter! Incredible, considering the fact that I am posting this review on the internet right now, you know what I mean? So far away. And "Do I have time to catch the 10:00 rocket? Call Idlewild," kind of slayed me. How could this rocketeer know the airport would rather soon have to be renamed JFK? The future, it's dated.

But there's plenty of right ideas, the ubiquitous video-phone and audio-bookstore, plus the humorous "brooch-operas" ("She Shall Have Music Wherever She Goes") that I suppose are probably how iPods would have been designed in 1950, sure. And, distressingly: "Snim trudged downtown to Maiden Lane and cased the banks in that pleasant esplanade around Bomb Inlet." Too right. Actually.

I can't, though, let this book go without saying that its misogyny makes it really hard to enjoy. For this reader. Indeed some won't mind but it did do its number on me. It isn't just that the only women in the book are just around to want the men, who are allowed to want other things besides the women. It's that it is mean, kinda borderline violent, and that's not good fun or inevitable social history to me.

Like: The literal infantilization of Barbara the love interest -- she regresses into a drooling, baby-talking woman-baby, as a coping mechanism -- who then falls in love with her Da-Da. And there's Duffy, the "virgin seductress," who begs to be thrown around.

A few moments:

"You're delighted with yourself because you're a woman, aren't you? It's your substitute for living. ... 'It's enough to know that thousands of men could have me if I'd let them. That makes me real.'"

"'I'm beginning to hate her ... that goddamn girl.'"
"'Mr. Beck, I hate women too. For Christ's sake, why are they all trying to get me married?'"
"[laughter]"

"'Why waste all that dear violence? Punch me around a little.'" (Thanks, Duffy.)

Some of this is intentionally disturbing, but some of it is probably not. Sometimes this atmosphere is just icky. I don't like reading around this, but I know some readers don't mind it, and some enjoy the sort of pulpiness about it.

So they can rate this higher, whatever.
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LibraryThing member sonofcarc
This novel made a big splash when it came out, but it hasn't aged well.

Any sci-fi set in the near-term future is almost certainly going to look dated down the line. Slang is especially likely to look ridiculous -- like many of his contemporaries, Bester bet that rocketry would become ubiquitous; so
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when somebody wants to tell another character to leave, he says "Jet!" ("Frab" as a substitute for the most common Anglo-Saxon tetragrammaton looks equally silly.) But what really makes this book look old-fashioned is (this is sort of a spoiler) its wholehearted embrace of the gospel according to Freud.
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LibraryThing member bunwat
This book is so dated that for me it travels beyond being dated into portraying an oddly fascinating alternate reality. I think the future of this book may actually feel stranger to me now than it did to the people reading the book in 1953. They were confronted with a world of flying cars and
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miniature androids and bubble environments in space, but the strange new world was inhabited by people whose motivations and behaviors they accepted as recognizable. I am confronted by a world with all of those technological innovations, inhabited by people who seem like some sort of weird alien race.

The men in this novel are all and always engaged in status contests with one another for access to power over one another. Some are seeking power for altruistic reasons, some for selfish reasons, some out of fear, or hunger, or desperation, but all of them believe unquestioningly that the only way to get what they need is to struggle to rise in a hierarchy of dominance.

The women are some sort of strange symbiont creatures, almost entirely focused on finding a man or men to attach to and identify with. This identification is so complete that rejection by or loss of the symbiont threatens their sanity. These strange symbiont creatures are also prone to behaving like children, which is apparently some kind of sexual signaling device.

In addition both the status warriors and the symbiont clingers act out various psycho dramas strictly along Freudian lines, with ids, egos, and super egos all battling it out - causing people to suddenly burst into hysterical laughter in the middle of a fist fight or fall unconscious at a party because they've suddenly been confronted by an unacceptable sense memory of their absent father or their death wish has gotten tangled up with their life force and is causing an uncomfortable pulsation in their sex drive, or who knows what all. They are very odd creatures really.

Its been said that every reading of a novel is a little bit different because each reading is a collaboration between what the author wrote and what the reader brings to her understanding of it. In my case that collaboration has produced something rich and strange, a story of alien creatures struggling for dominance in a world that never was.
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LibraryThing member RoboSchro
"Which is why there hasn't been a successful Triple-A in over seventy years. A man can't walk around with a distorted pattern, maturing murder, and go unnoticed these days. He'd have as much chance of going unnoticed as a man with three heads."

