Many people live in the wreckage of an earlier nuclear war – like the West Side of Manhattan, melted into a three-dimensional maze of twisted glass and ceramics and turned into a “mega-brothel.”
A lucky few live in unimaginable opulence, throwing decadent parties at private estates. Interplanetary corporations control the solar system. The Demolished Man is set in the 24th Century. There they remain in suspended animation until 2032, when Spartan is revived to take Phoenix out. When his takedown of longtime nemesis Simon Phoenix results in a massive number of civilian casualties, he and Phoenix are sent to the same cryo-prison. The Demolition Man is John Spartan, a cop from 1996 Los Angeles who doesn’t play by the rules but still gets results. But Reich, a man of singular genius and willpower, finds a way around their powers. No one has successfully committed a murder for over seventy years. The only catch: the Espers Guild, a professional association of telepaths that occupy all levels of industrial society. Already plagued by insanity, in the form of waking nightmares where a Man With No Face tries to murder him, Reich hatches a plot to murder Craye D’Courtney. Monarch has steadily lost business for the last decade to Reich’s rival, the D’Courtney Cartel. The Demolished Man – or rather, the protagonist of Alfred Bester’s 1951 novel of that name – is Ben Reich, owner of interplanetary conglomerate Monarch Enterprises. I come out of cryo-prison and I’m Betsy-fucking-Ross. Why throw him away? Do that enough and all you’ve got left are the sheep. You straighten him out and turn him into a plus value. If a man’s got talent and guts to buck society, he’s obviously above average.
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