Good, better, best, Bester

I’ve been a science fiction and fantasy fan for a long time. (This is notable mainly because I hated the first SF&F I can remember seeing, the Tom Baker-era Dr. Who. I’m better now, thanks.) Although I’ve been more of a fantasy reader, I started reading Alfred Bester a few years ago, prompted by references from J. Michael Straczynski and Harlan Ellison.

The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination had just been reprinted, and I ate them up. The former, which Bester wrote twenty years before I was born (and which won him the very first Hugo Award), is sort of a funhouse mirror image of Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report (which was written five years later). Bester’s representations of the telepathic conversations of espers are wild, and his psi-blocking song (Tenser, said the Tensor) is as persistent in real life as in the book. It’s also interesting how psi slang (e.g. @kins for Atkins, Wyg& for Wygand) is mirrored in the so-called l33t speak that pervades the web.

As other volumes were reprinted, I grabbed them all; I’ve currently got Virtual Unrealities, The Deceivers, The Computer Connection, Redemolished, and Psychoshop in my reading stack. Unfortunately, that’s where they’ve stayed since I bought them. The only one that I’ve made a stab at is Redemolished, and it’s taken me a good month to make it through Hell is Forever. I can’t seem to make enough time to get to these books, or any of the others in the growing stack. I don’t think I’m succumbing to a shorter attention span–if anything, I’m more focused than I’ve been in some time–and I don’t enjoy the books any less when I do get to them, and I’ve had more free time recently than ever, so I’m at a loss to explain it. I’m starting to identify with HAL:

Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it.

Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey