Gully’s Travels
The Stars My Destination (1956) by Alfred Bester
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. (p. 3)
I spent most of July on the road. My husband and I set off by car from Washington DC on July 3rd, spent the night in Pittsburgh, celebrated Independence Day in Chicago, then flew with my parents to Calgary for the Calgary Stampede (The World’s Largest Outdoor Rodeo), where I discovered that I look absolutely killer in a cowboy hat. We then drove to Banff and Jasper National Parks (just before the devastating fires), and on to the geographic center of British Columbia. After a week in the woods, we flew to Vancouver, and then back to Chicago, and then drove back home to DC at last. All told, we were away from home for three weeks. My tomato plants suffered. Even so, this is an accelerated trip compared to the one we took two years ago. We drove all the way across the continent from DC to Southern Alberta, then central British Columbia, then down through Vancouver and Seattle and back across the US home to the east coast. It took us a full month.
Some of that drive, specifically through the Canadian Rockies, is mind-bogglingly beautiful. Much of it, especially across the Upper Midwest, is unspeakably boring. You can drive twelve hours through South Dakota on a highway as flat as a piece of paper and still not leave the state. Ohio means six hours of aggressive state troopers and Pennsylvania feels interminable when you’re trying to achieve escape velocity from the East Coast.
I like a good road trip, but the sheer amount of time it takes to cross the continent is impractical for people with jobs and limited paid time off. As we were planning this trip, trying to make it align with our schedules, we remarked a few times how much we wished we could just teleport to our destinations. Imagine: a journey that takes 5 full days of driving, done in the blink of an eye. What would that capability do for individuals like us? What would it do to our cultures, to our economies? To the world?
This idea, of the discovery of teleportation as an innate human ability, and the implications of this discovery, form the premise of Alfred Bester’s novel The Stars My Destination. Mankind has colonized the inner planets and the outer rocky moons via conventional rocket travel by the time teleportation, or “jaunting,” is discovered. Jaunting is “a natural aptitude of almost every human organism, but it can only be developed by training and experience.” There are limits to jaunting; one can only teleport themselves and anything they can carry on their person, no one can jaunte further than 1000 miles in one go, and you can only jaunte to a place if you’ve been there before.
My coworker (thanks, Josiah!) gave me a copy of The Stars My Destination a few months ago, and though I’d never heard of it or its author, I was intrigued by the cover blurb by Samuel R. Delany (two books of whose I’ve previously reviewed here and here). “Considered by many readers and writers to be the greatest single SF novel!” He proclaims. I noted the careful wording— Delany did not specify whether he was one of those “many readers and writers.” (However, I have read that Delany’s 1968 novel Nova was inspired by Bester.) William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and the king of cyberpunk, appears to be among that number, according to this enthusiastic preface. Indeed, he borrows from Bester an interest in body modifications, the dark side of unchecked capitalism, and people of the gutter. I thought I might be discovering an unknown-to-me gem of the genre.
Gulliver “Gully” Foyle is the anti-hero of The Stars My Destination, an unremarkable, low-ranked spaceship mechanic who finds himself stranded in space alone following the destruction of his ship in a war between the inner and outer planets triggered by the economic disruption of the advent of human teleportation. Trapped in truly horrific circumstances for six months, he manages at last to flag down a friendly ship and is transformed when that ship abandons rather than rescues him. Consumed by rage and an all-encompassing need for vengeance, he learns how to save himself and then recommits to a new purpose in life: to kill the ship that left him for dead. He rapes and betrays his way through life, eventually accumulating a vast wealth that allows him access to the social circles of the ultra-wealthy hereditary class of oligarchs that control the Solar System. It’s a retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo for the 25th century.
One might think that, as a Korean, I’d be super into the revenge stuff, but I was disappointed. The premise is interesting, the world of greed and corruption at the highest levels is entertainingly outlandish, and the opening sequences that depict Foyle’s desperation in the wreckage of his ship are compellingly brutal, but the character development is thin and the prose is repetitive and uninspired. There is entirely too much plot. Too many notes!
So much happens in 235 pages. Foyle goes on way too many adventures and side quests. After a while, it feels like a series of generic pulpy adventure stories. In fact, I was shocked to learn that it was initially published as a novel and then serialized, rather than the other way around— it reads very much like a fix-up job of stories originally spread out over several installments.
Bester goes hard on the anti-hero thing, with Foyle proving himself to be a terrible human being time after time. And yet, two women, including the unfortunately named badass underworld bitch Jisbella “Jiz” McQueen, fall in love with him immediately. Most outrageously, the telepathic black woman he rapes and then blackmails into his service is later apparently jealous when he declares his love for another, the heiress of his sworn enemy’s company.
I’m generally not too squeamish when it comes to consuming media with outdated moral standards. Just the other weekend I re-watched The Manchurian Candidate (1962) as part of a mysteriously renewed interest in movies about political assassination. I found it thoroughly enjoyable despite (and frankly, in part, because of) some truly egregious racism and sexism. And I certainly don’t believe any topics are off-limits for literature. But the rape and physical assault against women that Gully Foyle commits aren’t in service of anything. Late in the book he grows a conscience and tries to repent. His victim forgives him. It’s a lame and unnecessary pseudo-redemption arc.
The ending shows some promise; there is some proto-psychedelic imagery and formal innovation. However, it struck me as hollow and silly, like it was written by someone who’d once heard someone describe a mescaline experience. The payoff fails to land because the stakes were never clear from the beginning. The entire package feels like more of an adolescent adventure fantasy than intellectually and artistically engaging sci-fi.
The Stars My Destination is best appreciated as the inspiration for later, better books. It’s true that the darkness of its tone is a departure from much of the sanitized, dignified, slightly boring hard sci-fi of the Golden Age, so I can see how it might have been invigorating to readers and writers of the day. Echoes of Gully Foyle can be found in the disaffected antiheroes of cyberpunk, from Gibson’s Sprawl to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash to Cowboy Bebop. It was a good book to bring on my road trip to Canada—it certainly livened up the nights spent in an off-grid hunting lodge. But I won’t be rushing to re-read it anytime soon.
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester: 3.7/10