Alexander Besher’s Bio-Testament
“(Besher is) obviously a person with outstanding qualities of head and heart."—Dr. RK Pachauri, co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, 2008
"(Besher writes with) outrageous bravura (and) imaginative leaps, in a style that nods to Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Sheckley—science fiction’s masters of surrealist slapstick."—The Washington Post
Alexander Besher is possibly the most unknown visionary writer writing today as evidenced by his critical mass of international literary reviews as well as the extensive coverage of his work in new science, computer technology and mobile phone content technology press, along with a startling list of pioneering "firsts" that he's managed to pull off in his ten lifetimes crammed into one as a pioneering Pacific Rim journalist, non-fiction author, Philip K. Dick Award Nominated novelist of futuristic and techno-psycho-spiritual works.
That's just the tip of the iceberg as he continues to fearlessly innovate, innovate, innovate and peel away at the onion skin of meta-futures that are forever percolating in today's pulsating present Moment.
The noted historian Kevin Starr, former state librarian now emeritus of California, acknowledged Besher’s role to shaping the future in a volume of his multi-volume history of California entitled Coast of Dreams, California on the Edge, 1990-2003 (Knopf, 2006). Please see page 30 of his tome.
Born in China, and raised in Japan by White Russian parents, Besher was editor of the Chicago Review, the distinguished literary & arts quarterly published at the University of Chicago, the magazine that was first to publish William Burroughs’ controversial novel Naked Lunch among many other masterful works by authors who have since become world famous. While at the U of C, he co-launched a small press (still around more than thirty years later) named the Chicago Review Press, publishing not only groundbreaking literary works and translations of Japanese literature that UNESCO has adopted in its Literature and Translation series, but he also discovered, edited, published, and packaged a gripping true crime memoir, The Home Invaders: Confessions of a Cat Burglar by Frank Hohimer that eventually became director Michael Mann’s debut film in its retitled version, Thief (1981) starring James Caan and Tuesday Weld. He also discovered and published The Violet Apple and The Witch, the last two missing and as yet unpublished manuscripts by world renowned Scottish fantasy writer David Lindsay, author of the classic novel A Voyage to Arcturus.
From 1983 to 1986, he wrote the first ever internationally syndicated column "Pacific Rim" that covered the rising Asia-Pacific region for The San Francisco Chronicle (Chronicle Features), was author of The Pacific Rim Almanac (HarperCollins Reference, '91)), served as a contributing editor to InfoWorld, Macworld, and PC Magazine, and as a consulting futurist to the Global Business Network, a noted corporate future scenarios think-tank headed by Peter Schwartz and Stewart Brand.
He is the Philip K. Dick Award nominated author of the futuristic thriller, Rim (HarperCollins), which was followed by Mir and Chi (Simon & Schuster), two loosely linked sequels in his widely acclaimed Rim Trilogy. Rim was optioned and reoptioned in 1995 and 1996 by Sony TriStar for Robin Williams’ Blue Wolf Productions but never got made because it was ahead of its time. Its CG effects alone were estimated to cost $100 million back in those days. There is renewed interest today in reprinting the Rim Trilogy as well as in its film and online RPG and videogame possibilities because today’s technological advances make these properties affordable to produce.
The Manga Man (Engagelogic, 2008, first edition; 2011, second edition; 2013, third edition)was the first multimedia novel to appear on a sentient T-shirt platform that contains the entire mobile phone-formatted novel, an Independent short film, an original music soundtrack, and hours of video, accessible to anyone who snaps a picture of the QR Code imprinted on the tee with their smartphone camera. He was invited to speak about the “future of mobile phone content” at the Microsoft-sponsored MobileCamp NYC3 conference in 2008 which proved to be one of the most popular panels at the event despite the fact that Besher’s personal mobile phone was a 15-year old Nokia. That’s okay for futurists to have a few dinosaur habits. Recall that William Gibson famously wrote his great Cyberspace novel, Neuromancer, on his Royal Underwood typewriter. He also paid Besher’s first novel Rim (which he read in early ms. form) an homage in his later novel Idoru when he used Besher’s literary conceit of a Mega-’Quake altering the reality of Neo-Tokyo in the future.
The distinguished Italian graphic novel artist Daniele Serra is working on a graphic novel adaptation of The Manga Man. Serra’s work was nominated for the British Fantasy Award in 2012. Look for his opening pages in the Menu.
This edition of Manga Man 3.0 includes various new features not included in the original edition.
