TYGER! Alfred Bester J.G. Ballard William Blake: The Literary Anatomy of 'The Stars My Destination' 

My pleasure. There's a cliche about great artists stealing from others, but I disagree- instead, they're inspired by approach, homage it and create something new. Bester also read Joyce and took his approach to words and weaved it into his style as well. All truly great writers have an awareness of what has gone before.

Thanks very much. I think there's way too much revisionist around Bester being spouted by those who only seem to have a background in reading SF- and they often don't realise that he was an idol of earlier generations of SF fans back to the 1950s (first Hugo winner, after all). The over-emphasis of Bester in mentions of Cyberpunk is one example of this.

Pleasure, dude.

You're very kind, thank you.

Salutations to you!

Cheers, Dean of Men! I think I discovered most of these for myself, through references in everything from tv to comic books to rock and roll, same as yourself. The purveyors of popular culture back then were regularly derided, but more often than not they had done some reading themselves...

Yes, that was one of the Penguin covers I seem to recall. A stone classic!

Yes, of course- the original Gothic antiheroes like Melmoth- and the fullblown villainous ones, such as Lewis' 'The Monk' and Beckford's 'Vathek' are classic antiheroes of a blacker stripe, but all part of the mix- the Gothic emerged as an extreme example of Romanticism. I read all this stuff many decades ago, as torruous as some of it is prose-wise.

Thank you, very kind.

Thanks, old chum!

Thanks for this, James. Similarly, I'm uncertain which variant Gollancz uses. I should try and pick up an older US edition and do a comparison, but if Alfie B preferred the Sidgwick- which I'm sure the Penguin and Goodchild editions draw on off the top of my head- I'm happy with that. Hope you are well, mate.

I too have ordered a dodgy looking copy of "Fall of Chronopolis" along with too many other books I can neither afford nor store! It's like a neo-capitalist nihilist virus!

Excellent news! Bayley has the kind of strange widescreen baroque that Bester displayed, but on a smaller budget.

We all want more Charles Logan - but we don't get any more, sadly. There are a few stories scattered in anthologies I seem to recall, I must drag these together.

The Ballard mention was more of an adjunct to the Melville and Swift material and I admit it could have been more elegantly linked- I thought this myself on playback- but I don't tight-script these things, I may make a few bullet point notes then riff off them. The Gulliver-Drowned Giant-Meliville-Tiger link was too good for menot to have an opportunity to mention one of my favourite short stories. Can't agree Bester always trumps Ballard, by the way, they were different kinds of writer, but I think they would have hit it off, both being outsiders in the Genre SF world. As for Jaunting, it may be one of the 'least' scientific aspects of the story, but it's not the supernatural, is it? I don't link it to DIckens, I link the multiple attempts by researchers to kill Jaunte to try and analyse how he teleports as a classic example of the scientific method- theory, repeated experimentation and proof: and it works scientifically in the novel as soon, they can teach everyone to do it. 'Superpower' and 'Pulp' are not specific enough terms here to disallow the Jaunte as an SF trope. I agree, though, that Bester does not age- and I think that's because of the Classical storytelling approach as influenced by the works I cite plus the addition of literary techniques from Modernism like Concrete Poetry and other typographical experiments. Bester also tapped into Beat Generation/50s hep cat dialogue and references which put him ahead of the New Wave. If you haven't read his short stories, seek them out as they are even better...

@@outlawbookselleroriginal I'd say that jaunting sure seems like something out of the Paranormal, at least at first. But Bester takes It one step beyond' by making It something everyone(or almost) can learn, thus giving It a kind of "evolutionary" aspect. In any case, the boundary between the material and 'other' world seems largely imaginary, at least according to Patrick Harpur, whose The Philosopher's Secret Fire I'm currently reading(and strongly recommend). Gully Foyle sure seems to transcend the boundary as the timeless Burning Man... Have read some of Bester's other work, and a couple of short story collections, but It seems to me that Tiger!Tiger! and The Demolished Man were his peak performances, by far.

@@luiznogueira1579 The point is that Bester does not offer a paranormal explanation for the Novum of Jaunting. If he had, we'd be in Fantasy territory-, as the 'explanation' would be a magical anachronism- look closely at the text at the section where the scientists try and explain the jaunte.

Much appreciated.

Thanks!

Many thanks to you, Greg, much appreciated, Super Thanks helps this channel keep going.

Thanks Paul. I don't do many of these as they simply don't get many views, though I enjoy doing them. That's the trouble with youtube- it's not how many subscribers you get, it's the views: if everyone who subscribed for the 'top 10' material watched the rest, I'd be a happier camper- and of course they'd learn more and not have to watch so many clickbaity videos....

@@outlawbookselleroriginal Yeah, I hear you. If there was any justice in the RU-vid universe, this astonishingly comprehensive video would go viral... Sigh 😔

Can't say I have, I will take a look.

Yes. I love 'Nine Princes'.

I think that's why MB is so incredible- and Melville so ahead of his time: he puts so much into the texts, often subtly, that you can read them again and find new meanings. I find him almost unassailable-when I read 'The Confidence Man : His Masquerade',he seemed to be ahead of everyone buy 30-50 years....

Well, what is prose without its poetic aspect, that which draws put pleasure in the use of vocabulary? Aldiss is a rich one, but then being someone who revels in the English Literary Genre SF tradition, he and his contemporaries are my formative influences.

'Starburst' is great, just not as good as 'Dark Side' as a whole- it's still an essential book for any serious collection of short SF.

Always a winner. Do read 'The Demolished Man' if you haven't yet.

Superb story.

You're very kind, mate, thank you!

You've entirely missed the point of the story. Your expectation of Ballard here is that he is a conventional 'sci-fi' writer, which he was not. As I said in a recent video title 'Maybe Your Expectations Are The Problem?'. Why do you read SF? To fulfill the need for familiar tropes, most of which you encountered on screens before you started reading widely in the genre? Ballard is writing here as much about the psyche of the people who visit the giant, in search of wonder and he never seeks to 'explain' the mystery of the giants' origin as that would arguably remove the poetry of the story's images. I'd say your expectation of Ballard as a 'Sci-Fi' writer is what's predictable here- Ballard was about expanding the horizons of the genre into Inner Space, of encouraging people to look at how their minds are altered by the unusual. This is why Ballard is revered as one of the greatest writers to ever emerge from Genre SF.

No, it's an influence over Cyberpunk, but it cannot be seriously claimed for the subgenre: it has more of a claim to be a New Wave novel, and even then it's not one, for as with the Cyberpunk claim, it's too early in the development of Genre SF - it's a matter of chronology as well as detail- It lacks all the elements that would comprise Cyberpunk. Later works by Delany and Budrys would have more of a claim, but again, they won't wash: Cyberpunk began to coalese proper at the very end of the 1970s and not before. Watch my video 'Who Put the Punk in Cyberpunk?'.

All good points, but when Gully Foyle gets his whole body retooled on Mars, that's practically a foundational aspect of cyberpunk in my opinion. With interesting echos (Mars) for Man Plus.

@@kid5Media Yes, it's regarded as foundational, but machine-human interfaces are only one aspect of Cyberpunk- his attitude as a character is arguably more important in this respect, but most significant is the fact that Gibson cites Bester's style of writing in the book as influential over him. 'The Demolished Man' depicts corporate power in a manner that foreshadows the dominance of corporations in Cyberpunk, but pick through the history of SF from the 1950s to late 1970s and there are numerous taproot texts- the most neglected of which is Budrys' Michelmas'.