< previous page page_59 next page >

Page 59
Who Murdered Mohammed." Bester's people learn to behave rationally (or are forced to by others, like Ben Reich or Jeffrey Halsyon), and perhaps there is hope in thisfew manage to destroy themselves or their world (Odysseus Gaul in "Oddy and Id" is an obvious exception). But surely, no contemporary besides Sturgeon has shown the concern for the human predicament that Bester has. Younger writers, like Malzberg with his mad astronauts or Dick with his demented future citizens, may well have learned from Bester.
Carolyn Wendell, Alfred Bester (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1982), pp. 1617
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Patrick A. McCarthy
The Stars My Destination is quintessentially a Romantic novel, not only in its adaptation of specific elements from Blake but in its vision and design. To a lesser extent the same can be said of many other SF novels; the difference is not only that Bester multiplies the Romantic elements in his novel to a degree beyond what we are likely to encounter in works by any other SF author, but that he self-reflexively converts the idea of Romanticism into an important theme of his fiction. Near the beginning of his Prologue, Bester refers to the "Romantics" who, in the 25th century, "cry 'Where are the new frontiers?' . . unaware that the frontier of the mind" has already been opened through the discovery of jaunting. At the end of the Prologue he outlines the context in which we are to interpret Gully Foyle's eventual discovery of the power to spacejaunte:
ce798b5ef163c3580ef142fbd570a210.gif ce798b5ef163c3580ef142fbd570a210.gif
It was an age of freaks, monsters, and grotesques. All the world was misshapen in marvelous and malevolent ways. The Classicists and Romanticists who hated it were unaware of the potential greatness of the twenty-fifth century. They were blind to a cold fact of evolution . . . that progress stems from the clashing merger of antagonistic extremes, out of the marriage of pinnacle freaks. Classicists and Romantics alike were unaware that the Solar System was trembling on the verge of a human explosion that would transform man and make him the master of the universe.
In the novel, the "marriage of pinnacle freaks" takes the form of the imaginative union of reason and passion. Here, Bester seems to be adopting

 
< previous page page_59 next page >