Hugo Project #1

I've taken on a little project for my trashy reading: I'm going to try to read through the list of Hugo-Award Winners. That way, I feed my sci-fi habit and at the same time can convince myself that I'm not reading absolute dreck.

So, I just finished Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, winner of the 1953 Hugo (the first one)

Verdict: Better than I anticipated. Some science fiction doesn't wear very well, becoming quaint or silly. In this case, I was surprised that the focus of the "science" part was psychology and Freudian psychoanalysis. It's based on the idea that there is a group of people (called espers) that can read minds at different levels. Bester uses this setup to write a futuristic detective story about a murder committed in an era when murder is almost literally unthinkable. Couple of strong characters--the perp and the detective--and an interesting conceptual take on 'talking' between minds, without words.

Uh Oh: Travel between planets and moons seems to be instantaneous--maybe Bester was better at psychology than astronomy. Also, the Freudian stuff is hard to take seriously.