The Stars My Destination

I intensely disliked main character, Gulliver Foyle, as an individual and really wasn't sure I wanted to keep reading, but about a third through I started thinking of him as a personification of the struggle of the lumpenproletariat to achieve class consciousness, and that seemed to work for me, though I wasn't sure if that was Bester's intention. Ultimately, it did work that way for me, and the story is, if imperfectly, a dramatised sci-fi setting of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the "cosmic" ending symbolising Foyle's awakening to his potential as a revolutionary liberationist figurehead. It was worth sticking with.

A couple of the names struck me as being symbolic, though I'm struggling to fully integrate them, so maybe show more I'm pareidolically seeing what's not there:

• Gulliver Foyle - Gullible Foil - Gullible Fool
• Presteign - Pristine - Prestige - Priest-Stain show less

4.5/5

On a shallow level, The Stars My Destination is an exciting caper as a compelling anti-hero tries to exact revenge upon the people who left him for dead. It feels fresh for it's age, at least most the time, there are some terms that date the novel quickly. It's incredibly well-paced, drops unexpected twists to the plot line, and has ideas that well realized and integrated into the weave of the world.

The biggest of these ideas is human teleportation, which in this fictional future is something that most everybody can, at least to varying degrees. What surprised me was the level to which Bester thought through the implications of such a change upon our societal structure. Bester identifies the ways in which economic class will show more hinder a persons use of teleportation, the ways in which our government will adapt to continue to shackle us to our work and to their ideals, how the elite will grow to revile this development, preferring to use antiquated methods of transportation while continue to benefit from it passively. Most of the ideas in The Stars My Destination are similarly well realized. I also especially enjoyed the concept of PyrE, an explosive so powerful that it can rip through entire galaxies and is triggered by a targeted thought, one-way telekinesis, a cast off-cult of scientists that use space refuse as a building medium, and what 'jaunting' eventually leads to in the end of the book.

Bester also explores more philosophical ideas, especially towards the end of the book, which is certainly more new wave than the rest, and an absolute joy. Bester asks what it takes to wake up the everyday person from their satisfaction with being mundane, what it takes turn them into a leader, or conversely, a nightmare? What sort of burdens are we willing to carry with us for the rest of our lives? How much will we contort ourselves to fit into the set of standards that society has for us? Like I said earlier, this novel is focused vengeance, on the dichotomy of love and hate, on the power of obsession. Gully Foyle is such a great character to explore these emotions, to play with bigger ideas while still providing a genuinely thrilling narrative.

“Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation.
Deep space is my dwelling place,
The stars my destination.” show less

More Action Than 5 Novels Combined

If by some oversight you have missed The Stars My Destination, then take this opportunity to read what some sci-fi writers and critics consider among the best, if not the best, sci-fi novel to date. You’ll find it jam-packed with action, wildly inventive, paced fast, insightful and prescient for its time, and too boot exceptionally well written. It’s a novel about a man driven to the ends of the solar system, and ultimately beyond, by his thirst for revenge, loosely patterned after Dumas’ The Count of Monte Christo.

Our world in the 25th century has greatly expanded to include colonization on the inner planets Mars and Venus and the Outer Satellites, certain moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. show more In this century, the Inner Planets are at war with the Outer Satellites and the O.S. appear to be winning. Giant hereditary cartels comprise the controlling powers of the I.P., the Morses, Peenemundes, Essos, Greyhounds, Colas, and others, but the most powerful and ruthless is Presteign. People jaunt, that is mentally teleport their physical bodies from one location to another memorized location by force of will (the maximum being a thousand miles). Giant ships traverse the solar system carrying passengers, goods, natural minerals exploited from the plants and moons, and human slave cargo.

