Hey folks, Harry here... Alfred Bester's genius hasn't had even the most marginal of success in Hollywood thus far. THE DEMOLISHED MAN script by Sam Hamm, brilliant though it may be, is a thing of long ago memory... forgotten in the yellowing page matter of decades gone. I'd love to see that sucker get made. Sigh.
However, for everyone that's ever flipped a Bester page, it's THE STARS MY DESTINATION that they'd kill to see translated. Once on a panel in Atlanta I was on, both Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury lamented that it'd never see the screen. Neil Gaiman loves it. John Carpenter has been heard to say that it is his, literal, dream project. It isn't hard to see why. Gully Foyle is one fuck of an anti-hero, a proto-cyberpunk badass invented long before cyberpunk was cyberpunk. A great science fiction revenge tale, a brilliant novel that is based loosely upon a story in NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC about a sailor that spent 4 months during WWII on a raft at sea, watching ship after ship ignoring his cries for help, for fear that he was a lure for a sub attack. That - and THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO. However, THE STARS MY DESTINATION rises above being a mere reworking, Bester's prose is so strong as to captivate you from the opening lines. This is one of the great books of the science fiction world.
