Hammers of Demolition and Redemption
Midway through the twentieth century, Marshall McLuhan published his first book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), a study of the American culture industry that explores the effects of popular media. Many reviewers were confused by McLuhan’s rhizomatic method as much as the subject matter, which had never been probed with such bravura. Five years later, UK publisher Sidgwick and Jackson released Alfred Bester’s Tiger! Tiger! (1956). The novel was renamed The Stars My Destination in 1957 by its US publisher, Signet Books. Like McLuhan, Bester hurled readers into a vortex of wonder, spectacle, and technology that was at once familiar and estranging, transcendent and disarming, preposterous and perfectly (in)sane.
Bester and McLuhan were proto-cyberpunks who paved the way for late capitalist SF and media culture in the twentieth century. The cyberpunk movement of the 1980s can be directly traced back to fictional and theoretical works by both authors. To a certain extent, Stars takes the baton from The Mechanical Bride and runs with it. There is no evidence that Bester read McLuhan before composing his novel. Stylistically and thematically, however, they exhibit ripe similarities in the form of quixotic approaches to narrative, representations of the anxiety and agency induced by the cultural maelstrom, and an attention to the vicissitudes of corporate power, patriarchy, and abuse—all cyberpunk staples. Most importantly, both texts point toward a future distinguished by the science fictionalization of reality. This, of course, is the future that has overtaken us. McLuhan predicted the wave. Bester and his cyberpunk descendants rode the wave. And now here we are, crashed on the Terminal Beach.
A collection of “exhibits,” The Mechanical Bride is a “Frankenstein fantasy” that concerns the “widely occurring cluster image of sex, technology, and death” in consumer-capitalist culture, especially advertising (McLuhan, Mechanical 29). McLuhan adopts a high-energy, immersive, and oblique style, compelling readers to make their own connections and dynamically engage with the material. Style is a way of seeing, just as it is for cyberpunk’s foundational texts: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1981) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). Bester does likewise in Stars, challenging readers to manage their expectations, pushing the limits of the SF genre, and manifesting a pyrotechnic style that reifies his content and characters.
The monster of culture is the apple of McLuhan’s eye. Bester has his eye on this apple, too, but the twenty-fifth century depicted in Stars is a virtual circus of monsters. One monster, however, towers above all the rest: Gully Foyle.
Bester’s quintessential antihero is one of the most complex, thought-provoking, and problematic ever created in SF, pieced together with the scraps of protagonists from earlier literary works, and enhanced by Bester’s own authorial mad scientism. Foyle’s degradation is the product of social and cultural forces, and his struggle to find and assert his identity bears with it the litany of violence endemic to all quests for self-identification. He is a technologized tiger who channels the darkest essences of McLuhan’s mechanical bride. When we meet him in the first chapter, this “stereotype Common Man” has been left for dead (Stars 17). As the novel progresses, we watch him transform into a superman, an “infernal machine” (23), ultimately “the archetypal Besterman,” which Peter Nicholls describes as “the 200th-century, pulp equivalent of the malcontent of Jacobean revenge dramas, brooding, sardonic, obsessed and murderous—at once ironic commentator and brutal actor in a dark, amoral world” (“Alfred”). In essence, the Besterman is the Batman. Demonic angel, angelic demon—either hybrid will do. It’s no coincidence that Batman’s co-creator, Bill Finger, taught Bester how to write comics. The Besterman needs the Fall as much as the Rise; his superheroic pathology depends upon the hammers of demolition and redemption.
In his most renowned book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), McLuhan builds upon The Mechanical Bride. He hypothesizes that all technologies amplify the body, ranging from low tech like speech (i.e., uttering equals outering) and clothing (“our extended skin”) to high tech like computers, robots, and nukes. These amplifications enhance us, but they also amputate us, as every form of newness can only be brought to bear by relegating that from which it sprung. “Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body” (McLuhan, Understanding 67). Foyle himself becomes an amplified amputation when he refurbishes his body and cybernetically extends himself through alter-ego Geoffrey Fourmyle of Ceres, “the classic bourgeois gentilhomme, the upstart nouveau riche of all time” (Stars 124). This extension relegates the gutter-dwelling prole he used to be, but the ghost of that prole continues to haunt him like a phantom limb. He is amplified/amputated by class as well as technology, two of cyberpunk’s most prevalent tropes.
