Today's publishers prefer pulp over prose

Bastard Hat
    By David Auerbach

Alfred Bester is, in certain circles, recognized as one of the finest writers of the 1950s. He certainly is within his chosen genre, science fiction. From a more objective viewpoint, he was brilliantly skilled with the genre conventions, but still trapped by them.

His two famous novels, The Demolished Man and Tiger, Tiger, begin with simple premises (telepathy and teleportation), pull some clever twists, and then devolve into (a) The Third Man and (b) The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, respectively. But because Bester could put a sentence together with some panache and had a knack for plotting, these two novels are considered classics, the highest pinnacles ever achieved in golden age sci-fi--which only goes to show how pedestrian 95 percent of the genre was (the rest ranging from interesting to estimable to truly great). Still, I won't sell Bester short--his fluid style makes short stories like the febrile "Fondly Fahrenheit" memorable, if not profound.

I tell you this because Vintage Books (a division of Random House, now notorious for paying Jackie Collins money to publish anything she submits) and Byron Preiss (another company with suspiciously low quality control, despite the fact that its namesake wrote one of my favorite books as a kid, The Vampire State Building) would have you think otherwise.

Both novels and a new collection of Brester's short fiction have been reissued in fairly pricey trade paperback after being out of print for years. Why now? If the jacket copy is to be believed, Bester "took science fiction into hyperdrive." I don't quite know what that means, but the jacket copy is also keen to point out how "speedy" and "audacious" he was, and what a trend-setter he became. Which justifies, I guess, paying $13 instead of $5 for his work. But then, for the extra $8 you get a nicely designed, not-at-all pulpish paperback that fits right next to Stanislaw Lem and Philip K. Dick on your shelf, two previous sci-fi authors to have been elevated into the literary canon (and thus, into the trade paperback realm). But those two, whether they willed it or not, were endorsed by the literati, and estranged from the genre community. Whereas Lem is a well-respected figure deserving of a Nobel and Dick had enough of a perverted metaphysical sensibility to be as radical as Burroughs, Bester's work is more notable for how much it is tied to the genre--its acclaims have almost exclusively been sung by members of that community. Bester is being dragged from sci-fi to "literature" kicking and screaming.

I remember when Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler's work was issued in trade. It was a sign of respect for them, not to put them out in cheap rack-sized paperback with buxom women on the front cover. It was also an attempt to cash in on a glut of marginally hard-boiled suspense movies that were popular around that time--no doubt the success of L.A. Confidential will see Spillane and Ellroy getting similar treatment.

But why Bester, why now? Science fiction is notorious for having no particularly estimable arbiters of taste, hence people like Samuel Delany and Geoff Ryman getting irritated and jumping over into straight fiction. In Bester, the genre has a microwavable Shakespeare. Not only can average sci-fi fans, for all their narrow scope and populist tastes, read Bester and feel big and literary, but his work even has a chance of being elevated into a true canon, alongside fantasists like Fuentes and Borges and Lem. This is unlikely, even if Bester was in hyperdrive. What's more likely is that his stylish period exercises will fall alongside William Gibson's, whose tired "cyberpunk" schtick was as dated as it was unoriginal. But as such, it will nonetheless grow to occupy a coveted place, stuck in the hip juncture where trash meets respectability.

What's sad here is that style alone is the differentiating factor. The late, lamented Olaf Stapledon (called a genius by Doris Lessing, among others) remains extant only in two Dover paperbacks, even though he is as close a successor to Dante as this century has produced. Bester--who can't be blamed for any of this, after all--is again evidence of a particularly American privileging, of "speed" over scope and "audacity" over originality. You'll find, if you read Bester in conjunction with Raymond Carver or Denis Johnson, for example, that both use all sorts of narrative shorthand that come off as the thematic prepossessions towards storybook nihilism (or, on a good day, optimism). Bester's case may be particularly obvious because he worked in a field so typically disposed to stylistic ineptitude, but he illustrates what I fear is becoming a pandemic ideal. As for why these predilections exist in the reading public, I leave that question to you.

Recent Herald Columns by this Columnist:
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• Today's need for old-fashioned cynicism, 1/30/97
• WYBC broadcasts hypocrisy, 1/16/98
• For better organizations, discriminate, 11/20/97

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