Starlight

Berkley Publishing Corporation : New York, 1977. Paperback. good/no jacket. Starlight, by Alfred Bester, a Berkley Medallion Book published by Berkley Publishing Corporation 1977, ISBN#: 0425034518, Soft bound, Good- condition (cover wear at corners, edges and along spine, tear on top front cover at spine, light spine crease). This is a fantastic collection of some of the best great short fiction of Alfred Bester. If you are not familiar with Bester�s work, this is a great chance to acquire one of his best works. Alfred Bester was born in Manhattan in 1913, the city which appears in much of his writing. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, gave law school a try, got married in 1936, and then began his long writing career. A childhood spent reading fairy tales, H. G. Wells, and the then new magazine Amazing Quarterly naturally led him to attempt to write science fiction. His first story, "The Broken Axiom," published in Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1939, won him the prize in the magazine's short story contest. He published about a dozen stories, few of which have been collected, and disappeared for the first time from science fiction. In 1942, he began writing for comics, which were just getting their start, working on popular titles such as Batman, Superman, and the Green Lantern, where he invented the Green Lantern Oath and the famous villain Solomon Grundy. A few years later he moved into radio, writing for Charlie Chan, The Shadow, and many other programs; he even directed one for awhile. When television came around he tried that too and came to hate it; he wrote about the experience in his first mainstream novel, the satirical Who He?, also published as The Rat Race, which came out in 1953. Tired of rehashing the same few plots, shocked at having been criticized for being "too original," Bester returned to science fiction as an escape, an outlet for the plots and characters that wouldn't fit into the structured, simple stories he wrote for others. He had committed himself to a life of writing, and had learned all the tricks of the trade, particularly plotting, character, and tension. It is in science fiction that he took all these skills and practiced them in double time, confounding all expectations of the genre by taking its tenets and extrapolating them out of the water, sending them into the future. "So, out of frustration, I went back to science fiction in order to keep my cool. It was a safety valve, an escape hatch, therapy for me. The ideas which no show would touch could be written as science fiction stories and I could have the satisfaction of seeing them come to life." Bester's return to science fiction was marked by "Oddy and Id," published in 1950 in John Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding under the title "The Devil's Invention" - an apt one considering Campbell's new infatuation with "dianetics," invented by another science fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard. Bester, with great humor and a little sadness, tells of his first "demented" (his words) meeting with the editor in "My Affair with Science Fiction." He was made to read the galleys of Hubbard's first articles on dianetics, all the while feigning interest, with the editor hovering over him, every moment trying to convert him. He lies, pretending to be taken in and telling Campbell, "...the emotional wounds are too much to bear. I can't go on with this." Bester was trying desperately to hold back laughter. The editor's response: "Yes, I could see you were shaking." The experience alienated him from Campbell, an important writer and one of the genre's most influential editors, who he thought of as a mentor. Bester began to write for Horace Gold, who sought him ought for his new magazine Galaxy, which was publishing more psychology-based, less "hard" science fiction. Gold helped Bester formulate the ideas for his first science fiction novel, and gave it its title The Demolished Man (the author's working title was the much less memorable Demolition!). The novel won the first Hugo award for best novel in 1953, and the attention it received kept Bester in the science fiction field for the next ten years and allowed him to meet and befriend some of his peers (who, incidentally, called him Alfie.) Several of the stories collected in Virtual Unrealities were written during this time, many of them for the new Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine. In 1956, Alfred Bester began writing travel articles for Holiday magazine and published his second novel The Stars My Destination. It was even more unusual than his first novel and received mixed reviews, its violent passages and sexuality put off many critics. Time would prove it just as important, if not more so, than his first novel. There are even recent rumors of a movie. In the early Sixties Bester also wrote reviews for Fantasy and Science Fiction, many of them very critical of the state of the genre. Though a career writer, he never relied on science fiction for his livelihood. This fact, and his many departures from the genre, gave him outsider status. It is likely the reason his stories and novels were so unique; he did not write them in haste, as a pulp writer who needed to make the money would, and he wrote all kinds of stories. These are things he finds at fault in science fiction, whose authors, he argued, are too short-sighted in their literary aspirations, not well read, and have a deadly reliance on science fact which stifles the genre's relevance to real life. Nitpicking critics often criticized him for his bad science, most notably the editor Damon Knight who nonetheless is impressed by him. Bester's response: "I hate hard science fiction." He advocated psychological drama over technological speculations, such as in this review of the author James Blish, who he urges to take up "...drink, drugs, seduction, crime, politics...anything that will shock him into experiencing the stresses that torture people, so that he will be able to write about them with the same lucid dedication which he presently reserves exclusively for science." Though Bester was critical, it was out of love for the genre: "It's the only literary medium left in which we have a free hand. We can do any damn thing we please. And we know we have a creative reading public who will go along with us." It is speculated that Bester's critical stance may have led to his second departure from science fiction, but it was actually his decision to concentrate on his job at Holiday, where he became a senior editor in 1967. (He remained there until the magazine changed hands in 1970.) His job, he says, was too much fun. In his essay, he tells of interviews with Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, and Laurence "Sir Larry" Olivier, visits to NASA, and test driving new cars. "Reality had become so colorful for me that I no longer needed the therapy of science fiction." After this flashy career, Alfred Bester returned to science fiction in 1973 with the story "The Four-Hour Fugue," which became part of his third science fiction novel, The Computer Connection, published in 1975 to uniformly negative reviews. (He himself admits that it was an experiment that failed - "that confounded book," he called it. ) Starlight, a short story collection compiling two earlier ones, appeared in 1976. In 1980 he published the story "Galatea Galante" and Golem100, which only he considered to be his greatest novel. His last novel, The Deceivers, published in 1981, was so bad some reviewers neglected to review it for fear of offending its author. Though his later stories are good, he never recaptured the glory of his early science fiction career. Alfred Bester died in Pennsylvania in 1987, the same year the Science Fiction Writers of America gave him the Grandmaster prize of the Nebula Awards. It is time that you find out why. The table of contents contains the following stories: from The Light Fantastic: 5271009; Ms Found in a Champagne Bottle; Fondly Fahrenheit; The Four Hour Fugue; The Men Who Murdered Mohammed; Disappear Act; Hell is Forever; from Star Light Star Bright: Adam and No Eve; Time if the Traitor; Oddly and Id; Hobson's Choice; They Don't Make Life Like They Used To; Of Time and Third Avenue; Isaac Asimov; The Pi Man; Something Up There Likes Me; and My Affair with Science Fiction. The book is approximately 4 1/8 X 6 7/8 inches in size and contains 452 pages. The cover price is $1.85. Another copy of the book is currently offered on the Internet at House of Books for $12.95. For more info about this other book, Visit: http://www..com/search/detail.cfm?binding=sc&chunk=25&mtype=&qisbn=0425034518&S=R&bid=8138231597&pqtynew=&page=1&matches=14&qsort=r> Buyer pays minimal shipping - US Post Office Media Mail unless specified otherwise. If you have any questions please send me an email. 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