In the end, Foyle/Fourmyle foils the SF heroes that preceded him and charts new terrain for the tigers that followed in his wake. The animal is an evocative signifier that goes far beyond the Māori mask tattooed onto his face and the poem from which Bester borrowed his original title and dominant themes, William Blake’s “The Tyger” (1794). More than anything, it represents Bester’s rancorous artistry and the hunger to carve out his own unique niche in a literary wilderness that he perceived to be largely stagnant, lackluster, and redundant. As an author, Bester is as much a tiger as his Ahabesque monomaniac. “I HATE science fiction for what it has been,” he wrote in 1953. “I love it for what it will be” (“Trematode” 11). He thought SF was capable of much more than the status quo it chronically delivered, and Stars pointed the way for the most inventive and stylish narratives that the genre would ever see. According to Paul Williams, the novel’s “first publication in 1956 was a major event in the history of contemporary science fiction” (v).
Renaissance Man: Biography
Alfred Morton Bester was born on December 18, 1913, in Manhattan, New York City; he died in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, in 1987 of complications from a broken hip. Isaac Asimov once said that he never heard his friends call him anything but “Alfie” (“In Memoriam” 25). I only know as much about his private, day-to-day life as what I’ve read in interviews, articles, and personal accounts by other authors, but I get the sense that he lived as hard as he wrote, propelled by the same intensity that informs his novels and stories. Tellingly, he left his literary estate to his bartender.
Bester’s well-documented desire to become a Renaissance man dates back to his early life. As a child and college student, his imagination conjured one future occupation and identity after another. He even referred to himself as a “Renaissance kid” (Bishop 24), but he lacked the gumption and follow-through to manifest any of his self-extrapolations, which eventually led him to SF. In addition to a scientist, a chess player, an artist, and an astronomer, “I wanted to be a physician, an adventurer, a fullback, a composer […] and never became them because the reality of accomplishment was so much less glamorous than the dreams. And I was so naturally led to science-fiction, for that form of literature provided me with the fulfillment of my dreams at no more cost than a pleasant hour’s reading” (Bester, “Trematode” 11–12). Like so many readers and writers, SF was an escape pod from the monotony of real life. In due course, Bester would aspire to make that pod his own, pushing the genre in new directions.
Predictably, Bester’s Bestermen tend to be Renaissance men. Gully is the touchstone, as he indicates in the guise of Fourmyle of Ceres: “I dance, speak four languages miserably, study science and philosophy, write pitiful poetry, blow myself up with idiotic experiments, fence like a fool, box like a buffoon” (Stars 169). Again and again, this driven, charismatic author’s penchant for self-diversity (and self-effacement) bled into his characters.
As an SF writer, Bester started in the pulps and ended as a Grand Master. Along the way, his early obsession with “the ideal of the Renaissance Man” led him elsewhere (“Science Fiction” 409). He became a writer by trade and by name—a “working stiff,” he frequently called himself—but he didn’t limit himself to one form or genre of writing. He pursued multiple avenues of expression within his chosen profession, personifying the diversity and well-roundedness after which he pined during boyhood. As Jad Smith foregrounds in his biocritical study of Bester’s life and work, “He focused on SF only intermittently during his nearly fifty years as a professional writer and, at times, maintained few ties with the field” (2).
Bester was a furious self-critic. In “Science Fiction and the Renaissance Man,” he denigrates his juvenilia, saying he sold “half a dozen miserable stories by the grace of two kindly editors at Standard Magazines who enjoyed discussing James Joyce with me and bought my stories out of pity” before his polymathic impulse led him to comics (410). All told, he sold over a dozen stories between 1939 and 1942, punctuated by the novelette “Hell Is Forever,” whose byzantine, multigeneric style prefigures Stars. He didn’t publish another SF story for nearly a decade. In the interim, he worked in radio, television, and comics, all of which contributed to the evolution of his style. Comics in particular “gave me an ample opportunity to get a lot of lousy writing out of my system” (“My Affair” 453), but it also contributed to his signature prose. Distinguished by aggressive bricolage, meta-playfulness, overcoding, visual dynamism, and compulsive fever pitches, the epitome of this prose can be found in Stars, a novel for whom the pyrotechnic label is richly deserved, if not definitive. Smith synthesizes the impact of Bester’s experience working in other media: “He brought valuable skills with him from comics, radio, and television—including a highly developed sense of pacing, a flair for both comic and hard-boiled dialogue, and a strongly visual approach to narrative—and he combined them with his own freewheeling imagination. To boot, he had a hip, iconoclastic New York attitude” (3).
