Alfred Bester

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With two novels and a handful of short stories, most of them written in a short burst in the 1950s, Alfred Bester opened out the possibilities of the sf field both as vehicle for story-telling and as a way of looking darkly at the world and human psychology. The Demolished Man is a psychological thriller in which a tycoon decides to kill a rival and get away with it in an era in which telepathic cops catch every serious criminal; both in its sparkling portrayal of multi-person mind-to-mind dialogue, and in its narrative trickery, the story of Ben Reich and his nemesis Lincoln Powell is one of sf's most effective contributions to the noir thriller. The other is Tiger,Tiger (aka The Stars My Destination); if The Demolished Man is Crime and Punishment with telepaths, Tiger,Tiger is The Count of Monte Cristo with teleportation and interplanetary war. Left to die in a shattered spaceship, illiterate spacehand Gully Foyle swears vengeance and remakes himself as master criminal and dilettante socialite, and changes the worlds around him in the process. Tiger, Tiger is also an inventive working through of a conceit from bastardized Freudianism--Foyle is at one level a symbol for the unbridled id. Bester's later novels are considerably less important--with these two books, he helped shape both the New Wave and cyberpunk.