Galactic Revenge | The Stars My Destination

From the forests of the night | The Stars My Destination | Alfred Bester

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	• The Stars My Destination Alfred Bester Vintage, 1996 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 222 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Stars my Destination

A notable web critic pegged Alfred Bester as "a normal-sized man who, because he walked among pygmies, if often mistaken for a giant". And it's true. Bester wrote competent, frantically-paced science fiction, and that's all he wrote. And you'll keep turning the pages, but after the conclusion you may find yourself wondering why you turned so many pages so quickly.

Gully Foyle is adrift, physically and psycologically. Stranded on a broken spaceship, he thinks nothing of his daily struggle for survival until a passing freighter distinctly fails to resuce him. From that point onward, the desire for revenge consumes him, and sees him crossing the solar system, adopting several fake identities, getting imprisoned, escaping, making a fortune, running a circus, wearing melting underwear, and more. Plotwise, Bester thrives on cleverness. Every character who shows up once shows up many times in many guises, reveal bizaree pasts and twisted motives. At the end, though, Bester doesn't really accomplsih anything through these endless twists and u-turns. You can have a character appear six times in the most unlikely places, but what's the point?

Another facet of adventure writing is progression. You start from small events and go to big events. There Bester succeeds with aplomb; he constantly raises the stakes for each new encounter. By the end, the fate of the whole human race hangs not just in the balance, but in at least three different balances. Even there, though, the books lacks some unity. Logically, parts of it just don't hold together.

Bester is a good author who suffers posthumously from the fact that so many people insist he must be the best. Our canon of great science fiction was determined by aging baby boomers. Regrettably they stacked it with classics remembered from their own childhood. As such, "The Stars my Destination" will likely continue to hog one spot on 'top ten SF' lists for many years to come, pushing out more deserving authors like Jack Vance and Philip K. Dick. But we, at least, can accept "Stars" for what it is: a rollicking joy ride notable for wild ideas and big bangs.

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Galactic Revenge

The Stars My Destination startled me with how modern in felt. I know, sci-fi books are supposed to feel like that, but not classic novels. The books written in the forties and fifties have already become outdated by scientific research or real-world inventions. The Stars My Destination, however, has a lot in it that can still happen in the distant future. This is what hooked me to this novel so much at the start, the fact that it was a book that is still very much relevant, even in today's market.

Based in a galaxy torn by war and on the edge of inter-galactic apocalypse, The Stars My Destination is a revenge tale following a man named Gully Foyle who is stranded on a wrecked ship in the middle of space with little opportunity for rescue. After months of seclusion and fighting for survival, Foyle finally gets his chance for rescue when another ship named the Vorga passes near. Yet, despite his many distress signals, the ship leaves him to die, to "rot." This spurs Foyle to save himself, and through his new-found motivation--anger and bloodthirstiness--he's able to do just that, and starts his year-long journey to destroy all those people involved in his abandonment.

Gully Foyle goes from ignorant savage to intelligent berserker, and is basically a sci-fi version of Conan. He's driven by his passion for vengeance and destruction, and has easily laid aside common human morals to achieve what he wants so badly. He's a bad guy, really, a womanizer, a rapist, and a murderer, and never thinks twice about his crimes, at least not right away. Foyle is constantly moving, searching, scheming, and blackmailing. Yet, also like Conan, Gully Foyle is a character easy to like, despite all his crimes.

Alfred Bester, as a writer, had a way of making me feel Foyle's chaotic emotions. When Foyle felt himself saved after a long sixth month wait, you felt his extreme disappointment and sudden flaring of anger at his abandonment. The power of Bester's writing is what made Gully Foyle so easy to love. Plus, Bester's dark vision of the future goes well the hopelessness of the character.

Most of those out there who have come from the generation that spawned The Stars My Destination and many other classical sci-fi novels have already read this, so it's difficult to recommend this book, really. I can say that if you love sci-fi, get this book. It's one of the top sci-fi novels ever written. Or, if you're like me and you want to write, then get this book. The power of the characterization, and the scope of the science and the times, make this book feel as if it was written twenty years ago, and not fifty.

