<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Alfred Bester (December 18, 1913 – September 30, 1987), Winner of the first Hugo Award for Best Novel for The Demolished Man, Bester began his career in the pulp magazines just before World War II, then worked as a script writer for several comics before moving on to radio and television work.

Bester began writing science fiction again on a part-time basis in 1950, quickly becoming a regular contributor to Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Two of his short stories for F&SF still stand out as representing the best of 1950's SF—exuberant, original, and wickedly funny. "Fondly Fahrenheit" (1954) is the story of a man and his android who become enmeshed in one another's mental illness; it is generally considered Bester's finest short story. Perhaps the best example of Bester's wicked sense of humor is "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" (1958), which destroys all previous conceptions of time travel in one wild ride. The best collection of his short stories is Starlight: The Great Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (1976).

Bester's 1953 book The Demolished Man was serialized in Galaxy and went on to win the first Hugo Award for best novel. It is a procedural crime drama set in a world with telepathic police, and was the first successful blending of science fiction and the hardboiled mystery tradition.

But Bester's reputation rests on his most brilliant novel, The Stars My Destination (1957; published in a slightly different version in the UK as Tiger! Tiger!). A drama of revenge set in a 25th century in which human beings have mastered telekinesis, it is remarkable for the baroque quality of both its characters and settings. For example, a sequence dealing with the synesthesia of the main character is a precursor of the psychedelia of the 1960s. Approaching half a century in age, this novel's splendor has not been diminished by time.

Bester reduced his output through the late 1950s and early '60s as he became increasingly busy at Holiday magazine, where he was a senior editor. When the magazine moved to Indianapolis and asked him to leave his native New York City in the mid-1970s, he quit and returned to full-time writing. The first novel he completed in this late period was The Computer Connection (1975), a science-fictional techno-thriller which moves as well as anything he ever wrote but does not quite live up to its own expectations. The best work of his later years, and his own favorite, was the novel Golem100 (1980), a tour-de-force about the social problems of late 22nd century New York. His last science fiction novel, The Deceivers (1981), was not a success.

From time to time there have been rumors that The Stars My Destination will be made into a film, but to date no such project has ever gone into development. However, a graphic novel based on the book came out in 1992.