While Bester is best known for, and has made his most important literary contributions through, his novels, he has also written numerous science fiction short stories that are extremely popular and considered classics of the genre. Starlight (1976) is a useful anthology of his short fiction because it brings together many of his best and best-known stories and because the contents of the collection span a considerable segment of his career, since it contains pieces published as early as 1941 ("Adam and No Eve") and as recently as 1974 ("The Four-Hour Fugue"). More importantly, a representative sampling from Starlight (which is actually a bringing together of two previously published collections — The Light Fantastic (1976) and Star Light, Star Bright (1976) — and includes the revealing autobiographical essay "My Affair with Science Fiction") shows that both the themes that control Bester's novels and the techniques that he uses to express them...