Deadly relations: Bester Ascendant - Part 2: Antithesis

[ruuger]

This is the discussion post for the first part Gregory J. Keys' Deadly Relations: Bester Ascendant. Spoilers for the whole of the series, including the spin-offs and tie-ins, are allowed here so newbies beware.

Comments

[selenak.livejournal.com]

This section has my favourite OC in the trilogy in it, Sandoval Bey. If only Crusade had not been cancelled and they had filmed Fiona Avery's script where Bester meets the Excalibur, Sandoval would be screen canon, too. (Bester mentions him in conversation.) Ah well.

Anyway: Sandoval Bey is pretty much an ideal mentor/father figure, so of course, Bester's life being what it is, he comes to a bad end. What Keyes introduces here is a theme of choice for Al, too (as in: he keeps making the wrong ones), though not as blatantly as the situation with Elizabeth Montoya that concludes this section. Bester could have warned Sandoval, as he later concludes (and feels guilty for), but he doesn't, telling himself it's surely yet another test (and given the way Psi Corps tests are set up, he could have been right). Hormonal confused feelings aside, Sandoval is the first person Bester loves, and the first he loses. (He was too young when his parents died for this to count in this way.) Incidentally, the loyalty test question Director Johnston asks him - whether Sandoval would choose a law-abiding non-telepath over a rogue telepath - is one that I think Bester later as an adult would also have decided for the telepath (though as opposed to Sandoval, this might not have pleased the telepath in question). You can see some mannerisms Bester picks up from Sandoval, too (Sandoval's joke about the pig reminds me of the one Bester tells Lochley about Descartes), and crucially the in lack of a better term profiler ability to think like his prey. I thought Keyes' choice of "Rashomon" as Sandoval's way od educating Al was a great meta commentary about what the trilogy itself does - tell a story from different points of view to create a complicated truth with no individual holding the claim to having the entire truth at their disposal.

Elizabeth Montoya as Bester's first romantic love then sharpens the theme of choices. Sandoval Bey was only emotionally conflicted after a life time of service to the Corps. Liz is as young as Al, but as opposed to him a "later", she doesn't want to start that life time of service, and in this scenario there is no "maybe" involved: she demands a choice. And Al Bester chooses duty over love, the community over the individual. This is basically the exact opposite of what we're trained to expect from sympathetic characters, and yet Keyes tells it in a way that makes it understandable. Being who he is, Bester can't choose differently. Or can he? That's indeed the question.

[alexcat.livejournal.com]

This part, for me, is where nasty little boy Bester grows into nasty adult Bester and is well on his way to nasty bully Bester. He certainly is a shining example of what lousy parents the Corps makes. How could he ever expect to have anyone love him when he has no love or loyalty in him, at least not to anything but the abstract construct of the Corp. Sure he tries to make it real but it isn't, never was.