Introduction

Bester spent more of his career on various day jobs, including writing profiles for the glossy magazine Holiday, writing comics, and scripting radio serials. His reputation as a science fiction writer rests on a handful of classic short stories and two novels published during the 1950s -- The Demolished Man and Tiger! Tiger! (or, as Americans insist on calling it, The Stars My Destination). The Demolished Man was first serialized in Galaxy magazine in 1952. Although both novels won Hugo awards (then the only major science fiction award), Bester's distinctive style remained at the fringes of the field and he was never as famous or commercially successful as the other major authors of the 1950s.

He brought a writing style and sensibility to his science fiction work quite different from that held by most SF authors of the 1940s and early 1950s.  None of it made its way into Campbell's Astounding -- where stodgier prose, sterner morality and harder science were demanded. As summed up in his entry in Clute & Nicholls, his work was "cynical, baroque and aggressive, produced hard, bright images in quick succession, and deals with obsessive states of mind." And, as they observe, his novels feature bitter social outsiders, and mingle symbols of decay and new life.

Discussion Questions

1. What similarities and differences do you see between Bester and Heinlein in their attitudes toward the future and toward technology?
2. The science in Bester, if there is one, is psychology. The idea of telepathy/Psi was pretty widespread in 1950s SF, but Bester merged this with a quasi-Freudian approach to psychology. How does he use psychology in the story, and how convincing do you find the results?
3. Bester's future society is derived from the assumption of telepathy, and a working out of the consequences. Do you find it interesting? Consistent?
4. The story draws heavily on elements of the detective story. In some ways it is similar to the TV series Columbo (though of course predating it) -- and its general darkness of tone has a lot in common with film noir and the stories which inspired it. Yet Bester twists these elements to his own ends. What are the elements, how does he use them, and how do they work differently here from a typical detective story.
5. Bester wrote as a self-consciously sophisticated, Ivy-league educated prosperous young 1950s New Yorker. How do you think this influenced the book?
6. What now seems dated? In particular, how does Bester treat women and sex?

Resources

Page created by Thomas Haigh. Last edited  01/12/2002.