“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.
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
