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Page 55
transition period in the development of science fiction, and arriving back on the scene in the 1950s to find a greatly matured field but with no personal experience, as writer or reader, of that maturation process. As a result, his science fiction in the early 1950s reflected his extensive background in the pre-1942 concept of science fiction, plus his own maturation as a person and as a (non-science fiction) professional writer; but at the same time he came in fresh without any of the built-in assumptions about what science fiction in the 1950s should be that other science fiction writers shared.
Bester's deep love for science fiction has always existed in him side by side with a kind of contempt for science fiction as escape fiction, a feeling of condescension. ("It [science fiction] is a special art-form, only indirectly related to reality. I would class it with the cliches-verres, the glass prints with which the Barbizon artists amused themselves in the middle 19th century. They achieved some spectacular effects, but after a brief vogue, glass prints died out.") Although he is unquestionably a science fiction insider, a fan for almost fifty years and a professional writer for thirty-five of them, he sees himself as an outsider; and this brings a valuable freshness to his science fiction writing.
Paul Williams, "Introduction," The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (Boston: Gregg Press, 1975), p. xiii
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John Clute
His view of man is autumnal, and much of Twentieth century literature shares with him a point-of-view that is technically ironic, technically "superior" to its subject matter. Out of this common material and common import, however, Bester makes sf stories through a kind of sleight-of-hand: The worlds in which his characters operate are themselves radically shaped by his hagridden Gully Foyles and Oddys and the rest of them; dominating and coercing and obsessing the real worlds about them, they engender sf situations by the binding extravagance of their natures. Simple enough, but heady in its implications, for this transforming of the internal into the external comes close to defining the deep structure of all genre creations. Understandably enough, most sf writers remain content with the vivid, entertaining, kinetic world of externalized dreams, where schizoid ex-marines remember their superpowers just in time to save the galaxy, and we're all American Pals together beneath the skin, jawing away. But Alfred Bester's peak novels and stories (most of the 50s batch in these

 
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