Ennui is any Renaissance man or woman’s worst enemy; nothing cripples him or her like boredom and the anvil of stagnation. Bester grew weary with commercial writing and returned to SF in a consummate pursuit of newness. While it would prove to be more limiting than liberating for him, he believed that, at its core, SF’s potential for genuine innovation and creative breakthroughs surpassed all other genres. Unfortunately, he discovered that SF publishers, editors, and authors rarely tapped and harnessed the core’s energy.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Bester came into his own. He sold his most enduring stories, among them “Fondly Fahrenheit” (1954), a tale about a wealthy playboy and his murderous android doppelgänger that extrapolates John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937) and, like Stars, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). He also produced two of SF’s most significant, influential novels of the post-WW2 era. His first novel, The Demolished Man, won the first annual Hugo Award in 1953. In the imagined future of this SF noir, telepathy has become normative and murder is virtually nonexistent—“Espers” or “peepers” can detect a crime before it happens or finger a perpetrator after the fact. The plot involves a schizophrenic, megalomaniacal industrialist, Ben Reich, who commits murder and attempts to evade the long, telepathic arm of the law. In the end, police detective Lincoln Powell apprehends him and Reich must undergo Demolition, a process that will recondition his psychological flows and turn him from a minus man into a “plus value” (242).
Bester loved Freud and often injected psychoanalytic ideas into his fiction. Reich is a Freudian case study amplified by Gully Foyle, a latent übermensch on the precipice of greatness. A Nietzschean venom flows through the veins of both Bestermen, although Foyle’s Zarathustra packs a harder punch than Reich’s. So does Stars elevate Demolished in terms of world-building, visual intricacy, the vagaries of inner space, and “special effects.” The release of the novel in 1956 solidified Bester’s status as an SF prizefighter. Several years later, however, he would depart from the genre again, partly because of a slow-burning antipathy for the way SF was being written, mostly because he took a full-time job at the travel magazine Holiday as a writer and editor. “An exciting new writing life began for me,” Bester wrote in 1975. “I was no longer immured in my workshop; I was getting out and interviewing interesting people in interesting professions. Reality had become so colorful for me that I no longer needed the therapy of science fiction. And since the magazine imposed no constraints on me, outside of the practical requirements of professional magazine technique, I no longer needed a safety valve” (“My Affair” 472).
His tenure at Holiday lasted until 1970 when the magazine downsized and relocated from New York to Indiana. During this period, Bester published a few stories, but for the most part he was AWOL from SF … until he made a concerted effort to return to “his first love” a second time with “The Animal Fair,” a morality “play” on George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) that appeared in the October 1972 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (473). The previous decade had seen him badmouth SF with impunity—even while serving as reviews editor of F&SF—but the birthright of his two great SF novels had grown more powerful than Bester’s best efforts to piss everybody off, and he was welcomed back to the genre, especially by authors and editors affiliated with the New Wave movement, which was at its height in the early 70s. This final stage of his career included his most experimental SF novels: The Computer Connection (1975), Golem100 (1980), and The Deceivers (1981). None of them came close to generating the buzz and acclaim of Stars or Demolished, and whereas Bester contended that Golem100 was “beyond a doubt” his best book (qtd. in Bishop 23), they were all widely criticized for a variety of reasons, above all authorial self-indulgence and complicated plotlines. In fact, these later novels are each underrated in their own right. Readers came down on them because what they really wanted was a repackaging of Demolished and Stars. But the Renaissance itch followed Bester to the end of his life, shirking redundancy and compelling him to make new doorways in the drywall.
Bester had been slated to be the Guest of Honor at WorldCon in 1987, but he couldn’t attend because of his hip injury. He died the same year after learning that he would be the 1988 Nebula Grand Master, an annual title bestowed by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Fiona Kelleghan nicely condenses his legacy: “Bester, like Gully a delighter in fire, fights, and rebellion, hurled himself into the unknown like a burning spear. Due to his ambition, skill, and wild talent, science fiction was thrust boldly forward through an innovative, enduring work of the imagination” (1273).
Critique of Science Fiction
Like a play or movie, Bester’s SF career can be broken into three acts with two intermissions that lasted about a decade apiece, one in the 1940s, the other in the 1960s. In the first act (1930s), he gained footing and tried to find his voice. He flourished in the second act (1950s), becoming a star. The third act (1970s) was mostly afterburn, but again, his later novels and stories deserve more attention and applause than they have received, if only because of his undying resolve to compose original works of art and literature that subverted the norm.
