IZ>> Сергей ЛУКЬЯHЕHКО
IZ>> LUKIAN08.HA 152629 03-11-95 Императоры иллюзий (цикл 1/2)
AT> А продолжение будет?
А я что, автор??? Ты у автора спрашивай - слава богу, он в этой эхе живьем
появляется.
Igor
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Msg : 360 of 568 - 310 Loc
From : Igor Zagumennov 2:463/2.5 .он 20 Hоя 95 07:35
To : Alex Tsaregorodtsev
Subj : .льфpед .естеp
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Hello Alex!
Пят Hоя 17 1995 20:48, Alex Tsaregorodtsev wrote to All:
AT> Может есть у кого-то библиогpафия Бестеpа?
BESTER, ALFRED
(1913-1987) US writer and editor, born into a Jewish family in New York,
a city with which he was always closely associated. Educated in both
humanities and sciences - including PSYCHOLOGY, perhaps the most important
"science" in his sf - at the University of Pennsylvania, AB entered sf
when he submitted a story to THRILLING WONDER STORIES. Mort WEISINGER, the
editor, helped AB to polish it, and then suggested he submit it for an
amateur story competition that TWS was running. AB did so and won. The
story was "The Broken Axiom" (Apr 1939 TWS).AB published another 13 sf
stories to 1942, and then followed his friend Weisinger, along with Otto
BINDER, Manly Wade WELLMAN and others, into the field of COMIC books,
working on such DC COMICS titles as SUPERMAN, The Green Lantern and
Batman. He worked successfully for four years on comics outlines and
dialogue, later working on CAPTAIN MARVEL, and then moved into radio,
scripting for such serials as Charlie Chan and The Shadow. After the
intensive course in action plotting this career had given him, AB returned
(part-time) to the sf magazines in 1950, by now more mature as a writer.
(His main job at the time was scripting the new tv series TOM CORBETT:
SPACE CADET.) There ensued over the next six years a series of stories and
novels which are considered to be among the greatest creations of genre
sf.AB was never prolific in sf, which was more of a hobby than a career
for him, publishing only 13 more short stories - mostly in FSF - before
1960. (One of the five "Quintets" in FSF Sep 1959 was by AB writing as
Sonny Powell.) But these alone would have secured him a place in the sf
pantheon. Most of his stories were originally issued in book form in two
collections, Starburst (coll 1958) and The Dark Side of the Earth (coll
1964). These collections were reassembled with 6 stories dropped, and one
older novella-"Hell is Forever" - and 3 quite recent stories added along
with the amusing autobiographical essay "My Affair with Science Fiction"
(1975), in two further collections, The Light Fantastic (coll 1976) and
Star Light, Star Bright (coll 1976), which were in turn reissued as an
omnibus volume, Starlight: The Great Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (omni
1976). This last is the best available collection.AB's talents were
evident from the beginning. At least three stories from his 1939-42 period
are memorable: "Adam and No Eve" (1941) ( ADAM AND EVE; END OF THE WORLD),
"The Push of a Finger" (1942) and "Hell is Forever" (1942). The latter, a
long novella for UNKNOWN, exhibits in a slightly sophomoric way the
qualities for which AB would later be celebrated: it is cynical, baroque
and aggressive, produces hard, bright images in quick succession, and
deals with obsessive states of mind. The most notable later story is
"Fondly Fahrenheit" (1954), a breathless story of a man and his ANDROID
servant whose personalities intermesh in a homicidal folie a deux. Also
memorable are "Of Time and Third Avenue" (1951), "Disappearing Act" (1953)
and "The Men who Murdered Mohammed" (1958), which is perhaps the most
concentratedly witty twist on the TIME-PARADOX story ever written. At
about the time of this story AB addressed an sf symposium at the
University of Chicago; his paper is one of the four reprinted in the
anonymously edited The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social
Criticism (anth 1959; intro by Basil DAVENPORT).AB's first two sf novels,
THE DEMOLISHED MAN (1953) and Tiger! Tiger! (1956 UK; rev vt The Stars My
Destination 1957 US), are among the few genuine classics of genre sf. They
are the sf equivalent of the Jacobean revenge drama: both feature
malcontent figures, outsiders from society bitterly cognizant of its
corruption, but themselves partly ruined by it, just as in The Revenger's
Tragedy or The Duchess of Malfi; like them, too, AB's novels blaze with a
sardonic imagery, mingling symbols of decay and new life - rebirth is a
recurrent theme of AB's - with a creative profligacy.THE DEMOLISHED MAN,
which won the first HUGO for Best Novel in 1953, tells a story which in
synopsis is straightforward: industrialist Ben Reich commits murder (in a
society where murder is almost unknown because telepathic ESPERS can
detect the idea before the act is carried out), almost gets away with it,
is ultimately caught by Esper detective Linc Powell, and is committed to
curative brainwashing, "demolition" ( CRIME AND PUNISHMENT). It is the
pace, the staccato style, the passion and the pyrotechnics that make the
novel extraordinary. The future society is evoked in marvellously
hard-edged details; the hero is a driven, resourceful man whose obsessions
are explained in Freudian terms that might seem too glib if they were
given straight, but are evoked with the same New Yorker's painful, ironic
scepticism that informs the whole novel. AB's mainstream novel Who He?
