The Stars my Destination: Alfred Bester

The Stars my Destination by Alfred Bester is a novel that stars an unambitious, sluggish caricature of the common man, Gully Foyle.  The novel starts with an explanation of “jaunting” a form of personal teleportation discovered accidentally by scientists, and how that ability had become so common place that it upset the balance of world order, disrupting dwelling patterns, security patterns and the hierarchy of social classes to the point where there is an all out inter planetary war between the inner planets and the outer satellites, with the outer satellites maintaining the upper hand. Gully Foyle was the victim of one of the many battles that occurred during the war, leaving him the sole survivor on his space ship stranded in the middle of the vast beyond.  One of the biggest transformation points for him in this novel comes when the “Vorga” space ship sails past his own ship. Excited to finally be rescued, Foyle shot off a flare, which was then ignored by the Vorga space ship. It was at this point that Foyle, previously described as a character lacking ambition, became consumed by vengeance and rage at his blatant abandonment, and using his want to exact revenge upon the captain and crew of the Vorga as reason to live, Foyle crudely repairs his own ship. The rest of the novel plays out following Foyle on his mission for vengeance against those who wronged him.

He is soon picked up by a cult of people who are descendants of an abandoned science team from the 24^th century; these people give him a wife, Moira, and also a hideous tiger tattoo on his face. The facial mask seems to be a physical representation of how brutish and savage Foyle’s inner turmoil has become. Foyle makes his escape from the “Scientific Race” ripping a hole in the side of their space colony as he does so. The story picks up with Foyle going through jaunt rehabilitation. At this point in the novel we start learning about how society has formed around jaunting, if you wanted any sort of career, jaunting was a necessity, with non-jaunters labeled as unemployable with the bacteria mines being the only exception (only place they could work). (This reminds me of the movie Gattaca actually with the idea of your biological makeup determining your job capabilities, I find that aspect of it to be very fascinating that science fiction movies really display the involvement of science in determining the roles of people’s lives. ) The story picks back up with Foyle’s jaunt rehabilitation teacher discovering that he wasn’t in need of rehab and was only there in an attempt to find out information on Vargos, thanks to that Foyle doesn’t hesitate in threatening to kill and ultimately raping her, this incidence displays how far he would go to get what he thought he deserved.

The story carries on with the ultimate end being Foyle making a last ditch effort to completely break away from his past and start anew.

I found this book to be a very interesting read, it delved into a lot of social and political issues and really explored how far one person would go to exact revenge I found it an interesting notion that up until the point where Foyle was enraptured in retribution he was a common place man with no ambition whatsoever but his embitterment empowered him. It seems like one of those things  where the protagonist needed to find something to draw strength from and although revenge was good fuel at the time, it ended up costing him a lot more than it was worth in the end.