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Alfred Bester
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 Alfred Bester published fourteen science fiction stories between 1939 and 1942, mostly in
Campbell's magazines. He left the field to work in comics and then in radio drama, returned to sf in 1950 and published
only twelve more short stories and two novels before 1960. Those novels --
The Demolished Man (1953) and The Stars My
Destination (1956) -- and those few stories made him for many the premier science fiction
writer of that decade. In fact, in the 1970s, The Stars My
Destination was still generally considered the best sf
novel ever written. His 1950s work was symbolic of the new styles of sf championed by Galaxy and The
Magazine of Fantasy Science Fiction; none of his stories appeared in Astounding.
"The one word most symbolic of science fiction is, of course, 'extrapolation,'" he said in his
collection, Starlight (1976), and defined it as "The continuation of a trend, either increasing, decreasing or steady-state,
to its culmination in the future. The only constraint is the limit set by the logic of the universe." Note that
he does not mention science. This is not exactly what Campbell meant when he used the term extrapolation,
and Bester's usage is slippery enough to permit much more of the fantastic (and little or no overt science).
Elsewhere, he said, "I'm not much interested in extrapolating science and technology; I merely use extrapolation
as a means of putting people into new quandaries which produce colorful pressures and conflicts." His
example was enormously influential. Nearly every ambitious young sf writer of the 1960s, certainly all the New Wave
writers, from Brian W. Aldiss to Samuel R. Delany, from Michael Moorcock to Roger Zelazny, revered
his work. Twenty years ago, it would have been surprising that any of his books be out of print, as they all
are today.
Bester championed psychiatry, when hard sf ranked it with voodoo and religion. He was
pyrotechnic, self-consciously literary and artificial, brilliant, and utterly rejected the style and affect of hard sf. His
fiction was lurid, brash, full of plot twists, coincidence, colorful special effects in imagery and even typography.
"I've always been obsessed with patterns, rhythms, and tempi, and I always feel my stories in those terms. It's this
pattern obsession that compels me to experiment with typography. I'm trying very hard to develop a
technique of blending the sight, sound, and context of words into dramatic patterns. I want to make the eye, ear, and
mind of the reader merge into a whole that is bigger than the sum of its parts." Reading should be "a
total sensory and intellectual experience," he said. He was a string of firecrackers thrown into the sf crowd of
the 1950s. Everyone applauded. "If you want to get a sense of how groovy it could have been to be alive
and young and living in New York in the 50s, read Bester's sf," William Gibson said recently.
One of the dozen from the 50s is "The Pi Man," a mathematical sf story that plays jazz riffs on statistics.
Of science, there is less here than meets the eye. Bester claims it is "extrapolating my obsession with patterns
. . . The story explores an autre but logically possible exaggeration of environment on a contemporary man."
But there are constant nuggets of knowledge and information. The basic technique, of charming the
reader with fast talk, street-wisdom, and an exaggerated character is borrowed to a large extent from Heinlein. And
it was the field that revered Heinlein that made Bester a star in the 50s. Herein lie the roots of the
contemporary diversity in science fiction, and the roots of the need, after a decade of Bester, to find a name, "hard
science fiction," for the best old fashioned kind in the early 1960s.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.