Customer Reviews

Star Light, Star Bright: Vol.2

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Only devoted fans of Alfred Bester's science fiction and fantasy will be enthralled with this book, a collection of largely forgettable stories and other odds and ends. The book wisely opens with a bang - the powerfully moving "Adam and No Eve" which describes the fate of the driven scientific visionary who becomes the last man on Earth. In an unusual twist, the intrepid explorer's determination to reach for the stars instigates an ecological catastrophe that renders the whole planet uninhabitable. Bester gets maximum mileage from his skill at writing prose that is heavy with violence and pain in this paean to a lost world. This kind of story is not for everyone, of course, but it's easily the best piece in this collection. Of the remaining stories, the more memorable are those that feature aberrant personalities, like the not-quite lovable kooks in "They Don't Make Life Like They Used To" and the frightening but fascinating lunatic who calls himself "The Pi Man". In a lighter vein, "Something Up There Likes Me" shows us the proud parents of an intelligent satellite and how their loving "son" affects their lives, as well as those of everyone on the planet. Included in the collection are three stories about time travel: the psychologically-based "Time Is the Traitor" fizzles despite some strong characterizations, "Hobson's Choice" suggests that one can never be happy outside one's own milieu, and "Of Time and Third Avenue" is a thoroughly forgettable yarn about an almanac from the future. The theme behind each of these stories is that time travel is a dead end to be avoided. Bester seems to think that better results can be obtained by mental control over external events, as with the genius in "Star Light, Star Bright", although he points out the dangers of such powers in "Oddy and Id". His interview with sci-fi legend Isaac Asimov is far too short to be memorable, and the autobiographical essay "My Affair with Science Fiction" may be interesting to Bester's fans, but isn't especially notable in itself. Few of these stories are scientific enough to show their age (although most of them are over 40 years old), but the ideas espoused in this collection seem to somehow fall a little short. Bester is surely a very talented writer, but too many of these stories have a half-finished quality that begs for another re-write, as though most of the story were written before he'd worked out the ending, and then once finished, he didn't have time to go back and fit the first half to the second. In any case, only "Adam and No Eve" really merits a recommendation. The rest of this book can be skipped without any major loss.