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collections) are different. They are passable excursions into the demonology of the self; and they are fine adventures in the light of day, Technicolor, torrential. More important than that, however, their pyrotechnics work as an explanatory dialogue between the inner and the after worlds. For that reasonand because the man can write so well when he's not being a chum, or a posh journalistthey are about the best sf ever published. They define the genre they inhabit. |
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John Clute, [Review of The Light Fantastic and Star Light, Star Bright], Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 52, No. 2 (February 1977): 4748 |
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Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin |
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In two books first serialized in Galaxy during the early fifties, Bester made his reputation and then fell silent for almost twenty years, but those two books are still very much alive, and have been influential on a younger generation of writers. The Demolished Man appeared as a book in 1953, The Stars My Destination in 1956. Both have been admired, but the second made the greatest impact. It tells the story of Gully Foyle, "the stereotype common man," who is inspired by revenge to become a great man. The world in which this happens is the medium-distant future: "All the habitable worlds of the solar system were occupied. Three planets and eight satellites and eleven billion people swarmed in one of the most exciting ages ever known" (Prologue). |
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"Exciting" is the key word here. Bester has taken a plot like that of The Count of Monte Cristo and updated it. In this world people have mastered teleportation but all the old divisions between rich and poor, and the old compulsion to make war have remained unchanged by the new technology. But Bester is not concerned with extrapolating the future. He is telling a fairy tale, a moral fable, using his exotic future world as a dazzling backdrop for a picaresque adventure story that becomes a novel of education, which is really a reshaping of an old myth. Gully Foyle starts out looking for revenge on a space ship that left him stranded as an outcast in space. In the course of this revenge he develops his own intelligence and imagination, so that when he gains the power for revenge his goals have shifted. He finishes by trying to spread his power around, to awaken other dead souls, to give men a choice between death and greatness. All this is narrated in a style of great energy and playfulness. (. . .) |
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