BOOK REPORT: THE STARS MY DESTINATION BY ALFRED BESTER

“This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying…but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice…but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks…but nobody loved it.

     All the habitable worlds of the solar system were occupied. Three planets and eight satellites and eleven million million people swarmed in one of the most exciting ages ever known, yet minds still yearned for other times, as always.” (7-8)

SO BEGINS ALFRED BESTER'S REMARKABLE 1957 SAGA OF GULLY FOYLE and his search for revenge and redemption in a journey that takes him across the solar system and beyond. Bester creates a future twenty-fifth century that is as dystopian as any in the genre—corporations hold sway and worlds are ruled by business dynasties and powerful aristocracies. It is a hard scrabble, dog-eat-dog universe and, as Neil Gaiman states in his preface to the novel, the main character, Gully Foyle, is a “predator…he is everyman, a nonentity; then Bester lights the touch paper, and we stand back and watch him flare and burn and illuminate.” Gully is, “single-minded, amoral…utterly, blindly selfish…he is a murderer—perhaps a multiple murderer—a rapist, a monster. A tiger.” (The novel’s original title was Tiger, Tiger, taken from William Blake’s great poem.) He is a terrifying and wonderful literary creation.

From the original Galaxy magazine

Bester deftly weaves descriptions of the future world—its politics, economy, class structure and so on, with the personal quest for revenge of “mechanic third-class” Gully Foyle. Society, we learn through the narrator was transformed by “jaunting”— human-directed teleportation; something that people can train themselves to do with their minds. It was developed over the course of decades until most people could ‘will’ themselves from place to place across the earth, travelling a thousand miles in an instant. Bester describes how this new, organic technology created great disruptions in the economies of the various habitable worlds, leading to conflict between the inner and outer planets (much like the conflict we see today between the developed and developing world, and as the technology acts to disrupt and transform—for good or ill—25th Century society.)

Much of the novel reads as if it could have been written yesterday, not sixty years ago. Bester writes about the Pandora’s box of new technologies, about political intrigue, 'interplanetary' war, class divides, greed, avarice, human sexuality and personal violence as relentlessly as his main character pursues his revenge on those who left him to die in the cold reaches of space after his spaceship was destroyed by an attacking OP (Outer Planets) vessel.

There are many exciting moments in the novel. One of my favorite is when Gully and Jisbella, a fellow inmate, flee from the “jaunte” escape-proof prison, deep within the Spanish mountains at Gouffre Martel. They have to grope down pitch-black corridors to the lowest level of the prison, break through barriers to gain the mountain’s natural cavern system, swim a glacial-cold river, and then dive through an underwater tunnel before they emerge from their prison. It’s quite a ride, and much more exciting than the water ride at Canada's Wonderland!

At the novel's beginning, Bester’s description of Foyle is engrossing as he struggles to escape from the coffin-like life-pod he is forced to inhabit for months in the wreckage of his spaceship. The person who eventually emerges is someone who reminds Gaiman of one of “the great grotesques of other literary traditions, of dark figures from Poe or Gogol or Dickens.”

And Gully is as dark as his times, with its vast social inequalities and violence, its religious intolerance (organized religion is banned) and things like female purdah, torture, corruption and sexual deviance. His darkness is one of personal violence, murder, rape and a single-minded determination to kill the crew of the spaceship Vorga, letting nothing stand in his way.
But the novel is also an exploration of the need to find a common humanity beyond the hyper-individualism and anomie dominant in this brave new world. And as the story develops, Gully notes, with much chagrin, that he is developing a “conscience.” Eventually he learns, unlike Moby Dick's Ahab, that his quest for revenge has been a cracked cup, something that can never be filled and will always remain empty.   

Where Gully’s growing sense of empathy, compassion, and all those other outmoded virtues take him is another wild ride to the conclusion.

“It was an age of freaks, monsters, and grotesques. All the world was misshapen in marvelous and malevolent ways. The Classicists and Romantics who hated it were unaware of the potential greatness of the twenty-fifth century. They were blind to a cold fact of evolution…that progress stems from the clashing merger of antagonistic extremes, out of the marriage of pinnacle freaks. Classicists and Romantics alike were unaware that the Solar System was trembling on the verge of human explosion that would transform man and make him the master of the universe.

     It is against this seething background of the twenty-fifty century that the vengeful history of Gulliver Foyle begins.” (14)

And while I quibble with the anthropomorphism in this passage from the Introduction, and am not completely satisfied with the conclusion, reading about the life and times of Gully Foyle was a total blast!

Cheers 

 

© 1956 Alfred Bester. Millenium, Orion Books Ltd., 1999. London