Fashionistas, check out this pic of the cool Manga Man t-shirt (available on eBay) that was featured in the style section of Italy’s leading fashion magazine for women, La Reppublica delle Donne, in their February 2010 issue!
In 2010, Besher began writing a brand-new trilogy of supernatural suspense horror exorcism novels in a genre that he has dubbed “Kabbalah noir.” The first title The Clinging was written as both an original screenplay and as a short novel. It has merited the first rave review ever given in more than four decades by William Blatty, author of the classic horror novel and film, The Exorcist, who has a strict policy of never blurbing other novelists.
“I will break my decades old habit of never reading fiction to grab one of the first copies (of Besher’s new novel) . . . I shook my head in admiration, if not awe, and said, 'Wow! I think he's got it!’” William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist, Legion and Dimiter
Since then, Besher has completed the prequel/sequel to The Clinging entitled The Night of the Golem, a 90,000 word-plus manuscript that is set in Nazi Berlin, and features one of the most original buddy stories ever conceived: a collaboration between a non-Nazi sympathizing German homicide detective and an Eastern European “wonder rebbe” exorcist who investigate a series of supernatural serial murders of top Nazi party members by a Jewish werewolf that is possessed by the evil spirit of an SA brownshirt party leader who was purged during Hitler’s rise to power putsch on the infamous “Night of the Long Knives” in June 1934.
Most recently, Besher founded cloudzero, a San Francisco-based transmedia company that made its stunning debut at the Sundance Film Festival 2010 with a two-day international and Indie film festival based on the futuristic concept of a “film festival in a pocket,” utilizing Microvision Inc.’s ultra-small SHOWWX™ laser pico projector that is a tiny peripheral that can be attached to any digital device such as an iPod and is able to project self-focusing films onto any surface anywhere ranging in size from a hard-boiled egg to 100-inches in size in HD quality. Soon to come embedded in mobile phones, you can say goodbye to expensive home theaters in the near future. Read wired.com’s coverage of this seminal event.
cloudzero’s radically innovative plans for the future must remain confidential for the moment since we are in the early stages of raising seed/angel and venture capital for our start-up at this time. Serious inquiries from qualified and pre-screened investors are welcome to be
received at alexbesher.cloudzero@gmail.com
“(Besher is) obviously a person with outstanding qualities of head and heart."—Dr. RK Pachauri, co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, 2008
"(Besher writes with) outrageous bravura (and) imaginative leaps, in a style that nods to Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Sheckley—science fiction’s masters of surrealist slapstick."—The Washington Post
Alexander Besher is possibly the most unknown visionary writer writing today as evidenced by his critical mass of international literary reviews as well as the extensive coverage of his work in new science, computer technology and mobile phone content technology press, along with a startling list of pioneering "firsts" that he's managed to pull off in his ten lifetimes crammed into one as a pioneering Pacific Rim journalist, non-fiction author, Philip K. Dick Award Nominated novelist of futuristic and techno-psycho-spiritual works.
That's just the tip of the iceberg as he continues to fearlessly innovate, innovate, innovate and peel away at the onion skin of meta-futures that are forever percolating in today's pulsating present Moment.
The noted historian Kevin Starr, former state librarian now emeritus of California, acknowledged Besher’s role to shaping the future in a volume of his multi-volume history of California entitled Coast of Dreams, California on the Edge, 1990-2003 (Knopf, 2006). Please see page 30 of his tome.
Born in China, and raised in Japan by White Russian parents, Besher was editor of the Chicago Review, the distinguished literary & arts quarterly published at the University of Chicago, the magazine that was first to publish William Burroughs’ controversial novel Naked Lunch among many other masterful works by authors who have since become world famous. While at the U of C, he co-launched a small press (still around more than thirty years later) named the Chicago Review Press, publishing not only groundbreaking literary works and translations of Japanese literature that UNESCO has adopted in its Literature and Translation series, but he also discovered, edited, published, and packaged a gripping true crime memoir, The Home Invaders: Confessions of a Cat Burglar by Frank Hohimer that eventually became director Michael Mann’s debut film in its retitled version, Thief (1981) starring James Caan and Tuesday Weld. He also discovered and published The Violet Apple and The Witch, the last two missing and as yet unpublished manuscripts by world renowned Scottish fantasy writer David Lindsay, author of the classic novel A Voyage to Arcturus.
