Psychoshop

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Without Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny, we would not today have William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, perhaps not even Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams.

Bester and Zelazny were among the SF jazz greats of their time. Each whirled in like golden dust-devils and disrupted the science fiction landscape, blowing new tunes in new styles and tempos, leaving glitter-speckled, disheveled admirers and a great many imitators in their wake. Other writers puzzled out some of their riffs, and improvised a few new ones of their own; but the surprise and originality of B and Z could not be duplicated.

Alfred Bester began writing in the forties, but it was in the fifties that he made his mark, just as science fiction nov­els were being published with fair regularity in hardcover, and at the beginning of the golden age of the SF paperback. His SF appeared sporadically through the sixties and seven­ties: then he seemed to fade. At the time he was declared a Grandmaster by the Science Fiction Writers of America, he was practically broke, dying, almost forgotten by the main­stream SF reader. Even with the highlights, his was not a career to be fervently desired—but it was very like the career of many musical jazz masters.

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