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Bester's sweeping style coupled with the stun ning ingenuity and thoroughness of his world-building in The Demolished Man (hereafter referred to as Demolished) earned him the attention of the science fiction world, as well as its top honorthe Hugo award. Bester's 1951 masterpiece remains a textbook case for the creation of a different world. Bester fashioned a new society, its implicit and explicit laws, and its modes of operation; in short, a whole culture. This kind of convincing "world design" is now taken for granted (Ursula Le Guin, Frank Herbert, and Larry Niven are three who followed Bester's lead, if not his style). Bester describes the special passion he must feel if he is to create characters for such a world: "I can't start a story until I can hear the characters talking, and by that time they've got will and ideas of their own and have gone into business for themselves." Nearly twenty years before the above comment was made, Bester described the process in Demolished where creation originates in "the never-ending make-and-break synapses contribut[ing] a crackling hail of complex rhythms. Packed in the changing interstices were broken images, half-symbols, partial references . . . the ionized nuclei of thought" (Demolished). Bester must understand the totality of his construct if he is to write about it. He must hear the characters, see them play, use all his senses to understand them. Beneath the senses is the war between the head and the heart. Heavily influenced by Freud (Bester comments that his "habit is to look at characters from the Freudian point of view firstother points of view receive equal time later"), Bester champions man's reason but often shows the id triumphant. This accounts for the dark, often desperate tone of his stories. Like his character the Pi Man, Bester strives for a balance between rationality and unreason, between hate and love. Bester's respect for the id's forces doesn't prevent him from generating mindscapes, incredible (rational) worlds created by the ego and superego. Each major novel is based on a simple ''what-if': what if . . (1) an elite group of telepaths ran society (Demolished),(2) everyone had powers of teleportationsome more than others (The Stars My Destination hereafter Destination), or (3) humanity can gain immortalityunder special conditions (The Computer Connection). Telepathy, teleportation, and immortality are all seen by Bester to be powers of the mind that hint at its potentialLincoln Powell sums up: "You are what you think" (Demolished). (. . .) |
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Bester's true music is the language he uses. The seemingly doomed Gully Foyle, trapped in a burning slag heap in Destination, finds his senses overloading so that "he saw the sound of his shouted name in vivid rhythms . . . . |
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