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. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.
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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. First published in 1956 (as Tiger! Tiger!), the novel revolves around a hero named Gulliver Foyle, who teleports himself out of a tight spot and creates a great deal of consternation in the process. With its sly potshotting at corporate skullduggery, The Stars My Destination seems utterly contemporary, and has maintained its status as an underground classic for forty years. (Bester fans should also note that Vintage has reprinted The Demolished Man, which won the very first Hugo Award in 1953.)
About the Author
Alfred Bester (1913-87) was born in New York and educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia. He was a scriptwriter and journalist by profession but he set the science fiction world alight with The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination and his extraordinary short stories in the 1950s, and blazed a trail for the sf New Wave of the 1960s and the cyberpunk writers of the 1980s.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
81 of 84 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Having read a great deal of Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke, I was quite taken aback by the very different style and tone of Alfred Bester. It was harsh, dirty, and his characters were more than a little mean. He provides a sharp contrast to Bradbury and Asimov, that much is certain. While he's close in action style to Heinlein, Bester's protagonist, Gulliver Foyle, seems absolutely unpredictable and terrifying--something I cannot really say about a Heinlein hero, anti-hero, or villain.
We start by finding our man Foyle near-death in a starship that has been cast adrift in space. As this not-too-bright crewman struggles to survive, a ship approaches that could help him. However, it doesn't. Instead, it flies away. The rest of the book consists of Foyle's angry, obsessed quest to get revenge upon that ship and the people who own it. We encounter telepathy and "jaunting" (instantaneous travel through the power of the mind--a mixture of telepathy with a Star Trek transporter). We find robber barons, three-ring circuses, violence. Bester does not apologize for the violence in his story (unlike some fiction today), he is writing a straight adventure story, with all the pitfalls and danger and violence that come with it. This is "guys' sci-fi" writ large. If the ending had been resolved a little more realistically, it would have been perfect. That said, buy it anyway.
100 of 108 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Capsule Description: Proto-Cyberpunkish dark future with some unique twists, a flawed and driven protagonist, and gripping action. On my Top Ten list. Read it. Buy it. Buy two and give one to a friend.
Review: Alfred Bester is generally recognized as one of the greatest writers of SF, especially on the strength of his plots and prose style. He made his reputation on short stories, but is best remembered for two novels: The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination (sometimes known as "Tiger! Tiger!" in the UK). First published in 1956, The Stars My Destination anticipated many of the staples of the later cyberpunk movement -- the megacorporations as powerful as the governments, body and mind redesign to specs, the dark overall nature of the world, even the cybernetic enhancement of the body. To this it added the standard "one wierd idea" of SF -- that human beings could learn to teleport, or "jaunte" from point to point, with various personal limitations but one overall absolute limit: no one could bridge the gap between a planet and anywhere in outer space. On the surface of a planet, the jaunte ruled supreme; off of it, mankind was still restricted to machinery. In this future world -- extrapolated with convincing and sometimes frightening accuracy by Bester -- we are introduced to the protagonist, Gulliver ("Gully") Foyle: "He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead..." Foyle is a former nobody, a man who had lots of potential but never had to use it, completely lazy, doing the minimum he could to get by, who is suddenly marooned in space with no escape. Even this isn't enough to motivate him beyond trying to find air and food on the wreck; he hasn't learned enough to know it's possible to FIND a way out of his situation. But he is galvanized to action when an apparent rescue ship deliberately passes him by.
In a sense, The Stars My Destination is simply a SF rewrite of a far older classic, The Count of Monte Cristo. It's the study of a capable, vengeance-driven man who escapes from an apparently impossible situation (twice, in Foyle's case) and returns as an utterly different man to wreak the vengeance that he was denied under his old name. Unlike many other Monte Cristo homages, however, Bester's is written with language fully as evocative as the original's, and with added intricate plot threads that make Gully Foyle's odyssey unique.
