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This playfulness is mixed with a high degree of literary awareness. The novel abounds with allusions to Blake and Rimbaud, carefully worked into context so that they will not trouble the untutored reader. And though the moral fable is serious, the spirit of play in the whole work indicates a kind of self-consciousness new to science fiction. This is not the clumsy earnestness of Doc Smith writing a genuinely "popular" fiction. This is a literate author deliberately choosing to work in a popular mode of fiction because of the opportunities it affords him. It is not easy to do this kind of thing without the inverted snobbery showing awkwardly, but Bester brings it off. He gives us a high-powered adventure, following a character who moves through society and space with great rapidity, whose experiences call for a bravura display of writing to describe them, climaxing in an extended passage of synesthetic derangement and cosmic displacement. Bester brought the Gosh-Wow! back into science fiction, but accompanied by a knowing wink, and he almost started an American New Wave all by himself. It is not surprising that his third novel, The Computer Connection (1975), which appeared in Analog as The Indian Giver in 1974, fits in beautifully with what is presently going on in science fictionsince a lot of what is going on is what Bester started in the early fifties. |
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Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin, Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 6769 |
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Golem100 is a bad book. It will infuriate you particularly if you become involved with the characters and their problems, which you may easily do. Three-quarters of the way through, Bester throws overboard everything he has built to that point, lapses into incoherence rather than pyrotechnics, kills off characters he had promised to shepherd safely through genuine troubles, and just generally bushes up his performance. |
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I can't understand this. In an alternate draft of this column, I spent five pages detailing how I think a writer as capable and charming as Alfred Bester could in effect repudiate everything he has ever shown us about storytelling. I spent another few pages looking for signs that he is actually producing something even more satisfactory in the way of craftsmanship or art. It isn't there. The final fourth of this book is a collection of words and |
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