The Way the Future Blogs

        Ion Hobana

So long, old friend.

Twenty-some years ago a few writers and editors from assorted parts of the world — Harry Harrison from Ireland, Brian Aldiss from England, Sam Lundwall from Sweden and your servant from the U.S.A. — got together to form the organization World SF. Its primary purpose was to constitute a formally existing organization of science-fiction professionals, with regular meetings all over the world, since a formal organization would help our fellows in countries like the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union get through their travel barriers to join the rest of us in truly international meetings.

It worked pretty well much of the time, with science-fiction writers turning up in several score of the countries of the world. One of the most active was Ion Hobana, from Bucharest, Romania, and it was with real sorrow that we learned that he died in a Bucharest hospital in February, at the age of 80. Some of his stories that were translated into English appear in anthologies, including The Penguin World Omnibus of Science Fiction.

The Demolished Man was worth all of Horace Gold’s editorial aggravations. The Demolished Man was fresh, adventurous and beautifully written, and it began a stretch of five years or so during which Alfred Bester was turning out what was arguably some of the best writing in the sf field, right up to his second great novel, The Stars My Destination, sometimes called Tiger! Tiger! in 1956.

But, as far as great sf novels were concerned, that was it. Alfie did produce a group of first-rate short stories and novelettes around that time — “Fondly Fahrenheit,” “5,279,009″ and my own personal favorite, “Disappearing Act,” for example — and he did write more novels later on, but I don’t think anyone has ever argued that they came up to the standards of those first two terrific books. Maybe Alfie really needed Horace’s nagging to make them great.

And, actually, science fiction lost a lot of its interest for Alfie Bester.

Alfie hadn’t stopped being a money writer. He had returned to science fiction because the money had got better — magazine word rates had tripled after World War II, and now the stories were being picked up by book publishers for even more money. And Alfie had just gotten some significant Hollywood money (for a film which, of course, was never made), which gave him and Rolly the chance to live in Europe for a while.

This suggested to him that he try a little nonfiction travel writing for a magazine named Holiday, which he discovered was just as painless to write as anything else, provided you were Alfred Bester. That paid pretty well. In fact, the magazine’s editors liked his writing so much that they offered him an editorial job, at quite a decent salary, and Alfie suddenly had a new home.

That is, for eight or nine years he did, up until the time when the magazine, as magazines do, went bust.

And then, after he and Rolly had been happily married for forty-eight years, Rolly died. And he began to lose his vision. And things, which had been going quite well for Alfie Bester, were beginning to be less idyllic.

Continue reading ‘Alfie, Part 2: When Bester was the Best’ »

From the blog team:

By popular request, here is the table of contents for Gateways, an anthology of original stories inspired by Frederik Pohl, edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull, and due out this summer from Tor:

• Elizabeth Anne Hull, Introduction
• David Brin, “Shoresteading”
• Phyllis and Alex Eisenstein, “Von Neumann’s Bug”
• Isaac Asimov, Appreciation
• Joe Haldeman, “Sleeping Dogs”
• Larry Niven, “Gates (Variations)”
• Gardner Dozois, Appreciation
• James Gunn, “Tales from the Spaceship Geoffrey”
• Gregory Benford and Elisabeth Malartre, “Shadows of the Lost”
• Connie Willis, Appreciation
• Vernor Vinge, “A Preliminary Assessment of the Drake Equation, Being an Excerpt from the Memories of Star Captain Y.T. Lee”
• Greg Bear, “Warm Sea”
• Robert J. Sawyer, Appreciation
• Frank M. Robinson, “The Errand Boy”
• Gene Wolfe, “King Rat”
• Robert Silverberg, Appreciation
• Harry Harrison, “The Stainless Steel Rat and the Pernicious Porcuswine”
• Jody Lynn Nye, “Virtually, A Cat”
• David Marusek, Appreciation
• Brian W. Aldiss, “The First-Born”
• Ben Bova, “Scheherezade and the Storytellers”
• Joan Slonczewski, Appreciation
• Sheri S. Tepper, “The Flight of the Denartesestel Radichan”
• Neil Gaiman, “The [Backspace] Merchants”
• Emily Pohl-Weary, Appreciation
• Mike Resnick, “On Safari”
• Cory Doctorow, “Chicken Little”
• James Frenkel, Afterword