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Alfred Bester is one of those authors
that I’ve been aware of for a long time, but who never quite
made it onto my To Read List: His name would come up in a
discussion or article, but my interest was never quite piqued
enough, or a copy of the book never found its way in front of my
eyes in a timely fashion, and he would sink back into the mental
noise of my consciousness.
Then, a couple
of weeks ago, the stars aligned themselves in the heavens,
Bester again came to my attention, and – lo and behold – I
discovered used copies of THE STARS MY DESTINATION and THE
DEMOLISHED MAN on the shelves of Uncle Hugo’s here in
Minneapolis, MN.
Wow. I’ve been
missing out.
Three things
about Bester stand out to me:
First, his use of what I must call, for
lack of a better term, casual detail. Bester will seamlessly
drop a staggeringly original idea into a paragraph, casually
passing it by as if it were no more remarkable than the mention
of an automobile in a novel of today. The effect is that of a
novel written in the far future, not merely taking place
there. It’s a technique which was pioneered by Heinlein, but
Bester presents it in a perfected form.
Second, the fact
that these are – at their core – incredibly powerful
character dramas. They have all the strength and pathos of a
Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, while simultaneously being
driven by a fast-paced, tautly-plotted action-adventure. The
result is a reading experience which is not only compelling and
addictive, but tremendously powerful. The depth with which the
characters are drawn, and the sheer emotional extremity of their
circumstance, leaves a lasting impression on your mind and soul.
Finally, the
astonishing originality and scope of his ideas. Unlike this
contemporaries, Bester is not content to simply choose one or
two or ten different ideas with which to build his future.
Instead, he uses dozens, spinning them out one after another in
an incredibly dense, breath-taking vista. Nor is his cascade a
random cornucopia of creativity: Each idea is a facet
painstakingly set within an imagined epoch, carefully revealed
not only to deepen the setting, but to further the story.
To see this
depth and mastery in a piece of 1950s science fiction is
astonishing. Bester was incredibly ahead of his time. It would
take nearly a decade after the publication of THE STARS MY
DESTINATION before science fiction, as a field, began
tentatively taking steps to explore in the directions Bester had
already intuitively mapped out. It would take nearly thirty
years before the genre showed serious signs of actually catching
up to Bester, and even today – nearly fifty years after its
publication – THE STARS MY DESTINATION continues to exist on
the cutting edge.
In fact, if I
didn’t already know who Alfred Bester was, I would have been
terribly excited at discovering a new, cutting edge author after
finishing THE STARS MY DESTINATION. It is the only novel from
the 1950’s that I feel could have been written yesterday: The
setting reads like a post-cyberpunk novel, and the main
character reads like a protagonist from Iain Banks or Stephen
Donaldson.
That’s an
incredible accomplishment. And the result are books which are
exciting to read in any case, and shockingly revelatory when
read within their historical context.
After reading
these books, one is left to wonder what science fiction would
have been like if Bester hadn’t left the field shortly after
the publication of THE STARS MY DESTINATION in 1956. I detect a
definite pre-Bester vs. post-Bester watershed in the genre, and
I think that if one were to carefully trace out the earliest
whispers of the New Wave movement, one would find those whispers
firmly rooted in the soil of Bester’s work. Would Bester’s
continued work in the field, therefore, have quickened that
development? Would Bester have served as a catalyst for a
revolution? And, if so, how would that revolution have differed
from the one Harlan Ellison catalyzed with DANGEROUS VISIONS?
Unfortunately,
such ponderings are lost to history – just as Bester was lost
to Holiday magazine for the better part of two decades. Perhaps
it is an alternate history tale for Michael Burstein to tell.
I have it on Good Authority(TM) that the books Bester
wrote upon returning to the SF field in the 1970’s do not
compare with these early masterpieces. That’s unfortunate. I
plan to give them a shot at some point, anyway, starting with
THE COMPUTER CONNECTION (since that turned up on the used shelf
recently, too).
GRADES:
- THE
STARS MY DESTINATION: A+
- THE
DEMOLISHED MAN: A+
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