From 1983 to 1986, he wrote the first ever internationally syndicated column "Pacific Rim" that covered the rising Asia-Pacific region for The San Francisco Chronicle (Chronicle Features), was author of The Pacific Rim Almanac (HarperCollins Reference, '91)), served as a contributing editor to InfoWorld, Macworld, and PC Magazine, and as a consulting futurist to the Global Business Network, a noted corporate future scenarios think-tank headed by Peter Schwartz and Stewart Brand.
He is the Philip K. Dick Award nominated author of the futuristic thriller, Rim (HarperCollins), which was followed by Mir and Chi (Simon & Schuster), two loosely linked sequels in his widely acclaimed Rim Trilogy. Rim was optioned and reoptioned in 1995 and 1996 by Sony TriStar for Robin Williams’ Blue Wolf Productions but never got made because it was ahead of its time. Its CG effects alone were estimated to cost $100 million back in those days. There is renewed interest today in reprinting the Rim Trilogy as well as in its film and online RPG and videogame possibilities because today’s technological advances make these properties affordable to produce.
The Manga Man (Engagelogic, 2008, first edition; 2011, second edition; 2013, third edition)was the first multimedia novel to appear on a sentient T-shirt platform that contains the entire mobile phone-formatted novel, an Independent short film, an original music soundtrack, and hours of video, accessible to anyone who snaps a picture of the QR Code imprinted on the tee with their smartphone camera. He was invited to speak about the “future of mobile phone content” at the Microsoft-sponsored MobileCamp NYC3 conference in 2008 which proved to be one of the most popular panels at the event despite the fact that Besher’s personal mobile phone was a 15-year old Nokia. That’s okay for futurists to have a few dinosaur habits. Recall that William Gibson famously wrote his great Cyberspace novel, Neuromancer, on his Royal Underwood typewriter. He also paid Besher’s first novel Rim (which he read in early ms. form) an homage in his later novel Idoru when he used Besher’s literary conceit of a Mega-’Quake altering the reality of Neo-Tokyo in the future.
The distinguished Italian graphic novel artist Daniele Serra is working on a graphic novel adaptation of The Manga Man. Serra’s work was nominated for the British Fantasy Award in 2012. Look for his opening pages in the Menu.
This edition of Manga Man 3.0 includes various new features not included in the original edition.
Fashionistas, check out this pic of the cool Manga Man t-shirt (available on eBay) that was featured in the style section of Italy’s leading fashion magazine for women, La Reppublica delle Donne, in their February 2010 issue!
In 2010, Besher began writing a brand-new trilogy of supernatural suspense horror exorcism novels in a genre that he has dubbed “Kabbalah noir.” The first title The Clinging was written as both an original screenplay and as a short novel. It has merited the first rave review ever given in more than four decades by William Blatty, author of the classic horror novel and film, The Exorcist, who has a strict policy of never blurbing other novelists.
“I will break my decades old habit of never reading fiction to grab one of the first copies (of Besher’s new novel) . . . I shook my head in admiration, if not awe, and said, 'Wow! I think he's got it!’” William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist, Legion and Dimiter
Since then, Besher has completed the prequel/sequel to The Clinging entitled The Night of the Golem, a 90,000 word-plus manuscript that is set in Nazi Berlin, and features one of the most original buddy stories ever conceived: a collaboration between a non-Nazi sympathizing German homicide detective and an Eastern European “wonder rebbe” exorcist who investigate a series of supernatural serial murders of top Nazi party members by a Jewish werewolf that is possessed by the evil spirit of an SA brownshirt party leader who was purged during Hitler’s rise to power putsch on the infamous “Night of the Long Knives” in June 1934.
Most recently, Besher founded cloudzero, a San Francisco-based transmedia company that made its stunning debut at the Sundance Film Festival 2010 with a two-day international and Indie film festival based on the futuristic concept of a “film festival in a pocket,” utilizing Microvision Inc.’s ultra-small SHOWWX™ laser pico projector that is a tiny peripheral that can be attached to any digital device such as an iPod and is able to project self-focusing films onto any surface anywhere ranging in size from a hard-boiled egg to 100-inches in size in HD quality. Soon to come embedded in mobile phones, you can say goodbye to expensive home theaters in the near future. Read wired.com’s coverage of this seminal event.
cloudzero’s radically innovative plans for the future must remain confidential for the moment since we are in the early stages of raising seed/angel and venture capital for our start-up at this time. Serious inquiries from qualified and pre-screened investors are welcome to be
received at alexbesher.cloudzero@gmail.com