Author Profile · Science Fiction
Alfred Bester
1913–1987 · American
Who was Alfred Bester?
A New Yorker who treated science fiction as a sideline between comics scripting (he wrote Superman and Green Lantern, and by some accounts the Green Lantern oath), radio drama and a long stint as a senior editor at Holiday magazine — which may explain why his two great novels read like nothing else of their era. The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination took the standard pulp toolkit and rewired it with Freud, typographical fireworks and white-hot narrative drive, creating protagonists who are obsessive, damaged and unforgettable. He published relatively little, but pound for pound no one in the field hits harder.
Why they matter
The proto-New-Wave and proto-cyberpunk in one package: Gibson, Moorcock and Delany all name him as the spark. The Demolished Man won the very first Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1953, and The Stars My Destination regularly tops best-SF-novel polls to this day.
Essential books — and where to start
The Demolished Man
1953 · Science Fiction · Golden Age SF, Satirical SF
In 2301 telepathic 'Espers' staff the courts, the boardrooms and the police, and there has not been a premeditated murder in seventy years — until ruthless tycoon Ben Reich decides to kill his rival and beat the peeper police, armouring his thoughts behind a maddening advertising jingle ('Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun'). Police prefect Lincoln Powell knows almost at once; the duel is over proof, and over the buried thing actually driving Reich. Bester renders telepathic society in typographic fireworks and Freudian depth-charges, at a pace that still feels reckless.
The Stars My Destination
1956 · Science Fiction · Space Opera, Satirical SF, New Wave SF
Gully Foyle, the least promising man alive, survives six months in the wrecked spaceship Nomad; when the liner Vorga passes him by, the rage of it remakes him. Across a 25th-century where everyone can teleport ('jaunte') and the gutter has gone interplanetary, Foyle claws upward — brute, fraud, gentleman, monster — pursuing Vorga and being pursued for the cargo he doesn't know he carries. The Count of Monte Cristo rebuilt as proto-cyberpunk pyrotechnics, ending in synaesthetic typography and one of SF's great gestures of dangerous hope: handing the fire to the people. Published in the UK as Tiger! Tiger!
1928–1982 · American
The genre's great metaphysician.
1934–2018 · American
The most decorated short-fiction writer in genre history and the editor who dragged American SF into the New Wave.
1952–2001 · British
The funniest writer the genre has produced and one of the most quoted authors in the language.