Bester’s critique of SF ebbed and flowed throughout his lifetime. It reached a crescendo in the second act. He didn’t suffer fools easily, and if he smelled bullshit, he called it out with a megaphone. His first and only encounter with renowned editor John W. Campbell, Jr. in 1950 clinched his irritation and dissatisfaction. He admired what Campbell had done for the genre, forsaking the boyish adventures of pulp SF for more sophisticated, adult themes. When Bester met him in person to discuss revisions to “Oddy and Id” (1950) for publication in Astounding, however, Campbell alienated him with his personality as much as his principles and editorial ideas. The encounter “solidified his conception of himself as a writer standing ‘outside’ the SF world, looking in” (Smith 85).
Hungry for literary acclaim, Philip K. Dick famously tried to break into the mainstream and leave SF in his dust, producing nine non-SF novels. Bester, too, wanted to be respected as a literary author and aspired for mass appeal. Even after the success of Demolition and Stars, he always felt like an amateur SF author, and he “was convinced that his talents lay in the mainstream writing field, though he would not make much headway” (Raucci 9). His most pointed effort, the posthumously published Tender Loving Rage (1991), was rejected by every publisher that read it during his lifetime. Bester belonged in SF, as did Dick; no other genre harbored such imaginative promise, and they were both great at writing it. Curiously, SF’s practitioners were relatively conservative and adhered to a strict code of conduct, believing that the literature needed to be written a certain way for a certain type of reader. Bester hated this grossly ironic limitation.
If Bester had his way, SF would be as he described it in “Science Fiction and the Renaissance Man,” “far above the utilitarian yardsticks of the technical minds, the agency minds, the teaching minds. Science fiction is not for Squares. It’s for the modern Renaissance Man … vigorous, versatile, zestful … full of romantic curiosity and impractical speculation” (422). In this essay and others, he rants and raves about how the genre consistently fails to manifest his ideal, pulling no punches and mincing no words. Of course, there are exceptions, most of which he itemizes in “The Perfect Composite Science Fiction Author.” Among them are Robert Heinlein, the “Big Daddy,” “Old Pro,” and “Kipling” of the genre (436); Theodore Sturgeon, “the most perceptive, the most sensitive, and the most adult of science fiction writers” (437); Robert Sheckley, “possibly the most polished” SF author (438); James Blish, “a dedicated craftsman with a deep philosophical bias” (438); Isaac Asimov, whose “encyclopedic enthusiasm” distinguishes him from the horde (442); Philip Jose Farmer, “possibly the only author who genuinely, with discipline, extrapolates” (440); and Ray Bradbury, SF’s preeminent stylist (442). At the same time, Bester has plenty of bad things to say about these “exceptions,” regretting, for example, that Asimov’s “greatest story was his first,” and he even argues that Asimov “is not a real fiction writer” (439). In short, Bester had problems with everybody, including himself, although self-effacement took a back seat to disparaging the genre and its people as a whole.
Almost everybody agrees that science fiction has fallen upon hard times—too many bad books and too few good books are being published today—and many people want to know why. Publishers, editors, and the public have been blamed. We disagree. We think authors are responsible. The average quality of writing in the field today is extraordinarily low. We don’t speak of style; it’s astonishing how well amateurs and professionals alike can handle words. […] No, we speak of content; of the thought, theme, and drama of the stories, which reflect the author himself. Many practicing science fiction authors reveal themselves in their works as very small people, disinterested in reality, inexperienced in life, incapable of relating science fiction to human beings, and withdrawing from the complexities of living into their make-believe worlds. […] Their science is a mere repetition of what has been done before. They ring minuscule changes on played-out themes, concepts which were established and exhausted a decade ago. They play with odds and ends and left-overs. In past years this has had a paralyzing effect on their technique. (431–32)
As if these one-two punches aren’t enough, Bester concludes with a forceful uppercut, denouncing the character of SF authors, “empty people who have failed as human beings. As a class they are lazy, irresponsible, immature. They are incapable of producing contemporary fiction because they know nothing about life, cannot reflect life, and have no adult comment to make about life. They are silly childish people who have taken refuge in science fiction where they can establish their own arbitrary rules about reality to suit their own inadequacy. And like most neurotics, they cherish the delusion that they’re ‘special’” (434).
