Cyberpunk Previsions and Literary Influences

Abstract

Bester’s imagined futures drew heavily from the history of literature and mapped lines of flight for the SF genre. In Stars, he establishes himself as a son of the pulp-SF and high-modernist writers that preceded him and a forefather to the New Wave and cyberpunk movements that followed his lead. Bester enacts wordplay and carefully devised the names of characters and places. These tactics situate Stars within a literary tradition that deepens the significance of the novel. So does the novel’s rampant intertextuality, which points toward the future of SF while demonstrating an anxiety about authorial identity and complementing the various excesses that fuel Bester’s pyrotechnic impetus. Awakening is a dominant, correlating theme. It allows Bester to map Gully’s transformation from sleeper to seer and make further commentary on the shortcomings of SF.