The Stars My Destination

Alfred Bester

Completed 3/10/2018, reviewed 3/10/2018

4 stars

The only previous Bester I had read was The Demolished Man, his Hugo winning novel.  I liked it but wasn’t thrilled.  I much more enjoyed The Stars My Destination.  I felt the prose was much better and the story overall was much more interesting.  It’s strange because this book has been called a proto-cyberpunk version of The Count of Monte Cristo, and I usually don’t care for cyberpunk.  Somehow, this book grabbed me in the prologue and kept me glued to it to the end.

The plot is pretty complex.  The time is the future, where teleportation, or jaunting, is the main means of travel.  People can jaunte up to 1000 miles at a time.  Space and time jaunting has not yet been discovered.  This has disrupted the economy so badly that war has erupted between the Inner Planets and the Outer Satellites.  It’s in this time of the turbulence that Gulliver Foyle, low ranking gutter trash on the spaceship Nomad, is marooned in space after what was probably an attack by the Outer Satellites.  An Inner Planets ship, the Vorga, comes close enough to rescue him, but doesn’t.  From then on, Gully Foyle develops a mad obsession to destroy the Vorga.

In addition to this story line, it turns out that the Nomad was carrying a secret cargo that has the potential for ending the war.  There is also some secret about the Vorga that people are dying over.  Lastly, Gully himself may have a secret that could be even more important than ending the war.

Gully is an anti-hero, a protagonist that will rape, torture, and murder to see his plan of vengeance succeed.  He has such a one-track mind, that he cannot be tortured into revealing what happened to the Nomad.  Despite being so morally depraved, I really liked Gully.  I especially liked him when he was speaking in gutter slang.  I didn’t like what he did, but his character develops as the plot moves along, and he does get a sort-of redemption in the end.

While this book doesn’t pass the Bechdel test (I’m pretty sure none of the female characters ever speak to each other), the female characters are rather strong for a novel from the ‘50s.  They all have or had some type of career, for good or for bad, and all play a part in Gully’s redemption.

I find it interesting that Bester again plays with form like he did in The Demolished Man.  He uses different patterns of text and strings of characters to get across a situation where Gully’s senses become crossed.  It’s difficult to describe here.  It has to be read. 

The prose is tremendous.  As I mentioned earlier, it really shines in the beginning until the plot grips you and keeps you going to the end.  Different layers of the plot keep the story from devolving into a simple adventure story, and the climax is very satisfying.  I give this book four stars out of five.