No matter how hard he tried, Bester couldn’t knock out his opponent. To this day, nearly every professional SF author still writes prescribed formulas for SF editors who still want a very specific type of canned writing. These are the authors and editors who purport to be on the cutting edge of imagination and narrative. But we’re assuming that the SF genre still exists. I would argue that it is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. In the last two decades, reality has effectively absorbed and digested SF (or vice versa) like a phagocyte.
There were really only two short periods where SF made genuinely innovative strides with the New Wave and cyberpunk movements, upshots of the evolving media environment and the postwar explosion of electric technologies. Bester was an icon for both movements. He wasn’t alone in his contention that SF needed improvement. Barry N. Malzberg, for instance, was another uncompromising livewire associated with the New Wave who seared the genre in scores of articles and meta-SF novels. But Bester has certainly been one of the most outspoken SF critics, and it’s a big part of his legacy. He foresaw the death of SF long before it fell to its knees and toppled into the dirt.
The Classic Pyrotechnic Novel
Near the end of his career’s first act, Bester sold “The Unseen Blushers” (1942) to Astonishing Stories. This satirical roman à clef falls into the same territory as A Moveable Feast (1964), in which Ernest Hemingway lightly roasts modernist contemporaries like Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and others. Bester’s victims included pulp-SF veterans who he met through his agent, such as Henry Kuttner, Otto Binder, Malcolm Jameson, and Manly Wade Wellman. He was still a young author at this point, but he didn’t hesitate to depict his SF contemporaries as a bunch of hacks. Even digs of this nature weren’t enough to get the monkey of SF off of his back (the more I read his SF diatribes, veiled or unbound, the more Bester comes off as an addict trying to quit a drug). Granted, the two intermissions between acts gave people time to cool off, but following the indisputable success of Demolished and Stars, Bester could burn bridges until he was blue in the face. The writing in these novels was too good to let the author’s rancor and angst get in the way of how they elevated the genre, captivating readers and setting a new standard for authors.
may be defined as one constructed quite literally like a string of firecrackers, each firecracker igniting the next, each explosion necessarily bigger than the last in order to sustain the impact on the reader. Such a novel, when done well, totally exhausts its reader with its astonishing pace of ideas and events, yet is so gripping that the reader must go on reading in spite of his own exhaustion, triggering a sort of intellectual overdrive, a surge of adrenalin that replaces exhaustion with a state of super-awareness. The breathless conclusion of a pyrotechnic novel leaves the reader certain that more things have happened to him than his dazed mind will ever be able to comprehend or remember. (v–vi)
This type of writing distinguishes most of Bester’s novels and many of his stories. Williams argues that Stars epitomizes the form, serving as a model for subsequent pyrotechnic novels like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964).
According to how he describes his writing process, Bester even seems to compose fiction in a pyrotechnic way. “I write out of fever,” he claimed in a 1976 reflection on “Fondly Fahrenheit.” “I cannot write anything until I’m so saturated with it, bursting with it, that it must come out or I will have no rest” (“Comment” 66). Ruminating on the composition of Stars, he has also said: “I write out of hysteria” (“My Affair” 468). This modus resonates in his prose like an atomic ring of fire, and Stars might be SF’s pyrotechnic masterwork, if not an ur-text for post-Stars literature.
Carolyn Wendell defines Bester’s style in greater detail: “Reading Bester can be like looking at a firework pinwheel: constant activity, sparks shooting off in every direction, speed, vibrant color and image—and a feeling of losing one’s breath” (15). The way he embroiders and unfolds storylines is equally charismatic as well as filmic. “His plots are always scenic, with rapid changes of setting and character occurring every few pages, not unlike cinematic technique. [The] reader is pushed along the inevitable path to a solution at its end. […] It is this pinwheel effect that has resulted in ‘pyrotechnic’ evolving as the favorite critical word for Bester. Unfortunately, the first does get out of control at time, and logic and sense are sacrificed for speed and dizzyingly vivid image” (ibid.).
Like Wendell, some readers were put off by Bester’s decidedly aggressive prose in novels like The Computer Connection and Golem100, both of which turn up the pyrotechnic dial to 11 while lacking the coherence of Demolished and Stars. Wendell takes issue with The Computer Connection, calling it Bester’s worst novel for this very reason. “It embodies his worst flaws as a writer and, as such, it probably is most interesting as a study of excessive style. Those techniques which worked before […]—the rapid scene shifts, the detailed plot, the piling on of image—are here […] in excess. Those qualities which made his two earlier novels classics make this novel a failure” (40). This stance says more about the failings of Wendell and readers than Bester, who was always trying to do new things. Readers hardly ever want new things, even if they say they do. They want the same things over and over with new, relatively inconspicuous frills. Bester’s lifelong struggle against SF has a lot to do with this default infirmity.
