The Subjective Nature of Time and the Individual’s (In)Ability to Inflict Social Change

This chapter explores the individual microhistory by looking at works by Alfred Bester which consider the subjective nature of time and the privatisation of temporal experience. Bester’s works often demonstrate the lack of a universal continuum and the isolated nature of an individual’s timeline, which can be seen as a representation of the individual’s (in)ability to exhibit agency over their social environment. This chapter proposes that Bester is utilising an otherwise standard SF trope to invite his readers to re-examine the way in which individuals are made to conform to a society which is given priority over the individual self. This chapter delineates the relationship between the self’s subjective experience of the world, in terms of psychology and personal identity, and the objective assumptions of that world in regards to the individual, thus demonstrating the self’s seemingly unalterable place in social history.

Alfred Bester

The introduction examines how Bester’s unique approach challenged the paradigm of Golden Age science fiction. After a stint scripting comics and radio, Bester returned to the SF field in search of creative freedom; however, a conflict with legendary editor John W. Campbell over the story “Oddy and Id,” among other circumstances, prompted Bester to assume the stance of an outsider and write against the grain of the Astounding ethos, which he came to regard as escapist and scientistic. Bester wanted to write “arrest” fiction “full of romantic curiosity” that left ample opportunity for the reader to cogenerate meaning and experience the euphoria of raw imagination. Bester’s approach is discussed in terms of Roland Barthes’s distinction between “readable” and “writable” fiction.

Alfred Bester

Like Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, science fiction author Alfred Bester started his career as a pulp writer and finished it as a Grand Master, but he followed a far more curious path to the field’s highest honor than either of his big-name contemporaries. He focused on SF only intermittently yet, as a result, developed a distinctive, outsider approach that opened up avenues for cutting-edge vanguards such as New Wave and cyberpunk. Making extensive use of Bester’s unpublished correspondence, this book carefully examines Bester’s entire career, giving particular attention to how his work across mediums, combined with his love of modernist and decadent authors, shaped his groundbreaking approach to science fiction. During the 1950s, Bester crossbred pulp aesthetics and high style to explosive effect, producing landmark novels and stories that crackled with excess and challenged the assumptions of Golden Age science fiction. His focus on language as a plot device and a tool for world-building, and his use of modernist style in the service of science-fictional extrapolation left the field changed forever. The book argues that what Bester brought to SF was not a radically new template but an idiosyncratic self-reflexivity about the writing and reading protocols of the genre that put the field into a highly productive and transformative dialogue with itself.