{"id":57,"date":"2002-09-17T23:53:26-04:00","date_gmt":"2002-09-18T07:53:26+00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/wordpress\/?p=57"},"modified":"2002-09-17T23:53:26-04:00","modified_gmt":"2002-09-18T07:53:26+00:00","slug":"good-better-best-bester","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/2002\/09\/17\/good-better-best-bester\/","title":{"rendered":"Good, better, best, Bester"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>. 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<\/a> and Harlan Ellison<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

The Demolished Man<\/a> and The Stars My Destination<\/a> 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<\/a>), is sort of a funhouse mirror image of Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report<\/q> (which was written five years later). Bester’s representations of the telepathic conversations of espers<\/q> are wild, and his psi-blocking song (Tenser, said the Tensor<\/q>) 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<\/acronym> speak<\/a><\/q> that pervades the web.<\/p>\n\n

As other volumes were reprinted, I grabbed them all; I’ve currently got Virtual Unrealities<\/a>, The Deceivers<\/a>, The Computer Connection<\/a>, Redemolished<\/a>, and Psychoshop<\/a> 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<\/q>. I can’t seem to make enough time to get to these books, or any<\/a> of<\/a> the<\/a> others<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>

Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/a><\/p><\/div>

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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…","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"mf2_syndication":[],"venue_id":0},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"kind":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}