Bester’s style and conception get utterly away from him, virtually out of control. Style never has been one of science fiction’s distinctions but, in any case, too many science fictioners, Bester included, forsake the neutral non-distracting style that is probably the best and canniest mode they can hope for. Instead, they offer an unrelenting meretriciousness. Bester, for instance, cannot resist those punningly derivative names, like Gully Foyle and Presteign, and then adds nervous whimsicalities, like “Robin Wednesday.” More damagingly, he is at the end of the whole class in showing off a sort of portentous wisdom, usually in the course of greatly increased action and thematic pressure—as if it were a sort of compensatory mechanism. (605)
Bier gets Robin’s surname wrong—it’s Wednesbury—but he makes his point clear: Stars is flawed by over-the-top ornamentation. Understandably, Demolished has not been disparaged for alleged superfluities. In retrospect, it is a prototype or template for Stars, which amplifies the pyrotechnic apparatus that Bester introduced in his award-winning first novel.
This brings me back to McLuhan’s theory that amplification is also amputation, that any technological advancement or gain is necessarily accompanied by a technological falling-off or loss. In the case of Stars, readers like Bier felt that Bester sacrificed basic narrative construction for high-octane antics. In fact, Stars is the mature, adult version of the comparatively adolescent Demolished, as more astute readers grasped. “Though it has the pace and some of the colour of his other book,” says Charles Platt, Demolished “is never quite as successful, as imaginative, or as satisfying, and the ‘open’ mystery format must take some of the blame. The plot relies heavily on psychology which is disappointingly glib and shallow” (215). Bester didn’t completely excise psychology from Stars; rather, he wove psychological principles into the fabric of the narrative so that they didn’t glint and stick out. Smith adds: “Stars remained fresh and relevant long after its initial publication, while Demolished’s Freudian references made it date more quickly. By the early 1970s, the former would be praised as the ‘best science fiction of its kind ever written,’ the latter viewed as a ‘tour de force’ marred by its ‘formal approach’ to psychology” (144).
Additionally, there is a marked difference between each novel’s Besterman. Both are hysteric, obsessive-compulsive, schizophrenic monsters, but Gully Foyle is far more dynamic and complex than Ben Reich, and whereas Foyle proves to be a fluid character who evolves and adapts to his surroundings, Reich is comparatively static. In more general terms, Jane Hipolito and Willis E. McNelly assert that, in Stars, “Bester’s chief concern is to develop what is only implicit in The Demolished Man” (78). Demolished may have won the Hugo Award, but Stars is the superior work as a source of entertainment, an artistic endeavor, and a site for scholarly research.
Context, Composition, and Reception
“The reclamé of [Demolished] turned me into a science fiction somebody,” Bester recounted in 1975, “and people were curious about me” (“My Affair” 467). He went on to write a mainstream novel about his experiences in television, Who He? (1953), which turned a decent profit and gave him and his wife Rolly, a radio and Broadway actress, some financial padding. They moved to England in May 1954 and he started research for Stars. The idea of writing a novel abroad excited him, but he found it more troublesome than he had planned on. “Everything seemed to go wrong,” he said, ranging from his unfamiliarity with English typewriters and manuscript paper to the cold weather that depressed him (468). It wasn’t until he and Rolly relocated to Rome in November that Bester finally hit his stride after starting the novel over three times.
In the twenty-first century, we take for granted how easy it is to access information. I haven’t been to a library in years—all of my research for this monograph was conducted online with books, magazines, articles, and stories downloaded onto my computer, sent to me from Ohio libraries, or purchased from eBay and Amazon—but in the twentieth century, research often required considerable time, travel, and endurance. In Italy, Bester used the British Consulate library to great effect. He still had difficulty finding up-to-date publications about scientific developments, so he relied on American editor Tony Boucher and German-American science writer Willy Ley, “plaguing” them with letters (470). He also consulted research materials from his early SF stories. The idea for the Māori tattoo on Gully’s face, for example, derived from an anecdote he came across while writing for South Sea Stories in the 1930s. The anecdote “was about an English remittance man who landed on one of the islands and wanted to marry a native girl. He had to go through all the native customs, which included tattooing his face. Then, he got the message that he was next in line to inherit a fortune; everyone else had died, and he had to return to England. He couldn’t go back with the tattoo on his face, so he had it removed. As he was being rowed out to the sailing ship to take him away, he saw the girl that he married embracing another guy, and got furious, and the scars of the tattooing showed up on his face” (Bester, “Alfred” 35).
