[Bester is a mesmerizing story teller, who cut his teeth writing comic book dialog and radio drama scripts, and this background is gloriously revealed in the cascading, exploding, pyrotechnical style that impels the story of the vengeance of the unstoppable Gully Folyle (aka Fourmyle of Ceres). This is one wild ride, one of the most captivating I've ever had the pleasure to have been on. This style is said to fully enliven Bester's other great novel as well, The Demolished Man (1953). Both of these books are widely considered classics of genre SF. - WA, 2 Feb 97]

At noon, Fourmyle of Ceres arrived with a display of conspicuous transportation so outlandish that it had been known to make seven-year melancholics laugh. A giant amphibian thrummed up from the south and landed on the lake. An LST barge emerged from the plane and droned across the water to the shore. Its forward wall banged down into a drawbridge and out came a twentieth century staff car. Wonder piled on wonder for the delighted spectators, for the staff car drove a matter of twenty yards to the center of camp and then stopped.
   "What can possibly come next? Bike?"
   "No, roller skates."
   "He'll come out on a pogo stick."
   Fourmyle capped their wildest speculations. The muzzle of a circus cannon thrust up from the staff car. There was the bang of a black-powder explosion and Fourmyle of Ceres was shot out of the cannon in a graceful arc to the very door of his tent where he was caught in a net by four valets. The applause that greeted him could be heard for six miles. Fourmyle climbed onto his valets' shoulders and motioned for silence.
   "Oh, God! It's going to make a speech."
   "It? You mean 'he', don't you?"
   "No; it. It can't be human."
   "Friends, Romans, Countrymen," Fourmyle began earnestly. "Lend me your ears, Shakespeare, 1564-1616. Damn!" Four white doves shook themselves out of Fourmyle's sleeves and fluttered away. He regarded them with astonishment, then continued. "Friends, greetings, salutations, bonjour, bon ton, bon vivant, bon voyage, bon-- What the hell?" Fourmyle's pockets caught fire and rocketed forth roman candles. He tried to put himself out. Streamers and confetti burst from him. "Friends... Shut up! I'll get this speech straight." Fourmyle looked down at himself in dismay. His clothes were melting away, revealing lurid scarlet underwear. "Kleinmann!" he bellowed furiously. "Kleinmann! What's happened to your goddamned hypno-training?"
   A hairy head thrust out of a tent. "You stoodied for dis sbeech last night, Fourmyle?"
   "Damn right. For two hours I stoodied. Never took my head out of the hypno-oven. Kleinmann on Prestidigitation.
   "No, no, no!" the hairy man bawled. "How many times must I tell you? Prestidigitation is not sbeechmaking. Is magic. Dumbkopf! You haff the wrong hypnosis taken!"
   The scarlet underwear began melting. Fourmyle toppled from the shoulders of his shaking valets and disappeared within his tent. There was a roar of laughter and cheering and the Four Mile Circus ripped into high gear. The kitchens sizzled and smoked. There was a perpetuity of eating and drinking. The music never stopped. The vaudeville never ceased.

   ...But Fourmyle was in the library bludgeoning his librarian over the head with Bloch's Das Sexuel Leben (eight pounds, nine ounces) because that unhappy man could produce no text on the manufacture of perpetual motion machines. He rushed to his physics laboratory where he destroyed an expensive chronometer to experiment with cog wheels, jaunted to the bandstand where he seized the baton and led the orchestra into confusion, put on skates and fell into the scented swimming pool, was hauled out, swearing fulminously at the lack of ice, and was heard to express a desire for solitude.
   "I wish to commute with myself," Fourmyle said, kicking his valets in all directions. He was snoring before the last of them limped to the door and closed it behind him.

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