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From the forests of the night

I've been so fond of this one since my teens... surprised Hollywood hasn't had a chance to mangle it yet. Reading it as an adult, I note his overuse of metaphor, yet still feel the old thrill of raw excitement recounting Foyle's exploits. I hope someone makes a movie of it before I get too old.

This book is galactic in its scope and wonderfully imaginative. Very highly recommended!

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Flawed and Overrated but a Good Read

I think the fans of science fiction do a discredit to the reputation of the genre when they heap too much praise on a novel that doesn't deserve that much adulation. The Stars My Destination is a good example of that.

It is what it is: a magnificently flawed space opera, with some aspects that are good but others that are downright bad and cheesy.

I loved the first third of the book. The protagonist is a simpleminded, uneducated, blue-collar lout. In fact, you could almost call him mildly retarded. What a refreshing change! The hero as a moron. Where the novel took a turn for the worse, from my perspective, was when the hero was sent into the catacombs and the author decided to turn the rest of the book into a sci-fi version of The Count of Monte Cristo.

Through an acoustical anomaly (a "whisper line") in his pitch black dungeon cell, he finds he can have whispered conversations with a female prisoner who is located off in another part of the mountain. That's stupid enough, but that can be overlooked for the sake of plot development. But then we are led to believe that whispered conversations with the female prisoner, over a number of months, suddenly transforms his intellect and his education to a high level. For the rest of the book, the simpleminded retard is now a genius... an intellectual, potent combination of James Bond, the Stainless Steel Rat, and Rambo with a brain. That was the biggest flaw for me. The caveman who used only one-syllable words at the beginning of the book can now sermonize on deep ethical questions later and say things like, "The man who upsets the morphology of society is a cancer," etc. The lovable hero of the beginning is now an entirely different character.

The whole escape from the prison was just plain ludicrous. No guards to prevent him from leaving the unlocked visitor's room; the entire lighting system in the prison being disabled by smashing one bulb; on an impulse a sledgehammer being used to knock out a wall to gain access to an underground series of caves that they didn't even know were there; then two naked people able to wend their way through ice-cold underground caverns, scrambling over rocks and ice in complete darkness, and swim an ice-cold underground river to emerge in safety, outside at night, and then have sex? C'mon. Why did that whole sequence have to be so outrageously silly?

The male/female interactions are so ridiculous, they seem written by someone who maybe never had a wife or girlfriend. It can't be excused by the fact the novel was written in the 50s.

In a quest for fast-paced action, and the book certainly delivers on that, the author sometimes reverts to little tactics taken right out of the movies. For instance, if you don't like the way a woman is talking to you, rap her sharply on the jaw, which knocks her out for a few minutes, then when she comes to, things are much better, with no residual resentment or bruising.

The book is readable, with many interesting parts, the action is fast, and the sci-fi stuff like "Jaunting" and the gravity columns for launching spaceships is cool.

Creating a hugely elaborate, solar-system-renowned circus act just to have a front to do some detective work, and elevating the once-moron and his convict girlfriend into the upper echelon of society? Way, way overkill.

The old tattoo that returns to his face whenever he gets emotional is a clever theatrical device. But why is it that only the tiger pattern reappears, and not the big, honking word "NOMAD" that was also tattooed across his forehead earlier in the book?

Lots of little flaws like that and a few big flaws too.

The ending was a complete disappointment. He throws tubes of the dangerous substance ("PyrE") to crowds all over the world, a substance that will destroy the planet if somebody just activates it with an evil thought, while at the same time sermonizing about how the industrial/defense complex must be able to "trust" common humanity with having that capability available to the populace. A bunkum ending.

Three stars for never being a boring book. But this is not literature.

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Buy this book

Seriously, just buy it. It took me until I saw the word "negro" before I realized how old this book actually was. Writing a sci-fi novel that doesn't become dated with time is truly amazing. Just buy it. I really can't say anything more, you will love it. Even if you don't like sci-fi as a genre, give it a try, I think you'll enjoy it.

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