Alexander Besher

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Alexander Besher (born January 26, 1951 in China ) is an American science fiction writer and journalist.

Life

Besher is the son of Belarusian parents. Born in China, he grew up in Japan. He attended the Canadian Academy High School in Kobe , graduated from Sophia University in Tokyo and then worked as a journalist, was editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Chicago Review , and wrote the column Pacific Rim for the San Francisco Chronicle for six years , in which he economic and cultural developments in the Eastern Pacific countries. The collected articles in the column appeared in book form in 1991.

In 1994 Besher published his first novel Rim: A Novel of Virtual Reality , a cyberpunk novel in which he dealt with the descent into the underworld of virtual reality . The novel is set in a Japan of the near future. In search of his son, the protagonist , a Californian Consciousness Detective , as a kind of modern Orpheus, embarks on a journey through the hell of a virtual world that loses coherence after a catastrophic earthquake in Tokyo. On the odyssey through this otherworldly world, which is furnished with borrowings from the Tibetan Book of the Dead , the hero has to find not only his son but also himself. With two other novels, Mir (1998) and Chi (1999), Rim was expanded into a trilogy. Besher was a finalist at the Philip K. Dick Awards in 1995 with the first volume .

After the Rim trilogy, he started writing the Kabbalah Noir trilogy in 2002 , a group of three stories set in the world of Hasidic legends with their golems and dibbukim . The Clinging , the first of these stories, was originally written as a screenplay and then turned into a short novel.

Another work by Besher is The Manga Man , a transmedia project in collaboration with the Italian comic artist Daniele Serra. The project includes a T-shirt with a QR code as an introduction, a mobile phone novel , a graphic novel , plus video material with performances by Japanese butoh dancers, as the main character is a Japanese butoh dancer assassin of the future who has the task of to "stop the warlords who want to clone the universe". The transmedia novel is to be the first part of a planned trilogy with the title Dance of Darkness .

Besher lives in San Francisco , California.

Works

Rim trilogy
  • Rim: A Novel of Virtual Reality (1994)
  • Mir: A Novel of Virtual Reality (1998)
    • German: Virtual Tattoo . Translated by Michael Nagula. Goldmann, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-442-25011-0 .
    • E-Book: VIRTUAL TATTOO: Second novel in the RIM trilogy. BookRix, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-7438-2775-2 .
  • Chi (1999)
Kabbalah Noir Trilogy
  • The clinging
  • The Night of the Golem
  • The Unchosen
Novels
  • Hanging Butoh (2000)
Transmedia
  • The Manga Man (2008 ff.)
Non-fiction
  • with John Wilcock: The Pacific Rim Almanac. HarperPerennial, New York, NY 1991, ISBN 0-06-271524-0 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ LCCN entry
  2. ↑ Besher: Satori City 2.0 . Goldmann, Munich 1996, blurb.
  3. ↑ Besher: SATORI CITY 2.0. BookRix, Munich 2016, introduction.
  4. ↑ a b c Michael Matzer: Interview with Alexander Besher
  5. ↑ The Manga Man 2.0 - Winksite Releases 2011 Upgrade of Sci-Fi Author's QR Code-Accessed Transmedia Novel on Sentient T-shirt Cross-Digital Platform , press release February 3, 2011, accessed November 14, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Besher, Alexander
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American science fiction writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH January 26, 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH China