Science fiction's dark star: Alfred Bester at 100 | Hacker News Reader

Science fiction's dark star: Alfred Bester at 100

patheos.com

48 pointsanigbrowl12 comments

Bester is one of my favorite SF writers, and it's almost criminal how few people know about his work. In addition to The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination (the latter my all-time favorite SF novel), he also wrote probably the best science fiction short story ever written, "Fondly Fahrenheit". Bester was a master of plot, of wordplay, of action, of emotion, and his stories were so exciting you were left out of breath when you got to the end.

They don't seem to get much love, but I really enjoyed his later novels Extro, also published under the name The Computer Connection, and The Deceivers.

I've always thought that The Stars My Destination would make an awesome movie but it has never been made for some reason.

The consensus always seems to have been that it's "unfilmable," especially with locations like the Gouffre Martel, a vast underground prison complex kept in total darkness. I always figured that part was easy, though: just film in infrared.

The Stars My Destination stood out for me as something entirely different of it's time. A particularly memorable passage even featured ascii art!

I too once thought that it would make a great movie. Thought the same about Ubik too. Now, my feeling is to just let these classics be.

The Computer Connection/Extro is a lot of fun, although it's quite a bit darker than his earlier novels. It's a pageturner; Bester's books always moved along at a fast, efficient pace, and pulled the reader along with him, but I think that book is the most extreme. Within the first couple of pages, the main character has already traveled back in time to 1770s London in an attempt to save Thomas Chatterton from dying (a favour to a friend, nicknamed H. G. Wells, who uses a time machine to transport gold back into the past in order to attempt to save impoverished artists and poet such as Mozart).

Stay away from his later novel Golem^100, though. It's a sad, often mean-spirited shadow of his best work.

Fun fact: The character Alfred Bester in B5 was named after this Alfred Bester.

The first time we hear his first-name is when his love-interest shows up, and I was dying on the floor laughing (which was somewhat inappropriate for the scene) and had to explain to my friend who Alfred Bester is.

Both in and out of continuity, in fact.

Coincidentally, I just this week threw away one of his short story collections. In an introduction to a story, he gleefully quoted a nasty song one of his friends had written about the Lindberg kidnapping. Classy fucker.

Did it happen to be this one, by any chance?

http://wallpaperroses.tumblr.com/post/67148629666/frank-sina...

I think our literature would be much less interesting and authentic if we required our authors to stay 'classy'!

Bester was my introduction to science fiction. My father would tell me bedtime stories from "The Stars My Destination" long before I ever read them.

I remember sitting up in bed listening raptly to the scene where Foyle has his nemesis on an operating table, chest ripped open, kept alive on life support machines.

http://www.loa.org/sciencefiction/biographies/bester_writing...

This link was in a HN thread some months(?) ago and I pinboarded it then. I keep almost buying a Bester novel...

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