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Page 48
However, it was the breathless pacing and pyrotechnic effects of the story that earned it the first Hugo Award for best novel.
Bester's second science fiction novel, Tiger! Tiger! (1956; published in the United States as The Stars My Destination), written during a sojourn in Italy, also poured on the pyrotechnics in its account of a wronged everyman transformed into a superman by his megalomaniacal desire for revenge (a plot Bester later admitted to having cribbed from Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo). Both novels crystallized cynical attitudes about the future of human civilization and the impact of environment upon character that Bester had expressed in his earlier short stories, and captured the dark mood of much postwar science fiction. At the same time that his stories were winning science fiction's highest awards, Bester wrote several blistering essays and addresses that attacked the genre for pandering to juvenile tastes.
Notice for his novel "Who He?" (1953; later retitled The Rat Race), a critique of the advertising business, landed Bester a job as an entertainment writer for Holiday magazine, which he held until 1970. He returned to science fiction with the novel The Computer Connection in 1975, but this and two later novels, Golem100 (1980) and The Deceivers (1981), failed to live up to the promise of his incandescent earlier work. Bester died after a lengthy period of illness in 1987. His mainstream novel Tender Loving Rage was published posthumously in 1991, nearly twenty years after it was written.
Critical Extracts
Alfred Bester
Intellectually, science-fiction is guilty of the naïveté of the child and the over-simplification of the child. Its naïveté leads it to adopt fads, believe in nostrums, and discuss disciplines of which it has only the most superficial understanding. I need mention no names. The followers of the "Bacon Wrote Shakespeare" cult and the interpreters of the Great Cipher have their blood brothers in science-fiction, as have the lunatic members of Gulliver's Grand Academy of Lagado.
The political and sociological theorizing in science-fiction is puerile. Philosophic thought is absurdly commonplace. Serious discussions are generally on the level of a bull session of high school sophomores who are all rather pleased with themselves and snobbish toward the rest of the world

 
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