Ĭonnie Willis described it as 'very funny' and one of her favorite time-travel stories (while misattributing it to Harry Harrison), and Jo Walton categorized it as 'excellent' and 'thought provoking', and specified that it is '(v)ery clever, very funny, and quite chilling when you think about it. Though successful in all these fields, he is best remembered for his science fiction, including The Demolished Man, winner of the inaugural Hugo Award in 1953, a story about murder in a future society. 'Mohammed' was shortlisted for the 1959 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, and The New York Review of Science Fiction describes it as a 'final development' to the theme of time travel in Bester's work. Alfred Bester was an American science fiction author, TV and radio scriptwriter, magazine editor and scripter for comic strips and comic books. In a desperate attempt to alter history, Hassel begins killing historical figures of greater and greater significance (eventually including Mohammed, thus the story's title), only to learn that the nature of time is very different from what he had thought. When he returns to the present, however, nothing has changed. When mad scientist Henry Hassel discovers his wife in the midst of committing adultery, he decides that simple murder would be intellectually unsatisfying he therefore builds a time machine with the intention of killing his wife's grandparents in their youth, so that she will never have existed. It has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and German, and has been reprinted nine times, most recently in Virtual Unrealities (1997). It was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October 1958. Gold: 451 (1953) Alfred Besters novels The Demolished Man (1953), about crime in a. The murderer Ben Reich is a normal, non-telepathic person, but he is extremely smart and is able to foil even mind reading policemen. Other articles where The Demolished Man is discussed: Horace L. ' The Men Who Murdered Mohammed' is a science fiction short story by American writer Alfred Bester. The Demolished Man is an inverted detective story in that the reader is immediately told who the murderer is, but the difficulty for our hero is how to catch the devious bastard.

The demolished man