Running Through Hugo's Back Yard 1: The Demolished Man

So. I had this funny idea, and...

Yeah, yeah, I know - funny ideas are usually the death of good ones, but not in this case; what this idea was is to look through all of the Hugo Award-winning novels I've read (mere nominees will have to follow sometime later, but I'll get around to it) in order to see how they stack up both in terms of how I remember them and how they stack up to a certain Mr. Torgersen's ideal of breakfast cereal (pretty much beaten to death here by MD Lachlan). I know I have a tendency to overwrite introductions, so without further ado here's the first victim of this experiment:

Hugo winner: The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester, 1953

My view: It's been a good, long while since I've read this, and the one thing that's a drawback is that the dialogue even seemed dated to me when I read it in my late teens/early twenties. Then again, so what? TDM came out in 1952, which essentially means that it would seem dated in most contexts since this is over 60 years later. A fun romp of a book that can almost seem like a positively cheerful alternative version of Minority Report at times.

Nuggety? There's plenty of action, but somehow I don't think that this is quite the kind of book that Sad Puppies would go for since it has about as much to do with military SF as it does the Bolshoi Ballet.