Anyone Remember “The Stars My Destination”?
This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dyingbut nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vicebut nobody admitted it. This an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaksbut nobody loved it. All the inhabitable worlds of the solar system were occupied. Three planets and eight satellites and eleven million million people swarmed in one of the most exciting ages ever known, yet minds still yearned for other times, as always. The solar system seethed with activityfighting, feeding, and breeding, learning new technologies that spewed forth almost before the old had been mastered, girding itself for the first exploration of the far stars in deep space, but---
It was an age of freaks, monsters, and grotesques. All the world was misshapen in marvelous and malevolent ways. The Classicists and Romanticists who hated it were unaware of the potential greatness of the twenty-fifth century. They were blind in a cold fact of evolutionthat progress stems from the clashing merger of antagonistic extremes, out of the marriage of pinnacle freaks. Classicists and Romantics alike were unaware that the Solar System was trembling on the verge of a human explosion that would transform Man and make him the master of the universe. It is against this seething background of the twenty-fifth century that the vengeful history of Gulliver Foyle begins.
The above passages are (condensed) from the Prologue of Alfred Besters 1956 novel The Stars My Destination. TSMD remains one of my favorite novels, though its closing in on 60 years old by now. Stars is in some ways a classic space opera (sans the BEMs so common back then), while also one of the earliest anti-hero novels, which were almost unheard of in science-fiction of the 1950s. Though some elements of the story are dated, it was decades ahead of its time, in some ways presaging the cyberpunk novels of the past decade or so. Bester paints a very vivid picture of an interplanetary culture warped and disfigured by rapid emergence of a new scientifc breakthrough in this case, practical limited-distance teleportation. The resultant collapse of transportation, communication, and other major industries leads to massive social/cultural changes as well as interplanetary war. Besters 25th century is an era of corporate exploitation and power-schemes, a culture of conspicuous consumption cheek-by-jowl with grinding poverty and disenfranchisement.
And all that is only the background & setting for the unfolding drama of one Gulliver Foyle, a stereotype Common Man, a lethargic & unimaginative loner, crushed by circumstances and driven to an obsessive search for vengeance Im going to (at least try to) hold off further disclosures, since I hate to spoil a good read for anyone who isnt aware of this science-fiction classic.
If youre old enough to be familiar with this story (long out of print now), Id appreciate your comments on the book; if you havent been aware of this little gem, I encourage you to track this novel down. I still havent figured out why TSMD hasnt been snapped up for a major moviewe finally have the FX technology that would do it justice. (Final teaserAlfred Bester had bullet-time visualizations going on over 50 years ago)
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