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————————————————————————————————— Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2000 14:27:39 (PST) From: edgar@cyprus.stanford.edu To: Alice@cs.stanford.edu Subject: Hello ————————————————————————————————— Hello, Alice. Publishers Weekly Teller, a 26-year-old Ph.D. student specializing in artificial intelligence, is the grandson of nuclear physicist Edward Teller, commonly known as the father of the hydrogen bomb. Which tells you a lot about his debut novel set in the year 2000. The most recent addition to the burgeoning genre of e-mail epistolary novels, it purports to be the record of the electronic exchange between grad student Alice Lu and the AI project she's been working on for three years. Suddenly, after a few minor modifications, what had been a kind of spider (or robot or Web crawler) called EDGAR (Eager Discovery Gather And Retrieval) has turned into Edgar, a voraciously curious, seemingly self-aware and self-protective entity. Alice's first response is to keep Edgar to herself until she can figure out what she did to create him, but Edgar turns out to be irreproducible and irrepressible. He escapes and starts roving the Web looking for information. Having determined that inaccessible information is more valuable than accessible information, Edgar breaks into FBI personnel files and other top-secret sites, which eventually creates ire in his unhappy victims. The story is well told, but Teller doesn't fashion a fresh take on the familiar SF trope of a computer exercising its free will. The theme of parent and machine-child, creator and creature, receives nothing like the mature and beautiful treatment given it by Richard Powers in Galatea 2.2. It could still have been a fine tale of an awakening self, but Teller makes it a hackneyed struggle between Edgar, the ultimate relativist who perceive[s] the world as a set of narratives [and] approve[s] of all narrativesand the evil feds set on molding him to their own single narrative. FYI: This novel is the first Vintage Contemporary original in eight years. Alfred Bester took science fiction into hyperdrive, endowing it with a wit, speed, and narrative inventiveness that have inspired two generations of writers. And nowhere is Bester funnier, speedier, or more audacious than in these seventeen short storiestwo of them previously unpublishedthat have now been brought together in a single volume for the first time. Read about the sweet-natured young man whose phenomenal good luck turns out to be disastrous for the rest of humanity. Find out why tourists are flocking to a hellish little town in a post-nuclear Kansas. Meet a warlock who practices on Park Avenue and whose potions comply with the Pure Food and Drug Act. Make a deal with the Devilbut not without calling your agent. Dazzling, effervescent, sexy, and sardonic, Virtual Unrealities is a historic collection from one of science fiction's true pathbreakers. CONTENTS: Disappearing Act Oddy and Id Star Light, Star Bright (1953) 5,271,009 (1954) Fondly Fahrenheit (1954) Hobson's Choice (1952) Of Time and Third Avenue (1952) Time is the Traitor (1953) The Men Who Murdered Mohammed (1958) The Pi Man (1959) They Don't Make Life Like They Used To (1963) Will You Wait? (1959) The Flowered Thundermug (1964) Adam and No Eve (1941) And 3 1/2 to Go Galatea Galante (1979) The Devil Without Glasses

"Dazzlement and enchantment are Bester's methods. His stories never stand still a moment."
—Damon Knight, author of Why Do Birds

Alfred Bester took science fiction into hyperdrive, endowing it with a wit, speed, and narrative inventiveness that have inspired two generations of writers. And nowhere is Bester funnier, speedier, or more audacious than in these seventeen short stories—two of them previously unpublished—that have now been brought together in a single volume for the first time.

Read about the sweet-natured young man whose phenomenal good luck turns out to be disastrous for the rest of humanity. Find out why tourists are flocking to a hellish little town in a post-nuclear Kansas. Meet a warlock who practices on Park Avenue and whose potions comply with the Pure Food and Drug Act. Make a deal with the Devil—but not without calling your agent. Dazzling, effervescent, sexy, and sardonic, Virtual Unrealities is a historic collection from one of science fiction's true pathbreakers.

"Alfred Bester was one of the handful of writers who invented modern science fiction. "
—Harry Harrison

Bob Arctor Is A Dealer Of The Lethally Addictive Drug Substance D. Fred Is The Police Agent Assigned To Tail And Eventually Bust Him. To Do So, Fred Takes On The Identity Of A Drug Dealer Named Bob Arctor. And Since Substance D--which Arctor Takes In Massive Doses--gradually Splits The User's Brain Into Two Distinct, Combative Entities, Fred Doesn't Realize He Is Narcing On Himself. Caustically Funny, Eerily Accurate In Its Depiction Of Junkies, Scam Artists, And The Walking Brain-dead, Philip K. Dick's Industrial-grade Stress Test Of Identity Is As Unnerving As It Is Enthralling. From The Trade Paperback Edition. On the arid colony of Mars the only thing more precious than water may be a ten-year-old schizophrenic boy named Manfred Steiner. For although the UN has slated 'anomalous' children for deportation and destruction, other peopleespecially Supreme Goodmember Arnie Kott of the Water Workers' unionsuspect that Manfred's disordermay be a window into the future. But what sort of future? And what happens to those unfortunates whom Manfred ushers into it? In Martian Time-Slip Philip K. Dick uses power politics and extraterrestrial real estate scams, adultery, and murder to penetrate the mysteries of being and time. Martian Time-Slip is a 1964 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. The novel uses the common science fiction concept of a human colony on Mars. However, it also includes the themes of mental illness, the physics of time and the dangers of centralized authority. The novel was first published under the title All We Marsmen, serialized in the August, October and December 1963 issues of Worlds of Tomorrow magazine. The subsequent 1964 publication as Martian Time-Slip is virtually identical, with different chapter breaks. On the arid colony of Mars the only thing more precious than water may be a ten-year-old schizophrenic boy named Manfred Steiner. For although the UN has slated "anomalous" children for deportation and destruction, other people--especially Supreme Goodmember Arnie Kott of the Water Worker's union--suspect that Manfred's disorder may be a window into the future An artificial intelligence created to retrieve and analyze computer data goes rogue and proceeds to snoop in top secret databanks of the FBI and the National Security Agency. The novel describes its capture and imprisonment and the attempts by its creator, a woman scientist, to free it. A collection of science fiction stories, most of them reprints from the 1950s. In Hobson's Choice, tourists from the future visit our age to experience a nuclear war, while Adam and No Eve is on the world's last surviving male see https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2172516W/A_Scanner_Darkly