Black Gate

Earlier this year, I was delighted to write a new New Treasures piece on the latest novel by Jamil Nasir. Tunnel Out of Death, as I noted at the time, had “one of the most original plot synopses I’ve read in the last year.”

That sent me on the hunt for his earlier novels, and over the last six months I’ve managed to track down most of them — including the highly regarded Tower of Dreams, which Jack Dann called “A powerful hallucinatory nightmare obsession from a writer who loves words and can turn them into the vital stuff of experience.”

In Advertising, Image is Everything.

Blaine Ramsey has an unusual occupation. He travels to foreign countries and lives like a native. He drinks in the culture with his mind, body, and soul. And he does it all in the name of American capitalism. For Blaine is an Image digger, one of an elite few blessed with the power to “dream” authentic images from the deep unconscious of foreign lands that are turned into alluring, computer-animated packages used by advertisers to sell their products.

But in a dusty Middle Eastern villa, something goes terribly wrong. Blaine is haunted by the recurring Image of a young Arab beauty suffering a brutal attack. For Blaine, her Image becomes the seductive source of romantic obsession–and a nightmare from which he cannot escape. And as Blaine is about to discover, her appearance in his dreams foretells tragedy — a disaster the likes of which the world has never seen….

Tower of Dreams was published in January 1999 by Bantam Spectra Books. It is 231 pages, originally priced at $5.99. That version is now out of print, but in 2009 the author self-published a trade paperback edition through iUniverse; that one is still in print. There is no digital edition.

There was a time when Alfred Bester was considered one of the top writers in science fiction and fantasy.

I know. You’ve never heard of Alfred Bester. Perhaps his greatest novel — The Stars My Destination (1956) — is in print only in an expensive trade paperback edition from a small press, and his classic The Demolished Man (1952), the first novel to win a Hugo Award, is out of print altogether.

Bester’s reputation was not built entirely on his novels, however. Before he stopped writing SF, he produced a number of brilliant stories, including “Fondly Fahrenheit” and “Adam and No Eve.” His short fiction was gathered in two hardcover collections, The Light Fantastic (1976) and Star Light, Star Bright (1976). Neither had a paperback edition in the US, and both are now long out of print.

Fortunately, they were collected into a huge omnibus edition, Starlight: The Great Short Fiction of Alfred Bester, published in a handsome paperback edition by Berkley Medallion in July, 1977. It’s also out of print, but not particularly hard to find — and well worth the effort.

After giving up on the field in the late sixties (which he discusses in the story notes in Starlight), Bester returned to science fiction with three novels in the late 70s and early 80s: The Computer Connection (1975), Golem 100 (1980), and The Deceivers (1981). He died in 1987.

The Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) named him its ninth Grand Master, presented posthumously in 1988. He was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2001.

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