In a society where telepathy is common, murder is
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impossible to hide. So when a successful businessman decides he needs to kill his greatest rival, he has to be very careful indeed.

Justly considered a classic, this is a riveting but odd book. Ben Reich, the protagonist-villain, is a singularly unlikeable character. Most of the book consists of the telepathic detectives circling around him after the murder. It becomes something of a thriller, but the telepathy gives each step in the chase an intriguing spin.

It's not without its flaws -- for example, at one point, murderously violent thugs appear, even though society is supposedly murder-free. But it has nice touches too, such as the typographical tricks that Bester uses to attempt to depict what telepathic conversations might actually be like. Definitely worth a read.
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LibraryThing member stubbyfingers
This is classic sci-fi, winner of the very first Hugo Award in 1953, but you know, I just didn't like it. This was a mystery about a man who tries to get away with murder in a future where mindreading makes such a thing pretty much impossible. Maybe when this was first written it was fresh and
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thrilling, but fifty-five years later it just seems flat and uninteresting to me. The mindreading "peepers" are boring with their guild and their strict code of ethics that nobody really follows, the science is outdated with computers that take up entire rooms and run on punch cards, and character names like @kins, Wig& and ¼main just seem like text-messaging, not futuristic at all. The story was a bit confusing and the big twist at the end, was more of a little tweak than anything.
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LibraryThing member storyjunkie
Story elements are dated now, particularly the psychology. The craft with which this book is written, however, is stunning.
LibraryThing member jeffjardine
The Demolished Man is a noir-ish police procedural set in a future where a subclass of humans have varying degrees of ESP powers.

The science is weak. Combined with The Stars My Destination, I'm left with the impression that Bester doesn't really understand how evolution works:

"It was anger for the
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relentless force of evolution that insisted on endowing man with increased powers without removing the vestigial vices that prevented him from using them."

It's as if he thinks that humankind's mental abilities are growing or improving over time, but he does not offer any mechanism for selection of the trait. And there are the suggestions of Freudian psychology - pseudoscience at best, outdated and so very wrong. And then there is the off-putting sexism that even goes a little beyond that of other SF novels I've read of this vintage.

The story contains many well-worn memes that must have been much more original back in 1953, one assumes. There are things revealed that modern readers will see coming a mile away.

Despite all this, I enjoyed the story. The plot just works, and it keeps within the constraints of the world Bester describes.
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LibraryThing member annbury
Terrific sci-fi from the Golden Age -- a whole lot livelier, wittier, and more engrossing than most of the hard-edged output of the period. Moreover, it is a compelling excursion into detective fiction. Bester posits a society in which crime is almost non-existent, because mind-reading detectives
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can prevent most crimes from ever being committed. One man manages to commit murder none the less, and the lead detective sets out to prove he did it. Bester creates a fascinating future world, where a low crime rate co-existing with a lot of interesting criminals manque. Lovely book, I've reread it about once a decade for altogether too many decades.
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LibraryThing member AlCracka
So, this is why I dislike scifi. When I think of scifi, I think of books that do a couple of things:

- They immediately introduce you to some silly madeup words for futury sounding things. "Oh no, that's a peeper! Which of course as you know is a guy who can read minds, because that's a thing people
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can do here in the future." "Right, that! Gosh." *random mention of Ganymede, because that's in space*

- And the writing is...just exposition, y'know? Just gettin' the sentences out. "He would have to act quickly, before the lights went back on. 'I'd better move fast,' he thought grimly as he raced down the corridor." *shooting self in brain*

They're often about exciting things, plenty of people getting murdered and aliens attacking and stuff, but there's nothing very important going on: it's just a description of exciting things happening, which it turns out is not the same as being exciting.

And the ending! Daddy issues! *fart noises* I knew the ending on like page 3, and omg seriously, with that Powell / Barbara love story? That was almost as bad as Heinlein.