Gulliver (Gully) Foyle is not among the rich. He’s a toiler, big, strong, naturally intelligent but unmotivated and completely raw in action and manners. After a prologue that sets the scene in the 25th century and hints at the great civilization altering skill this man will eventually unleash, we meet Gully trapped on a wrecked freighter, the Nomad. He struggles to stay alive for months, until another ship passes within signaling range, the Vorga, a Presteign vessel. Though it sees his distress flares, it passes him by. In that moment, he gathers up all his energy, recruits all his raw intelligence and aims it toward survival and most particularly finding and taking vengeance on the crew and captain of the Vorga.

After using his ingenuity to fix the Nomad enough to limp into the asteroid belt, the Scientific People pick him. They live on a rock enhanced with the hulls of scavenged ship parts and consider themselves, though primitive, ruled by science. They restore and accept him and, as their custom, tattoo his face (Maori style) and marry him to a girl named Moira. He finds a small ship among the those fastened into the asteroid, repairs it, and blasts off, ripping out a part of the little world, without regard to the destruction or death he may have caused.

Next, he ends up in a hospital in New York undergoing jaunt therapy with others, guided by Robin Wednesbury. She’s a telesender but cannot receive, so in this world she is second class. She also harbors a deadly secret. Gully, for his part, can jaunt very well and uses his ability and time to gather information on the Vorga. He finds the ship and attempts to destroy it, only to be captured by Presteign. Presteign is trying to find the Nomad because it carries 20 million credits and 20 pounds of PyrE, a psychokenetically ignited thermonuclear explosive, that could both end the war and civilization, while making more of a fortune for Presteign. Without telepaths available to extract the ship’s whereabouts from Gully, they send him to Gouffre Martel, an underground prison hospital in France. There he meets hot tempered, tough Jizbella (Jiz) McQueen. Together, they escape, but not before Gully learns of Nomad’s cargo. With Jiz’s help, he has the tattoo removed (though in times of extreme emotion it reappears). After, they find the Nomad and collect the 20 million credits and the safe holding the PyrE, but Gully jilts her.

Years pass with the war worsening. The bright spot in all this is the The Four Mile Circus, the wild, strange entourage of Geoffrey Fourmyle of Ceres. When he arrives in town, spirits brighten. Fourmyle is a new Gully, reconstituted, with the help of Robin Wednesbury (and the 20 million), as an intelligent wit. He also wears a special body suit under his clothing that when activated allows him to move five-times faster than others, useful in the various skirmishes he often finds himself.

Eventually, he finds the various crew members, all of whom perish, until he discovers who he has moved heaven and earth to discover. This turns out to be the lovely but cold, blind albino daughter of Presteign, Olivia, with whom he has fallen in love. This, along with additional startling information, breaks him. When the united parties of the Inner Planets plead with him to release the PyrE to him, he decides that rather than one group own it, all humankind should and then decide for themselves their own fate. After this, Gully learns of his most profound skill, another startling revelation and after much self pity and personal torture, finds his way back to the Scientific People, who receive him well. He wraps into himself and we are left with the hope he will reemerge a transformed man.

Though this description might strike you as long, it merely outlines some of the twists and turns Bester devised, enough for several whole novels. And all of this, if you can believe it, in under 250 pages. Really, this is not to be missed. show less

There's some great stories in here somewhere, floundering and half-formed. You can catch flashes of them hidden in the examination of a teleporting society, or in the character of the relentless Gully Foyle. But they're only glimpses, not fully realized.

Still, those teases of a better book do add up to an overall compelling story. This was likely a better book when it was written, as a lot of the power behind its ideas has been lost in the geopolitical and sociological shifts since The Stars My Destination was published.