(1953; vt The Rat Race 1956), about the tv and advertising businesses,
sheds some light on the milieu of THE DEMOLISHED MAN.Tiger! Tiger! tells
the story of the now legendary Gully Foyle, whose passion for revenge
transforms him from an illiterate outcast to a transcendent, ambiguous,
quasi- SUPERMAN in "an age of freaks, monsters and grotesques". Like the
first novel, this one lives as much through the incidentals of the setting
- in a lurid, crumbling, 25th-century world-as in the plot itself, which
AB confesses, too modestly, was borrowed from Alexandre Dumas's The Count
of Monte Cristo (1844-5). The first vol of a GRAPHIC-NOVEL version by
Howard V. CHAYKIN (adaptation by Byron PREISS), was The Stars My
Destination Vol 1 (graph 1979); the second vol, though widely bruited, was
not in fact published until it appeared, with the first, in The Stars My
Destination (1992).In the late 1950s AB was taken on by Holiday magazine
as a feature writer, ultimately becoming senior literary editor, a post he
held until the magazine ceased publication in the 1970s, at which time he
returned to sf. "The Four-Hour Fugue" (1974) shows the old extraordinary
assurance and inventiveness, and just a trace of over-facility. Two
decades after his last, his new novel, The Computer Connection (1974 ASF
as "The Indian Giver"; 1975; vt Extro UK), while full of incidental
felicities, did not quite recapture the old drive in its ornate story of a
group of immortals and an omniscient COMPUTER; perhaps it lacked a natural
"Besterman" as focus. The pace and complexity were still there, but
somehow looking like self-parody.The next book, Golem(100) (1980), was
more ambitious, had a more authentic Bester flavour, and was regarded by
AB as his best novel. It expands "The Four-Hour Fugue" into an
extraordinary but overheated tale of the jungle of New York in AD2175,
with diabolism, depth psychology (a Monster from the Id), bee superwomen,
pheromones, perverse sex, and overall a miasma of death. But the
1960s-style radicalism now looked a little out of date, and what used to
be spare and sinewy in his work had begun to seem prolix; the craziness
looked like ornamentation rather than what it once was, structural. His
last sf novel was The Deceivers (1981), which features a Synergist hero
who can perceive patterns; sadly, but interestingly in the light of AB's
fame, the sf press almost unanimously failed to review this, presumably
out of respect for his feelings. It is not good. When he died six years
later, after a long period of ill health, he willed his house and literary
estate to his bartender. The posthumously published Tender Loving Rage
(1991), written more than 20 years earlier, is a mainstream novel set in
1959, and appropriately features a scientist adopted by the New York
advertising/tv people.AB's innovative, ferocious, magpie (his word) talent
has certainly been influential in GENRE SF, on writers as disparate as
James BLISH, Samuel R. DELANY and Michael MOORCOCK. In many respects his
work was a forerunner of CYBERPUNK. He is one of the very few genre-sf
writers to have bridged the chasm between the old and the NEW WAVE, by
becoming a legendary figure for both - perhaps because in his sf imagery
he conjured up, with bravura, both outer and INNER SPACE.
=======================================
Alfred Bester didn't write much SF, but he wrote some of the best. "The
Demolished Man" and "The Stars My Destination" are two of the seminal
works in the field. These are recommended to all literate people
everywhere. "Starlight: the Great Short Fiction of Alfred Bester" is
also quite good.
[C] == Story Collection.
[O] == Omnibus. Includes other books.
[= ...] == Also known by this other title.
rev == Revision of the other book.
/John
arpa: jwenn@world.std.com
whatdoyoudoifyouvegotamanicallydepressedandroid-ly
----------------------------------------------------------------
Bester, Alfred (U.S.A., 12/18/1913-9/30/1987) G
(awards: Hugo 1953 & Nebula Grand Master 1987)
An Alfred Bester Omnibus (1976) [O/2N+C= The Demolished Man + Tiger! Tiger! +
The Dark Side of the Earth]
The Complete Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination (1992) [Graphic/Howard
Chaykin, artist]
The Computer Connection (1975) [= Extro]
The Dark Side of the Earth (1964) [C]
The Deceivers (1981)
The Demolished Man (Shasta, 1953) [Hugo]
Golem 100 (1980)
The Light Fantastic (1976) [C]
Starburst (1958) [C]
Star Light, Star Bright (1976) [C]
Starlight: The Great Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (1976) [O/2C= The Light
Fantastic + Star Light, Star Bright]
The Stars My Destination (1957) [rev./ Tiger! Tiger!]
The Stars My Destination (1979) [1/2 of novel] [Graphic/Howard Chaykin, artist]
Tiger! Tiger! (1956)
Non-Genre Fiction
Who He? (1953) [= The Rat Race]
Tender Loving Rage (Tafford, 1991)
Nonfiction
The Life and Death of a Satellite (1967)
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Msg : 361 of 568 - 323 Loc
From : Igor Zagumennov 2:463/2.5 .он 20 Hоя 95 07:45
To : Vladimir Borisov
Subj : .арадоксы времени :))) (Re: экранизация)
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Hello Vladimir!
Пят Hоя 17 1995 23:44, Vladimir Borisov wrote to Igor Chertock:
VB> °±ІЫ Nov 16 1995: Igor Chertock --> Victor Buzdugan:
VB>>> Лет в десять, кажется, написал я продолжение к
VB>>> "Экспедиции в преисподнюю"
IC>> Сам все время повторяешь, что через четыре года на пенсию... Hа
IC>> пенсию раньше сорока пяти не отпускают... "Экспедиция" была
IC>> напечатана в конце семидесятых... Тебе было тогда лет десять...
В 74-м ("Мир Приключений") - первые две части.
VB> Мылом я пытался выяснить у Виктоpа, как мог пpоизойти такой паpадокс. Он
VB> не ответил. Вывод можно сделать лишь один: что-то тут нечисто, а
VB> скpывается под именем Буздугана ЧУЖОЙ!!!
Igor
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