Bester finished Stars in early 1955, three months after moving to Rome. One of his biggest hurdles had been formulating a viable conclusion. “I didn’t have a fiery finish in mind. I must have an attack and a finale. I’m like the old Hollywood gag, ‘Start with an earthquake and build to a climax’” (“My Affair” 469). A dispute over serialization rights between Galaxy and Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1956 held up publication in the US. The hardcover edition that was published in the UK as Tiger! Tiger! came out in June. Reviewers loved it. In New Worlds, Leslie Flood referred to it as a masterpiece that “must surely take its place among the top ten science-fiction novels of all time” (128); Bester, she emphasized, “had resolved to write the science-fiction novel to end all such novels” (126).
When it was finally published as The Stars My Destination in the US, the novel had already generated considerable buzz. It received a fair share of praise, but there were more mixed feelings among American reviewers. In Astounding, P. Schuyler Miller said he liked Demolished better and criticized Bester for faulty science. In Fantastic Universe, Stefan Santesson reviled it for “violence (or rather blind, dogged hate), plus basic English, plus sex and deliberately exaggerated characterizations. While this obviously has commercial possibilities, is all this an admissible substitute for plotting in the classic sense of that much abused word?” (113). Ten years later in 1967, Damon Knight bashed Stars in the second edition of In Search of Wonder, calling the characters “not characters but funny hats” (234) and accusing Bester of “bad taste, inconsistency, irrationality, and downright factual errors” (235). Such puritan sentiments, however, invariably included disclaimers. Santesson couldn’t deny Bester’s innovations, and Miller wondered why a hardcover edition hadn’t been published in the US. Even Knight confessed that many of Bester’s ideas were “good as gold” and referred to Stars as a “work of art” (235, 236).
No work of art is without flaws, and Stars is hardly perfect. Bester’s representation of patriarchal entitlement and toxic masculinity leaves much to be desired in spite of the author’s best satirical, meta-referential efforts. Personally, I’m not a fan of Bester’s dialogue; even in its historical context, it sounds affected and clunky to me, like most pulp SF. But it’s impossible to deny the overall accomplishment of this singular novel. Contemporary readers, editors, and authors alike habitually treat it with reverence. Authors are outspoken about their feelings, acknowledging the imaginative debt they owe to Stars—William Gibson, Samuel R. Delany, Neil Gaiman, Joe Haldeman, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Spider Robinson, Robert Silverberg, K.W. Jeter, Norman Spinrad, Barry N. Malzberg, Harlan Ellison, M. John Harrison, and Bruce Sterling have all showered the novel with praise. It’s almost as if Bester has become a sacrament whose reception must be enunciated to validate one’s own SF authorship and alliance. If nothing else, any SF writer or scholar would be remiss without a concerted knowledge of Bester’s contribution to the genre. Delany puts it mildly but hits the mark: “Bester is easily the SF writer who brought expertise to its full fruition” (19).
More than the novel’s gleeful immorality, the negative feedback that Stars received in the 1950s mainly related to Bester’s pseudoscientific applications and unrealistic portrayals. Bester devalued science. In his view, the science of SF was altogether subsidiary to characterization. “In a question-answer session at Seacon, 1979, Bester said: ‘I hate hard science fiction’ and went on to explain that he is not even faintly interested in science fact and formula and will happily make it up as he goes along; his concern is people, and the science, valid or invalid, is a mere convenience to place people into stress situations” (Wendell 16). Critics like Knight accused Stars of cartoon characters and cirque-du-soleil landscapes that disrupt narrative verisimilitude. Bester didn’t care. For him, SF had “taken refuge in science to the detriment of its fiction. In the past this was no problem. The field had the charm of novelty. There were so many fascinating physical avenues to explore—space, time, dimensions, environments—that there was no need for understanding and development of human character. Unfortunately, the novelty is fading today and there is a rising demand for mature character handling” (“Trematode” 17).
