The Stars My Destination (S.F. MASTERWORKS): Alfred Bester

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Alfred Bester has created in Gulliver Foyle one of Science Fiction’s great characters. The protagonist of Bester’s 1956 novel The Stars My Destination is a brutish, driven by internal energies force of nature and provides the most memorable element of this archetypal SF story. Concept/story line - Kind of brilliant. There was a really good idea in here. Sometimes it was hard to see. This concept is something I think Asimov would have been better equipped to convey. The story is pretty heady and eventually ends up in a really fascinating place. A really good tale about good and evil and what makes a person good or evil. You're all freaks, sir. But you always have been freaks. Life is a freak. That's its hope and glory.' Special classes are held for those who have lost their ability due to trauma but still have the potential. Meaningful Name: 'Gully' is short for Gulliver...and both characters follow similar development arcs right down to becoming reclusive misanthropes at the end of their respective stories.

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 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.There was some relevant history, though. Bester had been writing science fiction since the 1930’s. His first story published was “The Broken Axiom”, published in Thrilling Wonder Stories in April 1939. Previous to these, since the 1940’s Bester had worked on writing stories for comics, including Superman, The Phantom and The Green Lantern. It was Bester who wrote “The Lantern Oath.”

Most of all the cyberpunk elements are still contemporary. At times it is almost pulpy, it is grubby, it doesn’t hold punches – there’s a hint at a rape scene, for example! – which in the 1950’s should have put it in the darkest shadows of pulp fiction. And yet it is so gloriously baroque that it holds your attention. These days I can see it as an HBO series. Bester's initial work on the book began in England, and he took the names for his characters from a UK telephone directory. As a result, many of the characters are named after British or Irish towns or other features: [3] Gulliver Foyle (and his pseudonym, Fourmyle of Ceres), Robin Wednesbury, the Presteign clan, Regis Sheffield, Y'ang- Yeovil, Saul Dagenham, Sam Quatt, Rodger Kempsey, the Bo'ness and Uig ship underwriters. [12] Characters [ edit ] I must admit that, while I thoroughly enjoyed this book from the start, I was minded to give it a three star rating until I came to the climax and Bester managed to turn a scarred, brutal criminal into an altruistic saviour for a mankind as lost and directionless as he had been. One key had turned and made Gully Foyle into a remorseless machine for vengeance, another equally harsh set of trials then took this driven creature and made him into someone able to see the root of humanity’s need and try his best to give them the key to their own awakening. It gets my heart pumping precisely eight times more than when I learned that Rama was in development. urn:oclc:67871283 Scandate 20090825191825 Scanner scribe2.sheridan.archive.org Scanningcenter sheridan Worldcat (source edition)

Foyle's search takes place in a future world dense with marvels and horrors: wide use of individually initiated teleportation (“jaunting”), heartless mega-corporations, occasional telepathy, vast underground prisons, a cargo cult with cool tattoos, a cathedral housing a circus, a mysterious substance ("PyrE") which may either consume or transform our world, and the fragmentation of time. He was Gulliver Foyle, Mechanic's Mate 3rd Class, thirty years old, big boned and rough.. . and one hundred and seventy days adrift in space. He was Gully Foyle, the oiler, wiper, bunkerman; too easy for trouble, too slow for fun, too empty for friendship, too lazy for love. The impression of mega-industries with their family names recognisable today – Esso, Greyhound, Cola, IBM – make this feel like the Southern families of Gone With the Wind combined with the Kardashians today. What was described in the 1950’s feels even more appropriate today. We have big business calling the shots, manipulating and dealing, doing all it can to make a profit.* With a change of the names to such as, let’s say, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Richard Branson, it doesn’t feel that dissimilar to the media frenzy of today. It is remarkably astute for a book nearly 70 years old. Neil Gaiman has said in the past that it was “the perfect cyberpunk novel”, and I can see why as many of the elements we will recognise in cyberpunk in the 1980’s are here.

The novel was both widely criticized and praised when it first appeared, but now is appreciated as a classic work in its own right, and as a prescient forerunner of the cyberpunk literary genre. From Nobody to Nightmare: Gully goes from the most insignificant cog in the machine to one of the few who truly lives outside its control. Psychic Teleportation: Pretty much everybody. Those who cannot jaunte usually become part of the dregs of society.

Originally posted by Marlowe:This is off topic, but I can't help myself. I usually don'y pay much attention to game achievement/trophies, but this thread caught my eye. I have to give the devs a tip of the hat for naming this achievement after the classic '50s SF novel by Alfred Bester, which I bet many younger players are unaware of. (Walter Koenig's villainous Psi cop in Babylon 5 was intentionally named after this author.) 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. As mentioned above, one production company had apparently secured the rights to the novel as early as the 1960s. A number of adaptations of the book have been scripted. So far, none have yet made it to the screen. [25] While the novel has long been considered an "unfilmable" work, [26] the screen rights were acquired by Universal Pictures in 2006 [27] and by Paramount Pictures in 2015. [28] Super-Speed: Foyle eventually has his body upgraded with various functions, including being able to think and move five times faster than normal humans. Notably, it doesn't give him Super-Toughness, so he has to avoid accidentally bumping into anything while super speed is engaged— especially other people who also possess this ability. (His one brief skirmish with some Martian commandos resembles a sped-up game of touch football, in which an actual collision would be messily fatal to both parties.) By today’s reading expectations, there are a few problems with the book. Bester wrote it in the 1950s, so a number of corporate players are no longer recognizable to younger readers. And the dialogue and slang is a bit dated.

I just learned there *might* be a movie in development. Oh, my lord, I can't believe how excited I am about this. Clareson, Thomas (1992). "Science Fiction: The 1950s". Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. p.74. ISBN 0-87249-870-0. The novel included some early descriptions of proto-science and fictional technology, among them Bester's portrayal of psionics, [13] including the phenomenon of "jaunting", named after the scientist (Charles Fort Jaunte) who discovered it. Jaunting is the instantaneous teleportation of one's body (and anything one is wearing or carrying). One is able to move up to a thousand miles by just thinking. American Science Fiction: Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (LOA #228): Double Star / The Stars My Destination / A Case of Conscience / Who? / The Big Time . America Classic Science Fiction Collection)Which is most easily done by playing on the easiest difficulty as higher diffs up the required ressource for each star (e.g. going from 3 researched techs to 4). World Building - Excellent. I liked the description of the different races/planets. I liked how society was described (i.e. the different 'houses' dressing according to the year their ancestors changed history). I loved everything that happened in Gouffre Martel. I would have liked the outlawing of religions to be discussed a little more. There were hints in conversations about things that I would have preferred to have read about over Gully's story like WWIII. And, of course, jaunting was a great idea. Brilliant actually. What happens at the end with Gully and the jaunting through space/time was amazing. I didn't see that coming at all it and opened the book up quite a bit.