
Science fiction's dark star: Alfred Bester at 100 - anigbrowl
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/christandpopculture/2013/12/science-fictions-dark-star-alfred-bester-at-100/
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pauldirac137
Bester is one of my favorite SF writers, and it's almost criminal how few
people know about his work. In addition to The Demolished Man and The Stars My
Destination (the latter my all-time favorite SF novel), he also wrote probably
the best science fiction short story ever written, "Fondly Fahrenheit". Bester
was a master of plot, of wordplay, of action, of emotion, and his stories were
so exciting you were left out of breath when you got to the end.

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snowwrestler
They don't seem to get much love, but I really enjoyed his later novels Extro,
also published under the name The Computer Connection, and The Deceivers.

I've always thought that The Stars My Destination would make an awesome movie
but it has never been made for some reason.

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lobster_johnson
The Computer Connection/Extro is a lot of fun, although it's quite a bit
darker than his earlier novels. It's a pageturner; Bester's books always moved
along at a fast, efficient pace, and pulled the reader along with him, but I
think that book is the most extreme. Within the first couple of pages, the
main character has already traveled back in time to 1770s London in an attempt
to save Thomas Chatterton from dying (a favour to a friend, nicknamed H. G.
Wells, who uses a time machine to transport gold back into the past in order
to attempt to save impoverished artists and poet such as Mozart).

Stay away from his later novel Golem^100, though. It's a sad, often mean-
spirited shadow of his best work.

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seiji
Fun fact: The character Alfred Bester in B5 was named after this Alfred
Bester.

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aidenn0
The first time we hear his first-name is when his love-interest shows up, and
I was dying on the floor laughing (which was somewhat inappropriate for the
scene) and had to explain to my friend who Alfred Bester is.

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automatthew
Coincidentally, I just this week threw away one of his short story
collections. In an introduction to a story, he gleefully quoted a nasty song
one of his friends had written about the Lindberg kidnapping. Classy fucker.

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gojomo
Did it happen to be this one, by any chance?

[http://wallpaperroses.tumblr.com/post/67148629666/frank-
sina...](http://wallpaperroses.tumblr.com/post/67148629666/frank-sinatra-who-
put-the-snatch-on-the)

I think our literature would be much less interesting and authentic if we
required our authors to stay 'classy'!

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iamthepieman
Bester was my introduction to science fiction. My father would tell me bedtime
stories from "The Stars My Destination" long before I ever read them.

I remember sitting up in bed listening raptly to the scene where Foyle has his
nemesis on an operating table, chest ripped open, kept alive on life support
machines.

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keithpeter
[http://www.loa.org/sciencefiction/biographies/bester_writing...](http://www.loa.org/sciencefiction/biographies/bester_writings.jsp)

This link was in a HN thread some months(?) ago and I pinboarded it then. I
keep _almost_ buying a Bester novel...

