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enemy transformed by time into his savior, he saves himself and attains a state of innocence and rebirth. |
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This is the stuff of mysticism. |
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It is also a very powerful dramatization of Rimbaud's theory of the systematic derangement of the senses to achieve the unknown. And the Rimbaud reference is as conscious as the book's earlier references to Joyce, Blake, and Swift. (. . .) To recapitulate: whatever the inspiration or vision, whether it arrives in a flash or has been meticulously worked out over years, the only way a writer can present it is by what he can make happen in the reader's mind between one word and another, by the way he can maneuver the existing tensions between words and associated images. |
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Samuel R. Delany, "About Five Thousand One Hundred and Seventy Five Words" (1969), The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press, 1977), p. 47 |
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(Bester's) intense literary preoccupation with fire, heat, and passion generally is fully realized in "Fondly Fahrenheit." References to fire, furnaces, burning, red, orange, and smoke litter every page of this story (. . .)"Fondly Fahrenheit" is narrated by James Vandaleur, a psychotic who projects his murderous desires onto the personality of his android, creating a "killer android" from whose crimes he must continually flee. His narration is a first person of mixed singulars and plurals that shifts occasionally to a third person. The point of view appears to flutter among Vandaleur, his android, and some emphatic observer. This technique makes a first reading of the story somewhat confusing, but it is a necessary (and brilliant) device, for "Fondly Fahrenheit'' is a Doppelgänger story of a highly original kind. Vandaleur is the evil side of the narrator; his android is the good, unable by nature to endanger life or property. Through projection, evil overcomes sanity and morality to set loose murder and destruction. |
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As in The Demolished Man, there are sufficient clues planted in the story for the reader to figure this out long before Bester tells him in the last paragraph. Why doesn't Vandaleur sell his android? He continually threatens to, but never does. Even if he took a loss on the sale, he could buy a less expensive model and live more modestly, something he is forced to do anyway when he bruises the android's head and hires it out as a common labourer. There is no rational purpose in keeping the androidexcept that |
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