Over the weekend I read Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination (1956). This book has been long regarded as one of the classics of science fiction, but for some reason I had never read it. All I can say is that the book really does deserve its reputation. (Plus the battle between getting to the end of the book and falling asleep, which was so common when I was fifteen, is not something that happens to me much any more. It did with this one, however). I'm not going to review it here, but it really doesn't feel like 1950s science fiction. It feels like it was written in about 1990. Its influence on many things that came later (from the New Wave to Cyberpunk) is so obvious and so large that it is really a shame I didn't read it 20 years ago.