There is often something dissonant about older science fiction. None of the old authors were able to properly forecast the dominance of computers in everyday life and that miss feels more egregious the older I get. But show more more than that I think it's the wishful thinking they projected on their vision of society. So many of the texts harbor a gleeful fantasy about the death or criminalization of organized religion in the glorious future. It's one of the many ways they seek to simplify the world, instead of expanding on it's marvelous complexity. show less

The Stars My Destination is one of the most interesting books I have read in years: partly because it just is, and partly because I don't read a great deal of sci-fi, much less the cyberpunk sub-genre of sci-fi. I didn't understand before I started that it was recognized as a proto-cyberpunk novel, because I simply added it to my readlist after seeing this edition's back cover blurb and thinking it sounded intriguing. (Also, for some reason, I am interested in old sci-fi novels from the first half of the 20th century. Ones written before the "Big Three" of Heinlein/Clarke/Asimov.)

Further comments later.

ORIGINAL COMMENT
I think I'll review this book before I finish it.

The Stars My Destination, whose original title apparently was Tiger! show more Tiger!, is my first experience ever of reading a recognized classic in the cyber-punk sub-genre of sci-fi. I simply saw the novel's back cover blurb on Goodreads earlier this year, and thought it sounded very interesting; but I don't believe I understood it was cyber-punk.

Actually, based on what I'm reading, I now see that I unwittingly got a taste of the stuff once. Where? The 1990s Doctor Who novels, the "New Adventures" published by Virgin. I now recognize that many of the "New Adventures" obviously were heavily influenced by cyber-punk, especially the "Psi Powers" arc and the ones written by Andrew Cartmel.

As for book I'm actually reading now: it very quickly made me find cyber-punk revolting. Well, what was I supposed to think when the author makes his protagonist's superiors write in his file that he's essentially an uninteresting loser; makes the protagonist rage against a passing ship that mysteriously fails to rescue him; and rapes a woman almost as soon as he meets her? But...a few minutes later, it also made me appreciate a certain quality of the sub-genre that I sensed in my limited knowledge and experience of punk styles. What quality? The greater honesty and discernment than the naive humanism I saw in Star Dreck. As (again) with Doctor Who, there's no nonsense here to the effect that human nature will suddenly become beautiful in the future. There's a reason that readers consider The Stars My Destination cyber-punk: nasty but real. show less

An excellent analysis of the Trump candidacy and events leading up to his election as #45. Uses both his perspective and that of the anonymous supporter to chilling effect. Guest appearance by Ivanka near the end.

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Forgive me my little joke; when I picked up the classic by Bester, I had no idea what I was in for, except a classic sci-fi--in space, with a rather appealing title.

The main character is Gully Foyle, a spacer with no real motivation in life. Content to be lazy, without purpose beyond existence, he's a bit of a drifter, until a spaceship he is traveling on is destroyed. Gully discovers a will to live and manages to keep himself barely alive, leaving the tiny reinforced space he exists in to show more scavenge supplies five minutes at a time in his barely functional spacesuit. At last, he sees a ship passing close by. He sends up a signal flare. The ship slows, almost stops, and then turns away. From here, the story takes off, as Gully discovers the heat of revenge as the one thing that can give him purpose.

One might think that discovering a passion could connect Gully, a previously amorphous blob of a human who was content to vegetate his way through life, to humanity, and possibly even the reader. But no, most certainly, absolutely no; Gully is a psychopath. In his quest for revenge, he meets a woman, Robin, who teaches the previously head-blind the skill of jaunting or limited teleportation. She has the unfortunate distinction of being a one-way telepath, so those around her can hear her thoughts when she isn't concentrating. Gully, it becomes clear, has a moment where he can understand what she is feeling/thinking, but doesn't actually empathize, instead choosing to ignore her humanity in his fit of rage and frustration.

Throughout the rather short book, Gully goes through transformations, each a step on his goal, each transformation followed by a fall back into the depths. He is caught, he spends time in prison, he meets another woman and--dare we recognize it?--falls into his version of love. But as is everything with Gully, his love is the negative side of the emotion, and though it can offer salvation, it is obvious what his choice will be.