Bester knew what readers wanted long before they knew what they wanted themselves. These days, most of us wouldn’t bat an eye at the novel’s depiction of sex, violence, and profanity. There are YA novels grittier than Stars. The novel’s transgressions have evaporated into the cultural ether. So have its characters and landscapes. For starters, check out Hong Kong or Dubai; both cities currently surpass any urban space that Bester describes in terms of architecture alone. As for characters—look at, say, TikTok, where the most popular influencers exist as ridiculous cartoon versions of themselves. It’s the inevitable “nature” of media technoculture, as McLuhan predicted at the same time Bester was working on his own inadvertent prophesies.
Granted, there were rules Bester couldn’t break. He couldn’t have his characters using expletives like shit or fuck, for example, and he could only describe sex acts via implication and innuendo. Had he written this novel in the twenty-first century, the gutter tongue—good in theory, goofy in practice—would probably sound and look nothing like it does when Gully speaks it. Nonetheless, Stars stands the test of time more than most SF novels. “Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future,” Neil Gaiman reminds us, and yet Stars is “less dated than most cyberpunk” (vii, x). In some ways, it’s less dated than everything that succeeded it and more imaginative than whatever is being passed off as SF today.
Thesis and Outline
My overarching thesis in this monograph is that Stars mapped new terrain in postwar SF and remains a polestar to this day. More specifically, the novel accomplishes what pre-1950s SF novels failed to do in terms of style, structure, and attitude. With Stars, Bester innovated and elevated these elements in a fell swoop, catapulted by the trebuchet of The Demolished Man.
In addition to this introduction, there are four chapters and a coda. Chapter one, “Literary Influences and Cyberpunk Previsions,” explores Bester’s hysterical inscription of literary tropes and allusions in the text; such excessiveness aligns Stars with a history of literature and points toward the future of SF while demonstrating an anxiety about authorial identity and complementing the various excesses that fuel the novel. In chapter two, “The Frankenstein Riff,” I discuss the relationship between Stars and Frankenstein, both of which tell the stories of charismatic monsters and meta-referentially point to the inherent mad scientism of Shelley’s and Bester’s authorship as well as narrative itself. I focus on issues of class, gender, and race in the third chapter, “Architectures of Psyche, Power, and Patriarchy,” examining how Bester, a product of his own patriarchal culture (and SF’s endorsement of that culture), is at once progressive and regressive. “Speaking in Gutter Tongues” is the fourth and final chapter where I address the theme of religion in its assorted permutations with an eye to the religious subtext of Bester’s linguistic flourishes and convolutions. The coda reaffirms that Stars signals the beginning of a new trend in SF, but the novel is also a tombstone looming over the genre’s resting place in the graveyard of the twentieth century.
A Note on Scholarship
Compared to other prominent SF authors, scholarship on Bester’s life and work is limited. There are no book-length biographies. Jad Smith includes ample biographical information, though, and many critics have recounted Bester’s precarious relationship with SF. So has Bester himself. Published in 2016, Smith’s outstanding monograph contains a chapter on Stars and discusses the novel in tandem with “Fondly Fahrenheit,” which exhibits similar traits; it also addresses principal themes, narrative style, historical context, and critical reception. The chapter is an engaged overview, and for my purposes, Smith provides well-researched background material and ideas for greater elaboration and commentary. The other monograph published on Bester’s oeuvre (also titled Alfred Bester) by Carolyn Wendell was released in 1982, six years before the author’s death in 1987. It’s a satisfactory primer, but it doesn’t account for later works (e.g., Golem100 and The Deceivers), and it’s far more limited in scope than Smith’s study. Wendell’s short chapter on Stars centers on gender relations and femininity. She has strong insights that inform my reading.
There are fewer than 10 formal scholarly articles on or related to Stars dating back to Jeff Riggenbach’s “Science Fiction as Will and Idea: The World of Alfred Bester,” published in 1972 in Riverside Quarterly. Perhaps the best article—and the one that got me interested in Stars as a graduate student—is Patrick A. McCarthy’s “Science Fiction as Creative Revisionism: The Example of Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination,” which appeared in Science Fiction Studies in 1983. McCarthy’s legwork scaffolds my first chapter and led to some of my central ideas. Beyond these essays and several others, I rely on reviews, interviews, and additional secondary sources from scholarly and popular venues. Bester’s own essays about his craft, life, and career have been most interesting and helpful, but as a novelist myself, I’m acutely aware that what an author says about oneself is often not what an author actually thinks, let alone what the author is. For the literary critic, things become meaningful when they become repetitive, so I try to converge on what Bester said about his writing, SF, and relevant issues with consistency over the years.