Alfred Bester

writer
Short Story

The Probable Man

Years before The Demolished Man, there was Bester’s probable man. I looked forward to reading it as the first story of my retirement, and I enjoyed the time-travel model that Bester set up: David Conn travels backward from 2941 to World War II, but then returns to a vastly changed future. For me, though, I found the naÏve attitude toward war unappealing.
She’d be Hilda Pietjen, daughter of the prime minister, just another chip in the Nazi poker game. And he’d be dead in a bunker, a thousand years before he’d been born.
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  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

The Push of a Finger

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  • Science Fiction
  • No Time Phenomena
Short Story

Of Time and Third Avenue

Apparently, time travel has rules. For example, you cannot go back and simply take something from the past—it must be given to you. Thus, our man from the future must talk young Oliver Wilson Knight and his girlfriend into giving up the 1990 almanac that they bought in 1950.
If there was such a thing as a 1990 almanac, and if it was in that package, wild horses couldn’t get it away from me.
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  • Eloi Bronze Medal
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

Hobson’s Choice

By night, Addyer dreams of traveling to different times; by day, he is a statistician investigating an anomalous increase in the country’s population centered right in the part of the country that took the heaviest radiation damage in the war.
Either he imagined himself moved backward in time with a double armful of Encyclopedia Britannica, best-sellers, hit plays and gambling records; or else he imagined himself transported forward in time a thousand years to the Golden Age of perfection.
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  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

The Roller Coaster

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  • Undetermined
  • Definite Time Travel
Novelette

Time Is the Traitor

John Strapp scours the galaxy, desperately seeking his lost love’s doppleganger. He may or may not find her, but despite this story’s title, neither he nor you will find any time travel or other time-related phenomena. —Michael Main
I want the name and address of every girl over twenty-one who fits this description.
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  • Science Fiction
  • No Time Phenomena
Short Story

Disappearing Act

  • by Alfred Bester
  • in Star Science Fiction Stories No. 2, edited by Frederik Pohl (Ballantine Books, December 1953)
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  • Undetermined
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

The Stars My Destination

Even before I found Asimov and Heinlein and other books with space ships on the spine in the local library, I stole this paperback from my dad’s shelf around 1964. As you can see from the picture, it had an irresistible cover (yes, that’s the stolen copy).

For the most part, Bestor’s story has jaunting (teleportation through space) with no time travel, which is enough to cause plenty of excitement for Gully Foyle (aka Geoffrey Fourmyle) as he jaunts around the war-torn solar system, seeking revenge on various space merchants. But at one climactic point, he also manages a jaunt through time.
And then he was tumbling down, down, down the space-time lines, back into the dreadful pit of Now.
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  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

Travel Diary

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  • Undetermined
  • Definite Time Travel
Novelette

Travel Diary

Travel diary of blasé tourists around the Solar System, to other stars, back in time to the Great Fire of London and to another galaxy. —Dave Hook
A spaceship with six rockets lifts from a stark landscape with a red and green planet in the sky.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

The Men Who Murdered Mohammed

When Professor Henry Hassel discovers his wife in the arms of another man, he does what any mad scientist would do: build a time machine to go back and kill his wife’s grandfather. He has no trouble changing the past, but any effect on the present seems rather harder to achieve.
“While I was backing up, I inadvertently trampled and killed a small Pleistocene insect.”

“Aha!” said Hassel.

“I was terrified by the indicent. I had visions of returning to my world to find it completely changed as a result of this single death. Imagine my surprise when I returned to my world to find that nothing had changed!”
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  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Novelette

The Flowered Thundermug

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  • Romance
  • Definite Time Travel