Virtual Unrealities

Alfred Bester
Virtual Unrealities Cover

Always moving, always energetic

Mattastrophic
3/6/2012
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Alfred Bester is one writer who kind of did it all during his lifetime: science fiction, mainstream magazines, comics, television, stage, film etc., etc. In the SF community he is best known for his two novels The Demolished Man (which won the first Hugo award in 1953) and the equally dazzling The Stars My Destination (1956), both of which are amazing works that should be a part of everyone’s SF reading list. Amazing though they are, they certainly show their age. Bester did his best work in SF during the 1950s, while short fiction was still the lifeblood of the form, authors were paid by the word, and now-tired cliches were pursued with unabashed glee. The 1950s produced some great SF, to be sure, but it also produced drek that is perhaps best consumed as the target of lampooning in an episode of MST3K. Virtual Unrealities is a collection of Bester’s short work, which runs the gamut between amazingly engaging and…uh… not.  Bester’s tendency to run between genius and drek is clearly outlined in Robert Silverberg’s essential introduction to the work, in which he includes a very telling quote from Damon Knight:

Dazzlement and enchantment are Bester’s methods.  His stories never stand still a moment; they’re forever tilting into motion, veering, doubling back, firing off rockets to distract you…Bester’s science is all wrong, his characters are not characters but funny hats; but you never notice: he fires off a smoke bomb, climbs a ladder, leaps from a trapeze, plays three bars of “god Save the King,” swallows a sword and dives into three inches of water.  Good heavens, what more do you want?

Knight hits the nail on the head here, and I really identified with his critique of Bester’s characters as merely funny hats.  Most of his characters are placeholders, archetypes, and cardboard cutouts about as interesting as the paper they are printed on: they’re fairly flat, tend toward extremes, and demonstrate disturbing lack of incredulity given their situations.  Take “Star Light, Star Bright” for example: when a man tells you he’s hunting for a family of missing geniuses who can defy the laws of physics and he is going to let you in on the money he can make exploiting them, you should at least make an honest effort at being skeptical before negotiating your share. Still, he can be lauded for the fact that his stories never stand still, and he plays the showman enough that, if you can run with him far enough to get where he wants you to go, there are some neat surprises in store (most of the time).

The Good, The Bad, The Psychotic, and the Overly-Credulous

Bester’s short fiction isn’t about hard science, rather it speculates about wild ideas taken to their extremes with some science thrown in (you know, for credibility’s sake).  Given the loosey-goosey nature of the science, some of the stories almost read as contemporary fantasy, but I think of them closer as fantasies: extreme tales about desire, disappointment, frustration, anger, resentment, and high energy.  I can imagine Bester as a showman in a flashy suit with a light-up tie clapping his hands together with a sharp, resounding crash as he leans in to a rapt audience and says “Ok, let’s see what you think of THIS one” before starting in frenetically with barely a breath between lines.

Of course, this frenetic energy meant that many of these stories are exhausting, and I found myself skipping around the book quite a bit as one story or another tried my endurance a mite too far.  Each time I found myself skipping over the rest of a story because it drained me of energy (or interest), however, I would become instantly committed to another by the energy in its opening lines alone.  For instance, I became utterly bored with the first story in the collection only to turn to the next (“Oddy and Id) and be immediately sucked in by the first line: “This is the story of a monster.”  When I became bogged down in  the story “5,271,009,” I skipped ahead a bit and became immediately sucked in with the opener of his psychoanalytic gem “Fondly Fahrenheit”:  “He doesn’t know which of us I am these days, but they know one truth.  You must own nothing but yourself.  you must make your own life, live your own life, and die your own death…or else you will die another’s.”  This is really a testament to Bester’s ability to start a story at breakneck speed and use the resulting vortex to suck you into it.

While most of the stories in this collection begin with energy and intrigue you can feel on down to your toes, the endings vary in depth and overall effect.  You can tell he’s trying to shoot the moon every time and end with pzzazz.  Bester’s not after a meditative hmmmm from his readers as he is a thunderous, involuntary AHA! or a long, ominous Oooohhh! Poe’s notion of “unity of effect” is applicable here.  For Poe, all elements of a work of fiction should be unified in supporting the emotion or reaction that the author wants to elicit from the reader.  Bester’s short work seems to exemplify unity of effect as all elements of these stories move towards a unified emotion or singular revelation in the climax. That there is really no denouement to speak of in Bester’s stories, which further indicates that the climactic AHA! moment is the point of the story.  Sometimes this works out great, as in “Oddy and Id” where several scientists figure out that a young student of theirs has the power to make his unconscious desires come true.  They struggle with whether or not to make the young man, Oddy, explicitly aware of this gift since until that point, while he was unaware of this gift, his actions have all been good. The climax of this story is one that stays with you for a while and works on your brain in intriguing ways, and it one of the best examples of Bester’s ability to dazzle in a conclusion.