I cannot find sufficiently enthusiastic ways to recommend this book. It is one of the best, shining examples of what science fiction can be, in many ways. Read it.
39 of 44 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
_The Stars My Destination_ is one of the best novels I have ever read. It's so good that the first time I read it, I was overwhelmed by the number of amazing ideas and action-packed scenes filled in the book. Gully Foyle is one of the most wonderfully ruthless and tortured protagonists ever to be written. And the novel has no limits to its sense of depth and imagination; jaunting across Earth, Foyle's quest for revenge against Vorga, the number of interesting and unique characters Bester created, as well as his wonderful experiments in elaborate prose manipulation...this book is the very definition of compelling. About the only flaw I can say that the novel has is that some of the references are a bit dated from the 50's. But it's still so fresh and innovative that it makes a lot of today's SF novels seem dated. And it has influenced thousands of other writers, myself included. Along with this book, there's Bester's _The Demolished Man_. Another great book that shouldn't be missed.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Excellent book, BUT - major Kindle error - buy the actual book!
I agree with most of the reviewers here that The Stars my Destination is an excellent book. I have read and re-read the book many times and teach the book as one of the novels in a... Read more
Published 6 days ago by Kenneth R. Owens
Excellent.
This book is one of the most exciting reads I could wish for. I read it in my youth, and again recently. It more than passed the test of time. Read more
Published 2 months ago by jjdickson
If you're thinking about buying...
DON'T!!
I bought this book solely due to its high rating. I didn't like the sample (yeah, I know. Hate the sample, hate the book) but I figured, "meh" why not? Read more
I bought this book solely due to its high rating. I didn't like the sample (yeah, I know. Hate the sample, hate the book) but I figured, "meh" why not? Read more
Published 2 months ago by Book Knut
Groundbreaking it was...not any more
I was wondering what needs to be said about this book. One can't really call it a bad book, though I don't think that term `good' can easily be applied. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Matko Vladanovic
stars my destination
i have loved this book for many years, now. currently reading it to my best friend. i feel that now movie making has advanced to the stage where they can do justice to mr. Read more
Published 2 months ago by john
**spoiler alert**
Maybe my expectations were too high. Bester is one of the revered grandfathers of Science Fiction, and I'd wanted to read his works for a while. Read more
Published 3 months ago by C. Skinner
Was it good? No.
Seriously? People rate this rambling trash-heap of a novel 4-5 stars?
The Stars my Destination is nonsensical. Read more
The Stars my Destination is nonsensical. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Moon Donkey
A classic
When you have collected hundreds of SciFi books as I have, and think about which ones to keep, this one is easy to sort. Read more
Published 4 months ago by David J. Atkinson
Blown Away
Oftentimes books considered classics end up being a bit boring or difficult to immerse yourself in. Times change, writing styles change, what seemed fresh and innovative 50 years... Read more
Published 4 months ago by nontoxyc
Timeless Classic - Horrible ebook formatting
Fundamentally this is a morality story that just happens to be a science fiction classic. The story explores what happens to the stereotypical Common Man if he is shaken from his... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Mike
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Introduction (From Wikipedia)
The Stars My Destination is a science fiction novel by Alfred Bester. Originally serialized in Galaxy magazine in four parts beginning with the October 1956 issue, it first appeared in book form in the United Kingdom as Tiger! Tiger! – after William Blake's poem "The Tyger", the first verse of which is printed as the first page of the novel – and the book remains widely known under that title in markets where this edition was circulated. A working title for the novel was Hell's My Destination, and it was also associated with the name The Burning Spear.
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The Stars My Destination. Amazon is not affiliated with, and neither endorses, nor is endorsed by Wikipedia or any of the authors who contributed to this article. The Wikipedia content may be available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, version 3.0 or any later version, available at: CC BY-SA. Additional or other terms may apply. See Wikipedia Terms of Use for details.
