The Stars My Destination

By: Alfred Bester

Narrated by: Gerard Doyle

Marooned in outer space after an attack on his ship, Nomad, Gulliver Foyle lives to obsessively pursue the crew of a rescue vessel that had intended to leave him to die.

When it comes to pop culture, Alfred Bester (1913-1987) is something of an unsung hero. He wrote radio scripts, screenplays, and comic books (in which capacity he created the original Green Lantern Oath). But Bester is best known for his science fiction novels, and The Stars My Destination may be his finest creation. With its sly potshotting at corporate skullduggery, The Stars My Destination seems utterly contemporary, and has maintained its status as an underground classic for over 50 years.

©1956 Alfred Bester; copyright renewed 1984 by Alfred Bester; special restored text of this edition copyright 1996 by the Estate of Alfred Bester; Introduction copyright 1996 by Neil Gaiman (P)2017 Tantor

Gully Foyle is his name!

This 1956 classic is a true gem,and is easy to see the influence it has had on Sci fi books and movies ever since. This is the story of Gully Foyle who just jaunted to the top of my list of most memorable characters, Gully is a big brute with a bigger heart and a tribal style tiger mask tattoo'd over his face, making him quite an oddity in an world that hasn't seen a tattoo in centuries. Now Gully is turning this world on it's ear looking for revenge.but ends up finding much more.

How this has yet to be made into a movie is baffling,especially when considering all the crap that does get made

Still Best

Read this twice over the he years , and loved listening to it third time round. One of the best science fiction stories ever!

My first SF read still holds up...

First off, let’s be clear about one thing: the title of this book is “Tiger! Tiger!”, OK? OK. Regardless of its various publishing incarnations, that’s the title I first read it under, and for me it’s the TRUE title of the book.. Anyway, in terms of its importance to SF overall, this book should rate an A+. Also in terms of its importance to ME… A+. This was after all the first adult SF novel I ever read, and the reason I became an SF fan and wannabe SF writer. This is the wellspring! And it does hold up pretty well after 7 decades, much better than many another SF “classic,” so I can’t complain. But I CAN quibble! Bester did an amazing job of avoiding technological obsolescence by keeping the tech stuff vague. He also did a fairly good job of avoiding sociological obsolescence by having a good reason why gender inequality should still exist in the 25th century, but reading this book in the “me too” era makes it impossible to overlook Gully Foyle’s rape of Robin Wednesbury. That said, this book still stands as a classic in a lot of ways. It is one of the best novels to explore the concept of obsessive revenge, in any genre. It is an excellent piece of world-building – exploring the societal impact of “what if all of us could teleport” in a brilliant way. And it’s just a fine piece of action story-telling, with a killer pace and not one word wasted. If a 2018 writer had this many incredibly good ideas in his head, this novel would be triple the length! And while I would actually have liked more development of certain ideas, the literary courage involved in not over-pumping this book deserves admiration, even today. So… I loved the re-read and I am happy to have spent an Audible credit on this, especially given that I now understand that in my teens I did NOT truly understand the ending! But I do need to admit that it is in no way perfect or timeless. Some (though surprisingly not that much) of the dialog is dated, the sex role stuff is antiquated, and so on. The surprise for me was to find some of the action downright clunky. The best example was when the traitorous lawyer Sheffield – who had been carefully prepped to capture Foyle by his Outer Satellites masters – completely failed to recognize Foyle when the man walked into his office. What – they don’t have cameras in the 25th century??? Anyway... quibbles are quibbles. This is still a great book, a seminal piece of SF, and a classic piece of cyberpunk written 40 years before cyberpunk existed! So… still a classic? Yep.

great book really enjoyed it

keep me entertained till the very end. would recommend it. five more words a a

a A Sci-Fi classic

This book was recommended to me as one of the top 15 sci fi classics of all time. I agree.

Omg this was great!!

Incredible story so much in such a small book. The writers of The Expanse series must have read this book. Its all here inner and outer planets, death by spacing, even the gutteral language of belters is here. A book written in the 1950’s feels so modern.
The audio version is amazing

“We stand apart and shape our own world”

Alfred Bester’s classic space opera novel The Stars My Destination (1956) is still impressive. Its ambitious style (which at times prefigures New Wave sf), plethora of concepts (many of which prefigure cyberpunk), cynical view of capitalism, romantic view of human potential, page-turning plot, themes relating to love, revenge, will/thought/imagination, and growth, and larger than life characters, especially the obsessive protagonist Gully Foyle, all hold up well today.