In other works, however, the impact of that climactic moment or emotion is more akin to a fizzle than a bang.  “Of Time and Third Avenue,” for example, is a predictable and ho-hum affair where a man from the future attempts to convince a man from the past to relinquish an almanac that would tell him what the future holds.  The story is built around a revelation that, to my 21st century eyes at least, isn’t all that exciting and seems like it would have been overdone even at the time of its publication.  That the man from the past demonstrated only the most token bit of incredulity regarding the possibility of time travel and an almanac from the future is typical Bester.  He doesn’t have the time to thoroughly develop characters beyond “funny hats” or archetypes, so stories like this mean that you need to hold on to your suspension of disbelief with both hands as you read.  “Star Light, Star Bright” was another fizzle for me.  It slowly pulled me into an intriguing mystery involving a missing family of geniuses, but in the end it just didn’t have the payoff to make it worth the effort.  The entire story felt retroactively deflated the moment I read its climax; one of those “awww, come on!” moments that make you feel silly for being invested in the plot in the first place.  Bester is the consummate showman, and all of the stories in this collection are geared towards that big finish, although sometimes it fails to dazzle.

Where Bester seems to be in top form, and where his characterization is most compelling, is when writing about monsters: bad men who either make the choice to be bad or are helplessly compelled to do bad things.  The protagonists of both The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination are both wicked men (kill-your-family wicked, not fun-to-drink-with wicked), which is part of what makes them so appealing and so surprising for SF in the postwar era of the 1950s.  Bester’s affinity for writing compelling monsters comes out in several stories in this collection. In “Fondly Fahrenheit” for example, a man who has never done a lick of work in his life finds himself relying on his family’s advanced, super-expensive android, and when that android ends up killing people his solution is to run away with it, as it is his only asset in the world, instead of reporting the incident and taking responsibility.  “Pi Man” features a character who murders someone he likes and beats his own dog to death for no reason he can adequately explain to us or others (he’s at the whims of the cosmos), but by the end of the story even this monster is rendered sympathetic.  Sometimes the compulsion or choice to do bad or evil things is funny (in the absurdist tradition), as in “The Man Who Murdered Mohammed” where a mad scientist finds his wife cheating on him and, instead of confronting her, he decides to build a time machine to go back in time and kill his wife’s mother (thereby wiping said wife out of existence) with…unexpected results.  Sometimes it’s truly frightening, as in “Oddy and Id,” where we must conclude that the monster in the protagonist Oddy is no worse than the monster lurking in our own unconscious.

“Oddy and Id” is a good example of Bester’s fascination with psychology, particularly Freudian psychoanalysis, which played a pervasive role in his Hugo-award winning The Demolished Man.  We could do strong Freduian readings of most stories in this collection, particularly “Time is the Traitor” which involves an investigation into the trauma of The Decider (no, not George Bush) who despite an almost prescient ability to predict the future (affecting the lives of billions and making him the richest, most powerful man ever) has the inexplicable compulsion to kill any and every man named Kruger that he comes across.  While psychology has moved beyond Freud in many/most ways–which certainly doesn’t help the already-precarious way in which Bester’s work has aged–it nevertheless is appealing since it allows Bester to tap into and play with the unpredictable forces of the mind and make seemingly malevolent characters seem sympathetic and understandable to a degree.  These characters visibly struggle with their desires, and those stories are where Bester’s characters are the closest to being actual characters instead of funny hats (funny like an over-the-top Derby hat).

I would also draw attention to another endearing bit of Bester’s experimentation: how he plays with the way words sit on the page.  Occasionally he will often draw pictures using words that require you to read the page in a different way, to re-orient yourself to the story, or just to thumb you in the eye and defy your expectations.  This was a pretty avant garde move for Bester in the 50′s and 60′s, predating the most experimental Language Poets (who also played with typeset and the form of words on the page) by at least a decade or two.

The Best of Bester?

In some ways, Bester was very much ahead of his time, and in others he was of it, which is one reason his fiction has dated pretty hard.  If you know how to approach his work, however, you can look past its datedness (to a degree) and see the unbridled play going on underneath.   It’s not without its problems, however.  Virtual Unrealities is a collection that shows both sides of Bester: the frenetic genius and the trite, cliched stuff. Some of his stories are fun, others are haunting, and yet others have all the luster poorly-planned and poorly-timed joke. Silverberg, however, rightly notes in his forward that all of them–the good and the bad–are crackling with the energy, enthusiasm, and showmanship that was Bester’s hallmark.  If you read this collection for the razzle and the dazzle, knowing in advance that it has aged hard and that he is shooting not for meditation but a unity of effect that privileges that AHA! moment at the end, then you too can have some fun with Virtual Unrealities, as I did.

You can also read this review on my blog at: strangetelemetry.wordpress.com

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