Plot (From Wikipedia)
Gully Foyle is the last remaining survivor of the Nomad, a merchant spaceship attacked in the war between the Inner Planets and the Outer Satellites and left drifting in space. He blindly waits for over six months for a rescuer. Seeing a spacecraft named Vorga, he sets off signal flares and rejoices thinking he will be saved. The Vorga however passes him by, leaving him to die. This callousness triggers a consuming rage in Foyle that transforms him. Vengeance becomes his mission.
Improvising a repair to Nomad's engine, Foyle sends the ship into the asteroid belt, where it is captured and incorporated into the Sargasso asteroid, a body built of the wreckage of other crashed ships. The inhabitants, who call themselves the Scientific People, tattoo a mask reminiscent of tā moko onto Foyle's face, with the word "N♂MAD" across his forehead, and marry Foyle to one of their women. Once he recovers from his ordeal he blasts out of the asteroid and is picked up by a ship from the Inner Planets. He does not know about his tattoo until one of the hands on the Navy ship gives him a mirror.
Disguised as a disabled jaunter, among others who are undergoing therapy for head injuries that have affected their ability, Foyle plans an attack on the Vorga. Before he can do this, he is discovered by his instructor, Robin Wednesbury, a telesend (a kind of telepath who can send thoughts to others, but not receive them). He blackmails her into helping him, but his attack on the Vorga fails and he is captured by security forces working for Presteign, the aristocratic head of the huge Presteign corporation (owner of the Vorga). They grill Foyle about Nomad but he refuses to talk, and Foyle is thrown into the Gouffre Martel, a complex of underground caves in the Pyrenees. These are used as a prison, where the inmates live in total darkness, unable to form a picture of their location in order to jaunte.
Foyle discovers that an acoustic quirk in the prison caves allows him to communicate with a fellow prisoner, a woman named Jisbella McQueen. They plot an escape, and McQueen arranges to have Foyle's tattoos removed, but the removal is not total. Although Foyle's face looks normal most of the time, when he becomes emotional or excited, the rush of blood to his face brings back the markings.
Dagenham raids the clandestine hospital where the tattoos are being expunged, but Foyle and Jisbella escape in a ship and head out to the Sargasso Asteroid where the Scientific People live. There they recover the ship's vault from the Nomad. Besides a fortune in platinum, it contains something else. As the vault is ejected into their ship, Dagenham's men arrive and capture Jisbella, while Foyle, still obsessed, abandons her and jets away. With his new fortune, Foyle intends to find the Captain of the Vorga, avenging himself on a person rather than the ship itself. He also realizes that he must learn self-control, as the manifestation of his facial markings will give him away.
Using the alias "Geoffrey Fourmyle of Ceres," Foyle re-emerges as a rich dandy who charms high society with his antics, leading a troupe of freaks called the Four Mile Circus. Foyle has extensively altered himself physically and rigorously educated himself. He seeks out Robin Wednesbury, now socially blacklisted due to her family connections with the Outer Satellites, and offers her a chance to reunite with her family if she will use her one-way telepathy to help him navigate high society. She reluctantly agrees.
During a society party, Foyle meets Jisbella McQueen again, now the lover of Saul Dagenham, the detective who interrogated Foyle just before his escape from Gouffre Martel. He learns the real reason Dagenham wanted the location of Nomad: the vault contained a sample of a substance called PyrE, which Foyle had himself found and been unable to determine what it was. Then, during a sudden nuclear attack by the Outer Satellites, Foyle is smitten with Presteign's daughter Olivia, who has been watching the attack with her altered sense of sight: she sees only infrared light, but not the normal visible spectrum. Foyle grabs her with intent to ravish her before they die, only to find out that she has deceived him. She tells Foyle that to have her, he must be as cruel and ruthless as she is.
Foyle continues his hunt for the Vorga's captain, only to find that each of the crew has been given a kind of implanted death-reflex to prevent mention of the ship. Throughout these episodes, Foyle is tormented by the appearance of the "Burning Man", an image of himself on fire. He finally closes in on the Captain, now a neo-Skoptsy (a person with all sensory nerves disabled) living on Mars, and therefore immune to conventional torture. Foyle kidnaps a telepath, interrogates the Captain in her crypt, and finds that Olivia Presteign was the commander of the Vorga – moments before commando soldiers storm the crypt.
