The dual nature of mankind is discussed throughout literary history, most notably in the Bible, and the motivation of revenge can be traced back to Homer in classical literature and to Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (c.1586) and Shakespeare's Hamlet (c.1601) in more recent literature.

Likewise, mystery stories have existed since before prose was developed as an art form. One of the first to link the mystery story with science fiction was Anthony Boucher, who published Rocket to the Morgue under the pen name of H. H. Holmes in 1942, and The Demolished Man is one of the most important novels to follow in that tradition. Space travel and extrasensory perception are science fiction staples that date back to the works of H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapleton, and Hugo Gernsback.

The use of a nearly stream-of-consciousness approach to dialogue, the insertion of dream fragments, and the imaginative use...