BESTER, Alfred

(1913-1987)

   US writer and editor, born into a Jewish family in New York, a city with which he was always closely associated. Educated in both humanities and sciences - including PSYCHOLOGY, perhaps the most important "science" in his sf - at the University of Pennsylvania, AB entered sf when he submitted a story to THRILLING WONDER STORIES. Mort WEISINGER, the editor, helped AB to polish it, and then suggested he submit it for an amateur story competition that TWS was running. AB did so and won. The story was "The Broken Axiom" (Apr 1939 TWS).AB published another 13 sf stories to 1942, and then followed his friend Weisinger, along with Otto BINDER, Manly Wade WELLMAN and others, into the field of COMIC books, working on such DC COMICS titles as SUPERMAN, The Green Lantern and Batman. He worked successfully for four years on comics outlines and dialogue, later working on CAPTAIN MARVEL, and then moved into radio, scripting for such serials as Charlie Chan and The Shadow. After the intensive course in action plotting this career had given him, AB returned (part-time) to the sf magazines in 1950, by now more mature as a writer. (His main job at the time was scripting the new tv series TOM CORBETT: SPACE CADET.) There ensued over the next six years a series of stories and novels which are considered to be among the greatest creations of genre sf.AB was never prolific in sf, which was more of a hobby than a career for him, publishing only 13 more short stories - mostly in FSF - before 1960. (One of the five "Quintets" in FSF Sep 1959 was by AB writing as Sonny Powell.) But these alone would have secured him a place in the sf pantheon. Most of his stories were originally issued in book form in two collections, Starburst (coll 1958) and The Dark Side of the Earth (coll 1964). These collections were reassembled with 6 stories dropped, and one older novella-"Hell is Forever" - and 3 quite recent stories added along with the amusing autobiographical essay "My Affair with Science Fiction" (1975), in two further collections, The Light Fantastic (coll 1976) and Star Light, Star Bright (coll 1976), which were in turn reissued as an omnibus volume, Starlight: The Great Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (omni 1976). This last is the best available collection.AB's talents were evident from the beginning. At least three stories from his 1939-42 period are memorable: "Adam and No Eve" (1941) (ADAM AND EVE; END OF THE WORLD), "The Push of a Finger" (1942) and "Hell is Forever" (1942). The latter, a long novella for UNKNOWN, exhibits in a slightly sophomoric way the qualities for which AB would later be celebrated: it is cynical, baroque and aggressive, produces hard, bright images in quick succession, and deals with obsessive states of mind. The most notable later story is "Fondly Fahrenheit" (1954), a breathless story of a man and his ANDROID servant whose personalities intermesh in a homicidal folie a deux. Also memorable are "Of Time and Third Avenue" (1951), "Disappearing Act" (1953) and "The Men who Murdered Mohammed" (1958), which is perhaps the most concentratedly witty twist on the TIME-PARADOX story ever written. At about the time of this story AB addressed an sf symposium at the University of Chicago; his paper is one of the four reprinted in the anonymously edited The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism (anth 1959; intro by Basil DAVENPORT).AB's first two sf novels, THE DEMOLISHED MAN (1953) and Tiger! Tiger! (1956 UK; rev vt The Stars My Destination 1957 US), are among the few genuine classics of genre sf. They are the sf equivalent of the Jacobean revenge drama: both feature malcontent figures, outsiders from society bitterly cognizant of its corruption, but themselves partly ruined by it, just as in The Revenger's Tragedy or The Duchess of Malfi; like them, too, AB's novels blaze with a sardonic imagery, mingling symbols of decay and new life - rebirth is a recurrent theme of AB's - with a creative profligacy.THE DEMOLISHED MAN, which won the first HUGO for Best Novel in 1953, tells a story which in synopsis is straightforward: industrialist Ben Reich commits murder (in a society where murder is almost unknown because telepathic ESPERS can detect the idea before the act is carried out), almost gets away with it, is ultimately caught by Esper detective Linc Powell, and is committed to curative brainwashing, "demolition" (CRIME AND PUNISHMENT). It is the pace, the staccato style, the passion and the pyrotechnics that make the novel extraordinary. The future society is evoked in marvellously hard-edged details; the hero is a driven, resourceful man whose obsessions are explained in Freudian terms that might seem too glib if they were given straight, but are evoked with the same New Yorker's painful, ironic scepticism that informs the whole novel. AB's mainstream novel Who He? (1953; vt The Rat Race 1956), about the tv and advertising businesses, sheds some light on the milieu of THE DEMOLISHED MAN.Tiger! Tiger! tells the story of the now legendary Gully Foyle, whose passion for revenge transforms him from an illiterate outcast to a transcendent, ambiguous, quasi- SUPERMAN in "an age of freaks, monsters and grotesques". Like the first novel, this one lives as much through the incidentals of the setting - in a lurid, crumbling, 25th-century world-as in the plot itself, which AB confesses, too modestly, was borrowed from Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-5). The first vol of a GRAPHIC-NOVEL version by Howard V. CHAYKIN (adaptation by Byron PREISS), was The Stars My Destination Vol 1 (graph 1979); the second vol, though widely bruited, was not in fact published until it appeared, with the first, in The Stars My Destination (1992).In the late 1950s AB was taken on by Holiday magazine as a feature writer, ultimately becoming senior literary editor, a post he held until the magazine ceased publication in the 1970s, at which time he returned to sf. "The Four-Hour Fugue" (1974) shows the old extraordinary assurance and inventiveness, and just a trace of over-facility. Two decades after his last, his new novel, The Computer Connection (1974 ASF as "The Indian Giver"; 1975; vt Extro UK), while full of incidental felicities, did not quite recapture the old drive in its ornate story of a group of immortals and an omniscient COMPUTER; perhaps it lacked a natural "Besterman" as focus. The pace and complexity were still there, but somehow looking like self-parody.The next book, Golem(100) (1980), was more ambitious, had a more authentic Bester flavour, and was regarded by AB as his best novel. It expands "The Four-Hour Fugue" into an extraordinary but overheated tale of the jungle of New York in AD2175, with diabolism, depth psychology (a Monster from the Id), bee superwomen, pheromones, perverse sex, and overall a miasma of death. But the 1960s-style radicalism now looked a little out of date, and what used to be spare and sinewy in his work had begun to seem prolix; the craziness looked like ornamentation rather than what it once was, structural. His last sf novel was The Deceivers (1981), which features a Synergist hero who can perceive patterns; sadly, but interestingly in the light of AB's fame, the sf press almost unanimously failed to review this, presumably out of respect for his feelings. It is not good. When he died six years later, after a long period of ill health, he willed his house and literary estate to his bartender. The posthumously published Tender Loving Rage (1991), written more than 20 years earlier, is a mainstream novel set in 1959, and appropriately features a scientist adopted by the New York advertising/tv people.AB's innovative, ferocious, magpie (his word) talent has certainly been influential in GENRE SF, on writers as disparate as James BLISH, Samuel R. DELANY and Michael MOORCOCK. In many respects his work was a forerunner of CYBERPUNK. He is one of the very few genre-sf writers to have bridged the chasm between the old and the NEW WAVE, by becoming a legendary figure for both - perhaps because in his sf imagery he conjured up, with bravura, both outer and INNER SPACE.

   PN

   See also: CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; ESP; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; GOLDEN AGE OF SF; GOTHIC SF; HISTORY OF SF; HUMOUR; IMAGINARY SCIENCE; LINGUISTICS; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION; NEBULA; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; OUTER PLANETS; PERCEPTION; PSI POWERS; SF IN THE CLASSROOM; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES; TRANSPORTATION; VILLAINS.