Description
Book SynopsisIn this comprehensive study of The Stars My Destination, D. Harlan Wilson makes a case for the continued significance of Alfred Bester’s SF masterwork, exploring its distinctive style, influences, intertextuality, affect, and innovation as well as its extensive metafictional properties. In Stars, Bester established himself as a son of the pulp-SF and high-modernist writers that preceded him and a forefather to the New Wave and cyberpunk movements that followed his lead. Wilson’s study depicts Bester as an SF insider as much as an outlier, writing in the spirit of the genre but breaking with the fixation on hard science in favor of psychological interiority, literary experimentation, and adult themes. The book combines close-readings of the novel with broader concerns about contemporary media, technoculture, and the current state of SF itself. In Wilson’s view, SF is a moribund artform, and Stars foresaw the inevitable science fictionalization of our benighted world. With scholarly lucidity and precision, Wilson shows us that Stars pointed the way to what we have (un)become.
Table of Contents1. INTRODUCTION
2. SYNOPSIS
3. CHAPTER ONE: Cyberpunk Previsions and Literary Influences
4. CHAPTER TWO: The Frankenstein Riff
5. CHAPTER THREE: Architectures of Psyche, Power, and Patriarchy
6. CHAPTER FOUR: Speaking in Gutter Tongues
7. CODA