Okay, so if I might wax largescale for a minute: Burroughs (19teens) came right after Verne and Wells (late 19th), and ushered in the pulp era. Ably followed by Lovecraft (1920s), who's only a little better at writing but has a unique style. But 45 years later when Bester is writing, we've had Zamyatin ('21), Huxley ('31) and Orwell ('49), the second generation of literary scifi writers; Bester ('53) is ossifying the worst of Burroughs' habits, and it seems to me like he's defining the era of lazy scifi that turns me off so much. What I'm saying here is that all that stuff I mentioned above, about why scifi sucks? Totally Bester's fault.

This book is lame.
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LibraryThing member TheDivineOomba
I can see why this one the first Hugo - Its a murder mystery set in a future where nothing can be secret anymore. Its a well written book, crafty, intelligent, and easy to read.

It also doesn't feel like it was written in 1951 - Oh, its missing things like smart phones, women are almost always
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secretaries, and there's a bit of a the world is perfect attitude going on, but as a reader, I didn't notice it. This to me a sign of a well written book- it is timeless.

My only complaint - the ending. It felt a bit rushed, and in true 1950's ending, everyone comes out for the best at the end.
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LibraryThing member MaowangVater
Can one of the richest men in the world get away with murder? It’s 2301, and in the twenty-fourth century there’s another source of power in addition to wealth: the Esper Guild. “An Esper 3 can peep the conscious level of a mind—can discover what a subject is thinking at the moment of
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thought. A 3rd is the lowest class of telepath.” A 2nd class member of the guild can tell what you’re going to think before you think it. The elite 1st class Esper can read your unconscious primal desires. This presents a terrible problem for Ben Reich his offer to merge his company with that of his arch rival Cray D’Courtney has been flatly refused, and he’s so mad he wants to kill D’Courtney. It’s not just business. This is personal and Reich wants the satisfaction of doing it himself. Never mind that it’s been eighty-seven years since a murder was committed—he is determined and determined that the damned “peepers” won’t catch him.

Bester’s story is a fast-paced cat and mouse game between Reich and Police Prefect, Lincoln Powell, a 1st class Esper. It won the first Hugo Award in 1953 for best science fiction novel.
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LibraryThing member selfnoise
A crazy fun suspense SF from the olden days. One of the best examples of Bester's genius: perfect storytelling efficiency.
LibraryThing member Cecrow
This first-Hugo winning novel has a lot of "what happens next?" power when I didn't dwell on the unlikely crime, or puzzling over how rare murder had supposedly become only for several to occur or be referred to in the story and mostly be little remarked upon. I did appreciate the depiction of a
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society rife with ESP, how this ability's operation in social and work contexts would work long after it was been accepted by that society as everyday. This aspect felt very real, producing some interesting dialogue and scenarios. I was surprised to learn this novel was a precursor of Philip K. Dick's "Minority Report". It's a fast-paced thriller and a fun ride if you look past its 1950s pedigree (a hurdle I can overcome, but not entirely ignore).
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LibraryThing member Mrs_McGreevy
In a future where the law is staffed by telepaths, how can you plot a murder? Ben Reich thinks he’s found a way. Does he succeed? You’ll have to read the book to find out, and I envy anyone their first reading of this classic of science fiction.
LibraryThing member teknognome
I'm of two minds about this book. I loved the world, the espers & their guild, the little details Bester has (such as the orthography of names, or the patterns of telepathic communication), and how the plot built with mystery around the murder and the Man with No Face. And then it turned out the
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secret was that D'Courtney was secretly Reich's father? It was such an underwhelming, and Freudian, conclusion to that mystery, and such a poor explanation for the characters actions. I was hoping for something larger, and frankly more motivating and plausible. And so, while I loved the book up to that point, it's hard to rate it highly when the big reveal was so disappointing.
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LibraryThing member Stevil2001
The first third or so of the novel is definitely the best part: how do you commit murder in a society where telepaths comprise a significant portion of the population? Bester has fun both devising a society with a high prevalence of telepathy and showing a criminal mind work out ways to subvert
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this. It's enjoyable stuff, sort of like those Asimov puzzle stories, but Bester's writing has got more of a hard edge to it, doing some interesting stuff with narrative style and slang and future culture.

