This collection and Bester's Star Light, Star Bright (also 1976) were bound up together by the SFBC, 'way back when, as Starlight: The Great Short Fiction of Alfred Bester, which is the form in which I've just read the two collections. I'd assumed my notes would be about just the single bumper volume; however, my take on the books was significantly different, so I decided to split up the two sets of blethering. I vaguely recall that when, some decades ago, Pan paperbacks first released these books and I read them both, I had a similar reaction.

The Light Fantastic starts like a rocket with a novelette that seems designed to show off all of Bester's strengths, "5,271,009" -- the wild humour, the near-obsessive multilingual wordplay, etc. We're told by Bester in the tale's intro that this is all a deliberate self-parody; true, but whoever said parodies aren't a high form of literature? Our hero is lured by someone not unlike the Devil into a series of dreams-come-true that prove each in turn to be hellish. Immediately after this, however, we hurtle downhill with a story that obviously meant a lot to Bester because of the classy venue to which he sold it but which otherwise doesn't have a huge amount to recommend it, "MS. Found in a Champagne Bottle". Following are "Fondly Fahrenheit", a very famous story which I've for some reason never much liked; "The Four-Hour Fugue", which I like a lot; "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed", which is pretty boring; "Disappearing Act", which is good; and the longish fantasy novella "Hell is Forever", which is astonishingly turgid: I had some difficulty forcing myself to finish it.

A great strength that Bester was always able to draw on was, as with John Collier, the ability to tell an involving tale whose protagonists weren't recognizably real people: in both The Light Fantastic and Star Light, Star Bright most of the stories are fantabulations rather than pretences to reality. ost often this effect is charming; The Light Fantastic's main failing is that most of Bester's early stories where this charm was most evident were held over for Star Light, Star Bright. ( )