The novel begins with a prologue explaining 25th century solar system culture, “an age of freaks, monsters, and grotesques” in which teleporting by an act of will (jaunting) has transformed human transportation, economics, and relationships, and led to an endless war between the Outer Satellites and the Inner Planets.

In that future, Bester imagines many interesting cultural trends: jaunte jackals who scavenge the sites of accidents or disasters; women who chafe at being confined to the “seraglio” that is a reaction to the freedom that jaunting would otherwise give them; workers who jaunte to and from work and often quit too soon cause they can jaunte anywhere anytime; rich family corporation heads who show off their wealth by eschewing jaunting in favor of antique forms of transportation like cars and bicycles; Cellar Christians (and adherents of other faiths) who practice their banned religions in secret; people who voluntarily disconnect their nervous systems to abandon their five senses; commandos whose bodies are electronically enhanced to speed up so normal people move in slow motion; a form of torture which uses nightmarish virtual reality scenarios; a corporation which specializes in growing bacteria in giant vats on a moon; a robot bartender who suddenly gives insights like “Life is a freak. That’s its hope and glory”; and much more.

In that future, Bester’s anti-hero, the uneducated, brutish, ambitionless “stereotype Common Man” Gulliver Foyle, spends six months dying and yet remains alive when the Nomad, the spaceship on which he is Mechanic’s Mate 3rd class, is attacked and wrecked, leaving him the sole survivor, mostly confined to a coffin-like tool locker on the ship. When another spaceship, the Vorga, owned by the Presteign family corporation, happens by, raising his hopes for rescue but then goes on its way ignoring his desperate flares, Gully’s transformation into a unique uber-man driven by his obsession for revenge begins. Gully teaches himself to read the Nomad manuals and then finds a way to get the ship moving again, which sets in motion the plot of the novel, which reads like a compact 25th century Count of Monte Cristo.

Gully becomes a monster, a tiger, for revenge (“Rot you I kill you filthy!”), symbolized by the tiger-demon mask tattooed on his face by the Scientific People he happens upon, a research group lost in space and living for 200 years by scavenging wrecked spaceships. He will go on to rape and torture, to use brains rather than bombs, to assume a buffoonish Bruce Wayne-like false identity, to dabble in physics, chemistry, poetry, judo, and yoga, to speak more standard English than his original gutter variety, to try to control his emotions, to become Solar Enemy #1, and to single-mindedly pursue his revenge.

Supporting characters in the novel are compelling: Robin Wednesbury (a black “telesend” who can send her thoughts to others but can’t receive theirs), Jisbella McQueen (a thief who tries to get Gully to control himself and to think—Maybe your target should be not the Vorga itself but the person in charge of it?), Saul Dagenham (a radioactive skull-faced man who runs the biggest jaunting courier service), Peter Y’ang-Yeovil (a clever Central Intelligence chief who speaks Mandarin but doesn’t look Chinese), Presteign (a basilisk-smiling business clan chief who follows the credo “blood and money”), Olivia Presteign (his blind albino ice princess daughter who has some issues with sighted people). They are convincing and larger than life, less potent versions of Foyle.

Lurking in the background of Foyle’s vengeful ambitions and the war between the Outer Satellites and the Inner Planets is PyrE, a thermonuclear explosive element detonated by thought. The way in which Bester brings together PyrE, the major characters, and humanity in the transcendent climax of the novel is apt, satisfying, exhilarating, and neat. The way he writes the climax, with disorienting and poetic synesthesia and chronological tricks, is impressive. And Bester’s insights into human nature (hate, love, revenge, forgiveness, growth, etc.) are cool, like this one: “There’s no defense against betrayal, and we all betray ourselves.” The mental jaunting is something most sf would explain with scientific innovations and technological breakthroughs, but Bester wants to say it’s all a matter of mind over matter. Finally, the novel demonstrates that it’s up to each of us (or should be) how we shape ourselves and our world, whether we destroy everything or transcend.

Audiobook reader Gerard Doyle is fine, but perhaps his voice is not deep enough for the burning core of Gully Foyle.

Some things feel out of place in the 25th century future, like paper mail, and the sequence set in Gouffre Martel, an impossible to escape from prison, feels a little long and labored, but fans of Golden Age, classic, influential and well-written sf should read Bester’s novel.

Nester's Best

Within the limits of genre writing, it is philosophical but unusually humble about man's place in the big universe.

Best science fiction story ever told

The perfect message for our time and for all time. Also the perfect illustration of the use of a MacGuffin.

Mind blown

I loved this book! So original, and crazy. The ending was questionable and I’m not as sold on part 2 in general but you might think differently. Well worth it.