Foyle is rescued by Olivia. She had been transporting refugees for cash, only to murder them all by throwing them out into space. Her victims included Robin's family. She now sees a kindred spirit in Foyle, a freak who cannot live with "normal" humans, someone who can match her urges to destroy and conquer.
Foyle, driven by rage, remorse, and self-pity, tries to give himself up to the authorities. He unwittingly turns himself over to a lawyer, Regis Sheffield, who turns out to be a double agent working for the Outer Satellites. They are interested in him because apparently Foyle holds the holy grail of jaunting: space travel. He had been planted as a decoy to draw Inner Planets ships towards an ambush, but had jaunted back into the wreck of the Nomad from hundreds of thousands of miles away.
After Presteign learns of Olivia and Foyle being in cahoots, he suffers an epileptic seizure and babbles that PyrE is the most powerful explosive ever created. It is activated by telepathy, and so Robin (now having turned herself in to the authorities as well) is enlisted to activate it. The PyrE explodes, causing many incidents of destruction worldwide, but mostly at the HQ of the Fourmyle Circus in St. Patrick's Cathedral, where Foyle and Sheffield are holed up. The explosion partially collapses the building, killing Sheffield and trapping Foyle, unconscious but alive, over a pit of flame.
In the wreckage and confusion of the detonation, suffering from synesthesia brought on by the effects of the explosion on his neurological implants, Foyle once again jauntes through space and time, revisiting key moments of his journey to this point. Some of the synesthesia is conveyed to the reader visually, through graphic renditions of the text created by the noted illustrator Jack Gaughan. As The Burning Man, he appears to himself during the quest, as well as in other times and places, such as during his escape from the Gouffre Martel, when he distracts the guards enabling him and Jisbella to break out, and in space when Foyle was aboard the Nomad. Finally he jauntes to some unknown location in the future, where Robin telepathically gives him instructions (relayed from himself) for the exact route he needs – allowing for his confused senses – to escape the collapsing cathedral.
On returning to the present, Foyle is pressured from all sides to surrender the rest of the PyrE, or to let mankind benefit from his ability to space-jaunte. To Foyle's ears, this sounds like a no-win situation: to unleash a deadly weapon on the human race, or to let humanity spread like a disease by space-jaunting. He finally leads them to the vault where he has the rest of the PyrE stored, but steals it and teleports across the globe, throwing one slug of PyrE after another into the crowds and insisting the people be told what it is. "I've given life and death back to the people who do the living and dying," he says. He delivers one last speech, where he asks humanity to choose either to destroy itself or follow him into space.
At this point he realizes the key to space-jaunting. It is faith: not the certainty of an answer, but the conviction that somewhere an answer exists. He then jauntes from one nearby star to another. In the course of his star-hopping, Foyle locates the answer for the future: new worlds suitable for colonization reachable only if he can share the gift of space-jaunting. Finally he comes to rest in the locker on Nomad, where he spent his time before being reborn the first time. The Scientific People now see him as a holy man, and take up vigil to await his revelation.
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The Stars My Destination. Amazon is not affiliated with, and neither endorses, nor is endorsed by Wikipedia or any of the authors who contributed to this article. The Wikipedia content may be available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, version 3.0 or any later version, available at: CC BY-SA. Additional or other terms may apply. See Wikipedia Terms of Use for details.
Reception and influence (From Wikipedia)
Reviews of the novel have been mixed. The well-regarded science fiction writer and critic Damon Knight, in In Search of Wonder (1956), wrote of the novel's "bad taste, inconsistency, irrationality, and downright factual errors", but called the ending of the book "grotesquely moving". In a profile of Bester for Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature (2005), critic Steven H. Gale cited the novel as a reflection of the author's maturation, addressing as it does "the continued evolution of humankind as a species", a grander theme than those treated with in his earlier work. Gale furthermore declared the novel to be Bester's most stylistically ambitious work, citing the use of disparate fonts to evoke synaesthesia, the progressively intelligent language accorded to the maturing protagonist, and the framing of the narrative between the variations on Blake's quatrain.
