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The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
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Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
Which Novel is Bester?
October 22nd, 2009
I was reading this article on IO9 about Alfred Bester’s Hugo-Winning novel The Demolished Man, and was reminded about a discussion/poll I wanted to do here. That in a moment.
I really loved The Demolished Man, although it’s been 15+ years since I read it. The premise of the linked article above is that while the novel has some strengths, if this was the best there was back in the early 1950s, science fiction deserved to be in a ghetto. Well, although I also love The Old Man and the Sea, a Pulitzer Prize winner from the same time period and admire it very much, I can’t say that Hemingway or other more literary writers of the day ever made anyone think about how to commit murder in a world of telepaths. Mainstream has real shortcomings in my book. What’s the saying? Reality is for those who can’t handle science fiction, I think is the way it goes.
Alfred Bester also wrote another classic science fiction novel of the 1950s: The Stars My Destination, which I also love. It’s sort of a science fiction version of The Count of Monte Cristo, with people who can teleport. It’s an awesome revenge story.
Here are the summaries of the two from Wiki:
The Demolished Man (1953)
The Demolished Man, recipient of the first Hugo Award for best Science Fiction novel, is a police procedural that takes place in a future world in which telepathy is relatively common. Bester creates a harshly capitalistic, hierarchical and competitive social world that exists without deceit: a society where the right person with some skill (or money) and curiosity can access your memories, secrets, fears and past misdeeds more swiftly and with greater alacrity than even you.
Originally published in three parts in Galaxy, beginning in January 1952, The Demolished Man appeared in book form in 1953. It was dedicated to Gold, who made a number of suggestions during its writing. Originally, Bester wanted the title to be Demolition!, but Gold talked him out of it.
The Stars My Destination aka Tiger, Tiger (1955)
Bester’s next novel was outlined while he was living in England and mostly written when he was living in Rome. The Stars My Destination had its origins in a newspaper clipping that Bester found about Poon Lim, a shipwrecked World War II sailor on a raft, who had drifted unrescued in the Pacific for a world record 133 days because passing ships thought he was a lure to bring them within torpedo range of a hidden submarine. From that germ grew the story of Gully Foyle, seeking revenge for his abandonment and causing havoc all about him: a science fiction re-telling of Alexandre Dumas‘ The Count of Monte Cristo with teleportation added to the mix. It has been described as an ancestor of cyberpunk.
So, here’s the poll. Which is the better (Bester) novel? Why do you think so? I won’t bias anyone here with my answer just yet.
Loading …Oh yes, and for those who don’t know these books, there was a Babylon 5 character, a telepath, named after him, so there’s a legacy at least into 1990s tv science fiction.
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October 22nd, 2009 at 2:33 pm
I couldn’t get the LJ poll to work at all.
October 22nd, 2009 at 2:42 pm
*groan* No poll option for “read ‘em both; hated ‘em both.”
I tried, though, I really did! But man, talk about writing that’s thoroughly a product of its time. Sexist, racist, “real men eat beef and smoke Camels,” the whole shebang. Yowza.
October 22nd, 2009 at 2:55 pm
OK, Erika. Added that option for you. Your comments mirror some of those in the IO9 article. I haven’t read them in 15+ years, so I might not be as forgiving now as I was in the past, either. Hmmm, might be 20 years now, come to think about it.
October 22nd, 2009 at 2:56 pm
James, the LJ runs as a mirror and I have the polls done with a Wordpress plug in. I don’t know if they should really be compatible or not.
I know you run LJ polls. What do you use for that? I’m afraid I don’t know the LJ nuances very well at all.
October 22nd, 2009 at 6:55 pm
I prefer Stars by quite a bit. More interesting characters and plot as far as I’m concerned. I thought most of the characters in TDM were annoying.
October 22nd, 2009 at 9:26 pm
only read Stars My Destination. It was good… but not outstanding as I was led to believe by the hype surrounding the book.
October 23rd, 2009 at 1:21 am
I read them both in my teens and they completely and absolutely blew me away. For a while, I regarded ‘Stars’ as my all-time favourite sf novel. It’s been just as long since I’ve read it, but I seem to recall it was pretty revolutionary for its time. I used to be able to quote chunks from it. Mind you, that was when I was 16, a long time ago.
SF’s become enormously more sophisticated since then, and like I say it’s been a while since I read him, apart from one short story I had fond memories of which turned out to be pretty rough when I returned to it as an adult. I don’t know about the reviewer’s experience in the case of this particular book, but I’ve had that experience myself with other books prior to, say, 1970 that left me wondering if sf indeed had deserved some of its earlier reputation.
October 23rd, 2009 at 1:54 pm
I won’t vote since I haven’t read THE DEMOLISHED MAN. I love THE STARS MY DESTINATION though.
October 23rd, 2009 at 1:57 pm
“Sexist, racist, “real men eat beef and smoke Camels,” the whole shebang. Yowza.”
It would be interesting to read it again and see if I get this reaction. Like many others commenting its been a very long time since I read it.
October 23rd, 2009 at 4:32 pm
I don’t know about the reviewer’s experience in the case of this particular book, but I’ve had that experience myself with other books prior to, say, 1970 that left me wondering if sf indeed had deserved some of its earlier reputation.
I don’t know about that. I’ve recently been reading a lot of old SF. Lots of it is truly horrible. But there’s also some things I thought were wonderful.
Lovecraft, Simak, Vance, Sheckley and quite a few other writers of the 50s and earlier hold up pretty well.
Although his best work came later, Philip K. Dick wrote several novels in the 50s.
And NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR was written in ‘49. Vonnegut wrote THE SIRENS OF TITAN in ‘59. A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ was written in the same year. Wyndham’s THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS was published in ‘51. Clarke’s CHILDHOODS END (’54).
October 23rd, 2009 at 10:22 pm
gee, there are many AWESOME scifi books from the 50s… Asimov and Clarke alone have some better stuff in the 50s than dozens of other authors in the next decades…
October 23rd, 2009 at 10:30 pm
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not dissing everything pre-70 - I agree that the pre-70’s books mentioned are still good. It’s just the *other* stuff I liked before I developed real critical faculties that doesn’t look so good in retrospect. These books are indeed particular gems, but some of, say, Heinlein’s stuff when revisited doesn’t hold up very well to my mind.
Let’s say that instead of there being a selection of sophisticated sf novels pre-70’s floating on a sea of crud, that reader expectations have changed sufficiently that a greater skill with prose is not only expected, but required, resulting in a general elevation in quality affecting most if not all books. I have most of the good books mentioned above, but only after I tried rereading some other lesser stuff and got rid of it all because it was a bit, well, stinky.
October 24th, 2009 at 8:50 am
I never liked Heinlein even as a kid (except for STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, the only of his books I’ve ever managed to finish). I was always more into Clarke and Herbert.
Never cared for Asimov much either.
“…reader expectations have changed sufficiently that a greater skill with prose is not only expected, but required, resulting in a general elevation in quality affecting most if not all books.”
Agreed, I think the general quality of today’s SF is vastly better than the SF of past generations.
The same goes for SF illustration. With a few notable exceptions, there was very little in the field of much quality prior to the 60’s.