Alfred Bester wrote two important science fiction novels in the 1950s – The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination. While I have some reservations about the first, I have to agree with a couple of generations of great writers that the second is one of the best scifi novels of the 20th century. The Stars My Destination is a propulsive story of Gully or Gulliver Foyle who starts out as a nonentity with no purpose or energy and undergoes several transformations into a state of transcendence. Along the way, there is never a dull moment, even interesting time-travel, and (something I wasn’t expecting) there are strong women characters who are central to the story.
Bester lands us in the 25th century when most forms of communication and transportation have been supplanted by teleportation, or jaunting, made possible entirely by mental training and focus. Megacorporations dominate a solar system with inhabited Inner Planets at war with the Outer Satellites. That conflict simmers in the background of the story as we meet Gully Foyle, a completely undistinguished mechanic, trapped on board a wrecked and drifting spaceship, the Nomad. Foyle’s world has been reduced to a closet-sized room where he has had to shape his first guiding purpose, survival. He has kept himself alive by ingenious means for six months when he sees an approaching spaceship that seems to be his salvation. But the ship, named Vorga, owned like the Nomad by the Presteign Corporation, passes him by. That fuels a deep and abiding anger that drives him to seek vengeance. And now he has a purpose so deeply buried in his nature that it provokes everything that follows in the novel.
He manages to ignite the engines of the remnant Nomad and hopes the ship will take him to a settled moon or asteroid, but he blacks out from the force of acceleration. He wakes to find himself an object of veneration among a strange group of humans on an asteroid. These people have evolved from a scientific expedition to a cult that calls itself the Scientific People. They alter Gully’s identity by tattooing his face with a hideous tiger mask. He makes his escape by blasting a ship out of the inhabited rock and when he is rescued he is so badly damaged that his body has to be partly regrown in a tank. But he is prepared to go after Vorga when he gets back to Earth. His attempt to bomb the ship at the Presteign spaceport fails, and he is captured. Presteign and the leaders of the key security agencies fail to get him to confess the whereabouts of Nomad, which, unknown to Gully, contains a valuable secret cargo. This is PyrE, a wildly explosive metal of huge destructive power that the Inner Planets are desperate to keep out of the hands of their rivals of the Outer Satellites. It’s the pursuit of PyrE that motivates Foyle’s enemies to keep him alive and to try to torture the secret out of him.
Gully’s silence lands him in Gouffre Martel, a hideous prison of deep caves. While there, he establishes communication with another inmate, Jisbella McQueen, who educates him and teaches him to think and strategize. After their escape, Jiz takes him to a surgeon who removes his tattoo, but he finds it resurfacing when he feels deep emotion. With security forces in hot pursuit, he and Jiz steal a ship and make for the Scientific People’s asteroid where the Nomad and the treasure it contains are embedded in rock. It is during his escape with the safe containing PyrE and security teams in hot pursuit that he’s forced to accelerate away, leaving Jiz behind.
He reemerges with a new identity as Geoffrey Fourmyle of Ceres. He’s become absurdly rich and travels everywhere with the Four Mile Circus which we meet upon its arrival in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Foyle has mastered his emotions through meditation, and his self-control keeps the tiger mask from reappearing on his face. He has also trained himself as a kind of super soldier, able to accelerate his thought and movements to outmaneuver any attacker. He persuades a woman named Robin Wednesbury, who is a one-way telepath (she transmits her own thoughts but cannot receive those of others), to help him put on a front of social refinement so that he can mingle with the upper classes. This enables him to continue his search among Presteign’s associates to learn the identity of the captain of the Vorga. He is still possessed by his need for vengeance upon the person who gave the order to abandon him on the Nomad. Robin helps him identify a number of people who know the identity of the Vorga’s captain, but as Foyle confronts each one they all die at the moment of revealing the name because they have been implanted with a death thought pattern.
At one of Presteign’s parties, he meets the man’s daughter, Olivia, who is blind, and Foyle finds himself falling in love with her. Though Presteign protects her as if she were too frail to face the hardships of life, she turns out to be as tough and ruthless as her father. She sees herself as a monster and a match for the monster Foyle, but when he learns of her role in the darkest side of Presteign’s operations, he wants to give himself up to the authorities and accept punishment for all the evil he has done in his pursuit of vengeance. But that effort only sets off another chain of events that leads to climactic scenes of destruction as PyrE is detonated by thought alone and ultimately to Gully Foyle’s final transformation as he learns to jaunte through space in ways that he never been possible before. Along the way, he keeps encountering visions of a burning man, a figure who has stepped out of his future as he learns to overcome the limits of spacetime.
Gully Foyle starts out on his quest for vengeance as all Id, a furious bundle of anger and basic drives. He rapes two women, kills anyone in his way and presents the terror of his life in the tiger mask etched into his face. Yet, after being tortured both mentally and physically and ruthlessly turning his violence on others, he gradually learns self-control. At first, that is only another means to support his vengeance but gradually he evolves something that constrains all his baser instincts, a conscience. As with most good stories, it’s the getting there that is more interesting than the destination. Bester unlocked his imagination to fill these pages with characters as varied, quirky and ominous as those in Bob Dylan’s songs. And the women characters are a world apart and much more interesting than those in Demolition Man. Two of them especially are vivid, force their own way through the world, and choose their own fates. The relationships are not so well realized, as Bester seems stuck on a trope connecting love and loathing in this story, but the novel keeps going at full speed as Gully’s relationships fall by the wayside in the arc of his strange life.
The Stars My Destination inspired many writers who saw in it a precursor of cyberpunk, partly because of its corporate controlled world and strong women characters. For me, Bester’s fiction is equally reminiscent of his contemporary, Philip K. Dick, who also imagined world’s dominated by corporations and forces capable of controlling people’s perceptions of the world. The process of demolition in Demolition Man especially resembles Dick’s penchant for the destruction of a person’s reality. Such fiction is one of the most compelling themes of an era so closely associated with red-scares and corporate conformity. But aside from his influence and affinities, Bester produced in The Stars My Destination a wild ride with Gully Foyle that remains compelling reading to this day.
NOTE: I’ve had to pull back my blogging frequency this year, partly for health reasons, and now I have to do more than that and take a real sabbatical. After six years and hundreds of SFF books, I need to focus more on my fiction and rethink what I want to achieve with SciFi Mind. So there will be only irregular postings over the next few months, until I reconstruct my approach to this work. I’m not stopping, just changing everything around in my mind. Call it recovery or re-creation or just time off – but I hope I’ll see you again here before too long.
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