More recently, the book has received high praise from several science fiction writers. By 1987, when the author died, "It was apparent that the 1980s genre [cyberpunk] owed an enormous debt to Bester – and to this book in particular," Neil Gaiman wrote in the introduction to a 1999 edition of the book. "The Stars My Destination is, after all, the perfect cyberpunk novel: it contains such cheerfully protocyber elements as multinational corporate intrigue; a dangerous, mysterious, hyperscientific McGuffin (PyrE); an amoral hero; a supercool thief-woman ..." James Lovegrove called the it "the very best of Bester", and Thomas M. Disch identified it as "one of the great sf novels of the 1950s". "Our field has produced only a few works of actual genius, and this is one of them," wrote Joe Haldeman. who added that he reads the novel "every two or three years and it still evokes a sense of wonder." According to Samuel R. Delany, the book is "considered by many to be the greatest single SF novel". while Robert Silverberg wrote that it is "on everybody's list of the ten greatest SF novels". Fantasy writer Michael Moorcock praised it as "a wonderful adventure story" that embodies truly libertarian principles. In a 2011 survey asking leading science fiction writers to name their favourite work of the genre, The Stars My Destination was the choice of William Gibson and Moorcock. Gibson remarked that the book was "perfectly surefooted, elegantly pulpy," and "dizzying in its pace and sweep", and a "talisman" for him in undertaking his first novel. Moorcock hailed Bester's novel as a reminder of "why the best science fiction still contains, as in Ballard, vivid imagery and powerful prose coupled to a strong moral vision".
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
gutter tongue, sunward course, tool locker, burning man, tattooed face Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Gully Foyle, Gouffre Martel, Fourmyle of Ceres, Robin Wednesbury, Spanish Stairs, New Year, New York, Olivia Presteign, Miss Robin, Miss Wednesbury, Lindsey Joyce, Saul Dagenham, Outer Satellites, Presteign of Presteign, Sigurd Magsman, Angelo Poggi, Black Rod, Gulliver Foyle, Lady Olivia, Regis Sheffield, Sergei Orel, Commando Brigade, The Scientific People, Times Square, Whisper Line New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
gutter tongue, sunward course, tool locker, burning man, tattooed face Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Gully Foyle, Gouffre Martel, Fourmyle of Ceres, Robin Wednesbury, Spanish Stairs, New Year, New York, Olivia Presteign, Miss Robin, Miss Wednesbury, Lindsey Joyce, Saul Dagenham, Outer Satellites, Presteign of Presteign, Sigurd Magsman, Angelo Poggi, Black Rod, Gulliver Foyle, Lady Olivia, Regis Sheffield, Sergei Orel, Commando Brigade, The Scientific People, Times Square, Whisper Line New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 8
books:
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64
books
cite this book:
See all 64 books citing this book
- The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester in Front Matter (1), and Front Matter (2)
- The Computer Connection by Alfred Bester in Front Matter
- Virtual Unrealities: The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester by Alfred Bester in Back Matter
- Guardian Angel by Arthur Joyce on page 194
- The Count of Monte Cristo (New Method Supplementary Readers) by Alexandre Dumas in Front Matter
See all 8 books this book cites
- nova 03. by Henry Nouwen on 8 pages
- Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Formative Period, 1926-1970 (Understanding Contemporary American Literature) by Thomas D. Clareson on 7 pages
- The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made by David Hughes on 6 pages
- The DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF: How Science Fiction Conquered the World by Thomas M. Disch on 5 pages
- The DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF: HOW SCIENCE FICTION CONQUERED THE WORLD by Thomas M. Disch on 5 pages
See all 64 books citing this book
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