After the murder happens, focus switches to the telepathic detective trying to bring the murderer in, and this is pretty good, though not as good as what went before. The final part, though, where it all pulls together, is pretty so-so, with too much psychobabble and a very predictable Freudian twist, plus some weird sex stuff. Still, the first two-thirds of the novel is highly enjoyable, and I'm going to read Bester's The Stars My Destination in short order based on my enjoyment of this book.
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LibraryThing member brodiew2
This was an intense book. Every word seemed charged with rage and hostility; especially from the main villain. There were even moments when the cop (hero) was questionable. The most compelling thing about this novel was the authors basics for telepaths. Bester's concepts for telepaths given high
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homage in 'Babylon 5'. This novel is a well written murder mystery with a fascinating finale. You will truly understand what it means to be 'demolished'.
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LibraryThing member fredjryder1946
Hugo Award winner. Tight blend of future-scape and human psychology that keeps your attention. Dated to be sure but full of vivid character images with interplay easily making up for the 50's feel of the place.
LibraryThing member Mromano
Bester's great other work of science fiction, the first being The Stars My Destination envisions of world of telepaths who have essentially made it impossible to murder another human being. However, murder is precisely on the mind of the book's protagonist, who must first find a way to shield his
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intentions and then carry out the act. Those with law degrees might find the work particularly fascinating, as it deals with a modern criminal justice system. It deserves a very high place among science fiction works.
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LibraryThing member isabelx
But I'm not screaming. I'm singing on a stage of sparkling marble while the music soars and the light burn. But there's no-one out there in the amphitheatre. A great shadowed pit . . . empty except for one spectator. Silent. Staring. Looming. The Man With No Face.

Ben Reich is facing a dilemma.
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His business is in trouble and if his major rival won't agree to a merger of their companies, then perhaps he will have get rid of him another way. But how can he, when premeditated murder is impossible due to the Espers ensuring that all potential murderers are picked up before they can strike? His nightmares always end with him running screaming from The Man With No Face, and although he employs a psychiatrist Esper 2 to treat him, the nightmares continue and he can't or won't face the true identity of The Man With No Face.

An exciting SF Detective story, of the cantheyprovehedunnit variety.
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LibraryThing member fieldnotes
I do not know my way around detective fiction or science fiction, so I have little to say about the "Demolished Man." I also generally avoid books that would lose nothing in their transition from paper to the big screen. Stories that do not need to be written are uninteresting as texts even if they
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are entertaining. I kept having the sensation that I've already seen a film adaptation of Bester's novel; but it is more likely that others have borrowed from this influential writer. He seems to have a good deal in common with Phillip K. Dick and this book reminded me frequently of "Minority Report"--the movie.

Extra-sensory perception, cabal politics, double-crossing and four or five twists in the last twenty pages: par for the course, I'm guessing.
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LibraryThing member Radaghast
I expected a lot out of the Demolished Man, perhaps a little too much. Given that the novel was retroactively given a Hugo Award, I expected there must have been a compelling reason to do this. So I came into this novel with a lot of, perhaps unfair, preconceptions that left me disappointed. The
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Demolished Man is by no means an unreadable novel. It is a detective story at heart. It is the tale of a future in which a significant portion of the population has developed ESP, to varying degrees. In this future almost utopia, premeditated murder has been rendered impossible. One man, however, thinks he has a perfect plan to beat the "esper" detectives. He ends up pitted against the most powerful esper in the world as he struggles to get away with murder.

It's a compelling plot. Unfortunately, the novel never rises above a decent detective story. The main characters are developed excellently though the side characters sometimes feel a little bland. Some of the psychology and technology in the book is dated, but that's to be expected. The ending is horrifying, but there are parts that drag in the middle. Every positive point about the novel is balanced by a contrasting weakness. In short, the Demolished Man was an averaging reading experience.
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LibraryThing member Caragen87
A little dated-- but a Classic. Enough said

Subjects

Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

1952-01 (serialized)
1953-03 (novel)

Physical description

224 p.; 18.4 cm

Local notes

Omslag: Ole Vedel
Omslaget viser titel og forfatternavn på en mønstret baggrund
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
Oversat fra amerikansk "The Demolished Man" af Arne Herløv Petersen

Pages

224

Rating

½ (1184 ratings; 3.9)

DDC/MDS

813.54
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