βAlfred Bester was, and remains, long after his passing, the preeminent Class Act of imaginative literature. Bester was the mountain, all the rest of us merely climbers toward that peak.β
βHarlan Ellison
βAlfred Bester was one of a handful of writers who invented modern science fiction.β
βHarry Harrison, author of The Stainless Steel Rat
Alfred Bester took readers where none had gone before in his seminal fifties novel, The Stars My Destinationβ the story of a young man's desperate journey from adolescence to most-wanted-man of the 25th century.
In The Deceivers, Bester reinvented the space opera for the late 20th century. The hero is Rogue WinterβKing of the Maori Commandos... His lover is the beautiful Demi Jeroux, who has been kidnapped by... The villainous, demonic Manchu Duke of Death.
Rogue must search through the entire solar system to find the missing Demi Jeroux, from the Paradise of Carnal Pleasures to the bloody torture chambers of Triton. It is in the subterranean chambers beneath the surface of Triton that the key to the whole adventure lies. Buried here is the sole source of the newly discovered Meta-crystals, which hold the secret to unlimited energy for all mankind.
Demi Jeroux is merely a pawn in the Duke of Death's gambit to seize control of the crystals and place the entire solar system at his mercy. Rogue's final confrontation with the Duke will determine not only the fate of his beloved, but the future of the system and its freedom from the evil Manchu Empire.
**
Amazon.com Review
Way back in the 1950s, Alfred Bester established himself as one of the greats of SF with a number of dazzling short stories and two major novels: The Demolished Man (1953) and The Stars My Destination (1956, also known as Tiger! Tiger! ), both much reprinted. The Deceivers , his final SF novel, appeared in 1981. It's a colorful, whimsical romp that plays entertainingly with themes from Bester's peak years, though without his old driving, compelling savagery. Hero Rogue Winter is a "Synergist," acutely sensitive to the world's patterns: in one set-piece sequence he follows an intuitive trail from 12 drummers drumming in a street parade to the goal of a (metaphorical) partridge in a pear tree. Winter is also heir-apparent to the Maori Mafia, which controls much of the Solar System's crime, but he must single-handedly battle the dread mammoths of Ganymede to earn his crown. Meanwhile, he has fallen helplessly in love with a sexy nonhuman shapeshifter from Titan, making him vulnerable to minions of the insidious Manchu Duke of Death, who plans to smash the syndicate that's smuggling the priceless miracle fuel Meta from the heavily defended mines of Saturn's Chinese/Japanese-dominated moon Triton. Bester crams this wild farrago of a narrative with wisecracks, junk science, circus glamor, odd catch phrases, bits of self-conscious cleverness and excess, Chinese esoterica like the Mirror-and-Listen Mystery, and his trademark typographic tricks. Amusing candyfloss nonsense; quite readable, but definitely not in the same league as his 1950s classics. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk