In working through Robert Silverberg’s Science Fiction 101 (a compilation of essential Silver-era speculative fiction and analysis of how to write it), I came across The Light Fantastic by Alfred Bester in the bibliography. When I talk about silver era, I mean the post-Baron Edward John Moreton Draw Plunkett Lord Dunsany, post-H.G. Wells, pre-Nebula Award winners (or perhaps including early ones like Heinlein and Campbell), Bradbury-era stories. Of course, this simply means early modernist stuff — all of the 1,001 Nights and Epic of Gilgamesh go by the wayside.

May be easier to say “Alfred Bester was indicative of the pulp magazine era” and leave it at that.

Anyways, this volume is the first of his complete. If it’s any indication of the rest of the series, I’m content to read this volume and call it a day. It’s not like his work is bad. It’s just that I don’t read it and immediately think, “This is classic.” I think it’s obviously early, influential science fiction and fantasy. I recognize its contribution the way I recognize Andy Warhol’s contribution, but I don’t consider Warhol much more than a cultural commentator on the factory and the advertising agency, subverting more than offering something radically new and visionary. It’s good stuff in here, don’t get me wrong, but it feels like an older, slightly more influential pop culture anthology. And that’s fine, nothing wrong with that. Brief comments on the stories, but I will say that DISAPPEARING ACT is the finest in the lot.

Table of Contents

• 5,271,009
• Ms. Found in a Champagne Bottle
• Fondly Fahrenheit
• The Four-Hour Fugue
• The Men Who Murdered Mohammed
• Disappearing Act
• Hell Is Forever

5,271,009

This one came from a drawing on the front of the cover of an upcoming issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction — a case-hardened criminal wearing a nineteenth century prisoner’s outfit, chained to a rock, floating in space. They had him navigate this and he almost refused. But then an idea came for it — of a man who goes throughout time trying to fix the trauma of various folks by rewriting their personal history. If this story showed me anything, it’s that Bester couldn’t get out from underneath the shadow of Freud. All of his stories are marked by silly Freudian assumptions and the more Freudian they are, the sillier they read these days.

Ms. Found in a Champagne Bottle

This one seemed the coolest to me, at least premise-wise, and reminded me of Blaine the Train and the rest of the Stephen King machine universe — from Maximum Overdrive to The Stand. It was also so short as to be virtually unremarkable — I had to look it back up to remember the premise.

Fondly Fahrenheit

Silverburg loved this story. I thought it was silly. But it’s very niche for a generation that grew up on Asimov and thought the man could do no wrong. It’s a robot code puzzle: why is this murdering robot doing what it is?

The most value it has, at least for the writer or creator, is a fascinating conflation of first and third person, plural and first. Here’s the first line:

“He doesn’t know which of us I am these days, but they know the truth.”

If nothing else, it’s a great experimentation in the writing form, in the nature of pronouns, and the rest. I’d read it just for that, but I’m not in love with it like others.

The Four-Hour Fugue

This is sort of a microcosm of Perfume and Stacy X from X-men. Perhaps had I not already read so many comics of Stacy X, I may have enjoyed this all the more. I feel as if other pheromone stories did far more interesting things with the idea, particularly in using pheromones in the solution. I also felt like olfactory stories like Perfume did far more interesting things. But nevertheless, it’s a weird future where smell masters rule.

My father would have loved that.

The Men Who Murdered Mohammed

Rather offensive title, by modern standards, and yet when you get into it you realize why it’s not offensive at all — why it says far more about the men than anything else. Again, the idea of private psychology absolutely dominates this story and the rest. Having read The Personal Heresy by Lewis and Tillyard, I realize I’m predisposed to hate stories like this one by Alfred Bester. Any of his Freudian stuff, really, leaves me cold.

Disappearing Act

I think this is the most brilliant of the lot, frankly. It reminds me so, so much of Philip K. Dick’s work and it also has an optimism that would rival any of Bradbury’s stuff. It’s worth the purchase price.

Basically a future militarized and propagandized society (read: ours) keeps trying to overcorrect for their military and propoganda and commodities by trading and hiring more and more specialists, more and more people with hyper niche professions, at the expense of people who can think and be upright, upstanding individuals.

They end up needing one very specific kind of person. This is Alfred Bester at his… bester.

The man can write, don’t get me wrong, I just think the moments he turns his gaze away from psychological fads, the more interesting he gets.

There’s a warning there for other writers: don’t write with the crowd. Don’t write what’s merely politically correct or merely popscience or merely aesthetically cool. Don’t make mere pop culture, it’ll fade.

Actually think, actually think a thought through to its logical end, and write a story about that.

Hell Is Forever

Again, this story is its most boring when it’s at its most Freudian, however it works as a sort of horror that E. R. Eddison had a literary baby with King and the very literary party that birthed Frankenstein. I loved the middle of this far more than the ending. But the Freudian stuff left me sputtering frigid water from my mouth.

All in all, the guy can write. There’s stuff in here worth meditating upon, certainly a lot of tricks for the science fiction writer, but unless you’re already absolutely convinced that the whole point of creativity is the inner psyche of the creative (it isn’t) and in talking trauma ad nauseam (it’s not), then there are probably other writers for you. Canon, yes, but a short gun as cannons go.