Alfred Bester

The Stars My Destination ran as a serial in Galaxy across 1956 and 1957 and appeared in Britain under the title Tiger! Tiger! Its central figure, Gully Foyle, is a barely literate spaceman left adrift in a wrecked ship and passed over by a vessel that sees him and does not stop; the slight drives him across a solar system where people move by teleporting through an act of will. Alfred Bester, a New Yorker born in 1913 and dead in 1987, wrote comparatively little science fiction and earned most of his living elsewhere: scripts for radio and television, comic work for DC in the 1940s, where he wrote the Green Lantern oath beginning "In brightest day, in blackest night" and created the character Solomon Grundy, and eight years as senior editor of Holiday magazine from 1963. His earlier novel The Demolished Man took the first Hugo Award in 1953. The Science Fiction Writers of America made him their ninth Grand Master in 1988.