“These stories not only show Bester’s writable
approach in the making but also reveal that his aesthetic had its roots in
bricolage, or the practice of drawing on heterogeneous sources and writing
styles to create unexpected narrative tensions and unities. Bricolage works by
a logic of excess and encompasses more local strategies such as extra-coding,
pastiche, intertextuality, and allusion. By definition, it re-orders reading
protocols, requiring the reader to switch codes and synthetize incongruities.”
In “Alfred Bester” by Jad
Smith
Alfred Bester
was the first postmodernist SF writer. I won’t dwell on it again. If you’re
interested, you can find additional information here.
I haven't been an
adolescent for quite some time, but I still remember sitting in stone stairs in
the side yard of my mother’s rural home in Alfaiates. I had just seen Star Wars
and so my eyes were devouring a twilight sky waiting for the stars and planets
to appear. This was my gateway to the imagination. In my unsophisticated mind,
once so consumed by simple mysteries written by adults about girls not much
older than myself, something unfurled. I began to see a world so much bigger
than my own, and not just the universe laid open before me. SF made me think
beyond myself, perhaps for the first time, and I became alive with ideas,
possibilities. In this world, I could spiral deep into my own psyche or travel
out to infinity. It was a spark of light in the night and I followed it.
I used to read a
lot of it when I was younger. But now I find it deeply embarrassing to stand in
a FNAC bookshop (for instance) surrounded by silly, trite fantasy, endless Star
Wars novelisations and comic books. Sure, there's some great SF out there
dealing with the human condition the same any good fiction is, but it's drowned
under a sea of pre-pubescent dross. It's devoid of ideas. In fact, the last
time I tried to pick up a novel by Ian McEwan, it was full of ridiculously
named characters and convoluted plots. Therefore, I for one can't be bothered
with it.
So much 'normal'
fiction is literary masturbation (the 'oh so bloody fantastic' “The Road” being
a classic example). I guess critics don't like stuff they must read and
understand? :-) Plus, SF offers a wide spectrum to pick from, from the 'brain
dump' stuff to lighter fast-paced space opera (Peter F. Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds, Iain Banks, etc.) to the downright weird and beautiful, e.g. China
Mieville (although his work is more dystopian fantasy than SF).
Consider as well
Vonnegut's “Slaughterhouse 5”, Le Guin’s “Left Hand of Darkness”, Atwood's “Handmaids
Tale”, Bester’s “The
Stars My Destination” or any of Iain Banks output. There are simply no
finer writers in the English language and just look at the questions they raise
about perception, sexuality, morality or entrapment. Consider Nivens or
Heinlein musing on different societies. Sparser prose and less "literary"
but no worse than Hemingway. Critics are by nature critical and veer between
seeking shock value and taking comfort in the style of the classics, and SF
rarely fits those bills. I for one will continue to read SF along with other
modern works.
This leads us to
Bester. Jad Smith shows us he had a very pronounced tendency to pepper his
stories with verbal motifs that repeated with slight variations, which always
reminded me of old Irish fairy tales. As Jad states:
“His fiction of the fifties is re-readable not merely
because of its inventiveness but also because of this complex patterning, which over-determines the reader’s experience, even the second or third time around.
Bester produced this sense of excess through bricolage and pastiche that mixed
up and hybridized reading protocols, and through various types of extra-coding
– allusion, nonstandard orthography, language confusion, synesthesia, and
mixed-viewpoint narration, to name just a few of his narrative strategies – but
the reader-centered, writable patterns he created mattered more than any of
these ‘pyrotechnics’ alone, as his later career demonstrates.”
Jad’s analysis
of Bester’s two major novel-length works (“The Demolished Man” and “The Stars
my Destination”) is one of the best I’ve ever read. Too bad Bester was then
offered a lucrative job writing journalism for Holiday magazine, and he took it
because he saw SF as just another job (and a badly paying one at that). He didn't
return to SF until Holiday magazine folded, 25 years later, but that was way
too late. The inner fire had extinguished and what he did produce later was
just crap…
SF = Speculative
Fiction.