It is an inverse of the levels of hell; each reinvention has Gully reinventing himself to become more surfacely human, moving up the ladder of society into something that appears more socially acceptable but that remains rotten at the core. Depending on the reader's point of view, he may become more accessible, but really he is the same single-minded psychopath, single-minded in pursuit of his goal and unable to recognize or empathize with others. At one point he thinks he 'falls in love' but as with everything, he's fallen in love with an idea, an instant of emotion and not anything real.

It's a brilliant book. Bester does an unbelievable job at getting at Gully's emotion; I found myself taking a break at each transformation, needing to get a way from the miasma of hate for some untainted air. While Gully transforms, we're offered commentary on each section of 'society' he encounters, from the parody of scientists on an asteroid to the 'high' society of the richest men in the universe and their cloistered women. It's one of those amazing little stories that you understand as you read is offering up a scathing social indictment and yet wraps you up in its fast-paced plotting. I can't remember the last book I read with a main character so filled with hate and rage, that ignores every opportunity for redemptive actions.

The ending was a little slap-dash and has me wondering if dropping acid at least once during a book was a basic requirement of some of the sci-fi boundary pushers (thinking of Zelazny and Philip K. Dick here). Well, no matter, but I think it would have been more powerful had Bester relied on words instead of word-pictures. The circular nature of the ending is asthetically pleasing, although someone pushing the rules of the book. No matter, it was powerful nonetheless.

We can all only hope that Trump will experience something similar. show less

f I had just picked this off a shelf and read it, I would never have guessed that this book was first published in 1956. I usually associate 50s and 60s science fiction with Lester Del Rey, Doc Smith, Isaac Asimov, and tales of other worlds and heroic adventures. This is a noir science fiction novel way before its time.

Gully Foyle is a dark figure, at best. Abandoned on the Nomad, a wrecked spaceship drifting in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, Foyle's personal quest is to find and punish the responsible party aboard a ship that passed by him, received his desperate signal, and left him to die. That story of revenge gives Bester the chance to take us through a narrative of interplanetary politics, selfish pursuits, and dark show more endings.

Foyle is no hero. He's narrow in his perspective, and he's uninihibited by conventional morality. His character is what makes the book unusual for its time. Bester surrounds Foyle with other interesting, and complicated characters as well, to make the story unpredictable and provocative.

He also introduces two story props -- "jaunting" and "PyrE" -- that are transformative. Jaunting allows anyone of normal cognitive abilities to transport themselves instantly across locations. Bester doesn't develop the consequences as fullly as he might -- this is not a technocentric story -- but he does begin to spin out how the world could change as the result of such an ability. Physical boundaries mean nothing. Distance is irrelevant.

PyrE provides the root of a counter-story to Foyle's pursuit of revenge. Some amount of the substance, a kind of cosmological explosive, was hidden aboard the Nomad when it and Bester were lost. Powerful parties are trying to locate and retrieve the PyrE just as Foyle tries to find and exact revenge against whoever left him, and the PyrE, drifting in space.

Much of science fiction from the 1950s is good reading just for its nostalgia or historical value -- this one stands on its own as just a good story. If you like the dark turn given to science fiction by William Gibson, you'll like this. Gibson wasn't the first noirish science fiction writer. And I don't think Bester is the only ancestor of that turn -- Philip Dick certainly belongs in that club -- but this book is one of the best. I think it stands up to anything Gibson or other more recent writers have turned out.

I also have to mention something I found surprising in the story. PyrE's explosive power is unleashed by mind, in particular by "Will and Idea" -- it's hard not to connect PyrE's nature as both explosive and creative force with Schopenhauer's metaphysics of "will and representation". "Representation" and "Idea" are very distinct concepts for Schopenhauer, but nevertheless it seems odd to suppose that Bester used such an unusual phrase completely out of the blue. I have no idea if the connection is coincidence, or if Bester meant to echo Schopenhauer's metaphysics in his conception of PyrE. "World and Idea" are no more than hints in the story at the nature of PyrE. show less