The Stars My Destination
Ratings194
Average rating3.9
”You pigs, you. You rut like pigs, is all. You got the most in you, and you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties. All a you. Every you......I challenge you, me. Die or live and be great. Blow yourselves to Christ gone or come and find me, Gully Foyle, and I make you men. I make you great. I give you the stars.”
This book was nothing like I expected. It started great. Main character lost in space, waiting for someone to find him. But it never happens. Which makes Gully angry. Really angry. I mean “fate of the world is in his hands” angry. It doesn't begin that ridiculous but it gets there. Gully is not likeable at all. He's a monster. Thanks to a twist of faith not only on the inside but also the outside. But... it eventually works.
The book is split into two parts. I'd give part one 2/5... part two 5/5. I might adjust the rating to more fair 4/5* down the line when I look back at this book but for now thanks to a stellar ending it's full rating. 5/5 usually also means that I'd like to re-read the book sometime in the future and this one certainly qualifies.
What brings the first part down is the character of Jisbella. She's insufferable. There are other women in part 2 which are written much better but anytime Jisbella was in the scene it brought my enjoyment down by a lot.
The book actually starts strong with very pleasant and thoughtful prose style which fizzles out a few pages later, when prologue (exposition) ends and we meet Gully who uses a primitive English dialect, though not for long. I loved his character development. He goes from a dummy to smart villain to repenting antihero. Prose then picks up at the end where we get “the message” of the book on a golden platter, part of it literally told by the author in a form of a glitching robot.
What's more, in the background of all of this is a metaphor for cold war, arms race and whether the mankind should be trusted with weapons of mass destruction.
The worldbuilding is excellent for a sci-fi from the 50's and it's clear why this book is so highly appraised by so many people in the business. However, until the very end I was puzzled why this is called The Stars My Destination. While very catchy and poetic, there is no stars until the very end. “Tiger! Tiger!” seems like more appropriate title for the book – it was the original one for like a year before the book was reprinted as TSMD. But try to sell a sci-fi with title like that...
I enjoy a good sci-fi romp through space every once in awhile, and The Stars, My Destination fits the mold perfectly.
Gulliver (“Gully”) Foyle is an uneducated mechanic set adrift aboard a damaged ship named the Nomad. With his air supply dwindling, a terra ship named the Vorga passes by and, to his amazement, leaves him. Foyle is incredibly angry and vows to track down the Earth-based ship and enact revenge.
Foyle repairs the ship and blasts to a nearby asteroid, where he is captured by a cult, is instantly married to a crew member, and has his entire face tattooed with their signature, a tiger-like design. Fun times!
Did I mention teleportation? The ability was discovered, and it retroactively changed the way Earth deals with logistics, privacy, and the mix of different cultures.
It has quite a few novel ideas for the mid-1950s. It touches on governmental control, space fairing, cybernetic implants, telepathy, and time travel, to name a few. Those who like a bit of Terminator with their pseudoscience, death-wish-like plotting will be at home here.
// Setting the scene \
Foyle meets a 100-year-old woman whom he falls for in prison. One thing leads to the next, and after they escape, she knows an ex-con/swindler “Freakshow” procurer (yes, it gets kind of convoluted), and he is able to remove the hideous tattooing. It works for awhile, but, surprise! Once Foyle displays complex emotion, the scars return. But do not worry; he undergoes a procedure and becomes half man and half machine. And how does one control their anger after such a transformative body upgrade? Yoga! That's right, my friends, Namaste!
It's a wild plot that has quite a few twists and turns. The ending is fairly philosophical, too. Overall, I enjoyed it, but your mileage may vary. If you're looking for a nostalgic sci-fi story that has a mish-mash of plot lines that definitely inspired future writers, this is it.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays, my friends!!!!
This was just about a good book for me I don't understand the praise it gets for starting the cyberpunk movement and all that, it barely has that element. But it definitely didn't feel dated. I liked the pacing and the intriguing set-up for the world and the fictional future that it's set in during the prologue. It loses a bit of steam in between due to exposition. Not so much that it was challenging to follow only that the prose felt boring at times.
I would have preferred the conclusion to be just like the rest of the book, just fun and simple instead of trying to be deep and Messianic. A nice bloodthirsty revenge story should have been the way to go in my opinion.
“Gully Foyle is my name.Terra is my nation.Deep space is my dwelling place.The stars my destination.”
Our main character is a bit of an asshole. Well, that's an exaggeration. He's way more than a bit of an asshole, but he's a resourceful one at least. Trapped aboard a wrecked freighter, stuck inside an 8x8 cube of a room for months, subsisting on what meagre rations he salvages during his brief trips into the vacuum of space, he wants nothing more than to leave. Just when he'd almost given up all hope, the sister ship Vorga approaches. Making every sign and signal he can, Gully awaits the rescue that....never comes. The Vorga passes him by, and thus begins a long revenge-fueled quest that pits Gully against huge sci-fi megacorporations, a war between the inner and outer planets, and drives him almost to madness (if he wasn't there already).
I loved the jaunting system that the author fleshed out in this book. Essentially, mind teleportation, at-will, only restricted by your own personal ability. The author carefully constructs a world where everything has decentralized, where new countermeasures need to be created to keep jaunters at bay, that takes into consideration the consequences of being able to teleport in and out on a whim. There's a lot of nice touches here that I wouldn't have considered otherwise.
I really loved this book as it starts out, then slowly cooled on it until I almost wondered why I was still going. There's a lot of loose plot threads that aren't tied up until the end, but the book doesn't really tell you that or guide you in any sort of way, there's a lot of blind faith in a satisfying ending involved. I also slowly started hating Gully Foyle, as he's an incredibly unlikeable character. Actually, most of the people in the story are unlikeable in different ways, but Gully really takes the cake. What brought me around was the ending, and the revelation (thanks to reviewers here) that this is just a retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo. Gully declares revenge on the Vorga and all aboard her, uses his considerable talents and money (thanks to salvaged cargo from his ship) to carefully construct the perfect revenge scenario, and then runs into problems seeing it through.
But even after all that, I just wasn't able to rate it higher than three stars. It's a nice clever take on the revenge theme, but I wasn't able to get past Gully Foyle as a character. There's also a lot of old sci-fi baggage here as well, so be warned.
The audiobook narrator killed it though, by the way. Highly recommend, if you're looking to listen to this one.
This is one of those foundational sci-fi books in which the tropes of a thousand other books are conjured up in a nascent form. The prose compels you to read with much the same intensity that the main character is compelled to follow his driving passion for revenge. Ideas explode off the page with force and wit–but as with many golden era sci-fi, don't expect too much in the way of characterisation.
Gave up on this about 3/4 of the way through, just after the whacky circus was introduced. The misogyny and racism just got too much and there wasn't enough else to make me stick around. Some cool ideas, kinda, but it had neither the kind of quaint charm of many vintage SF books nor a gripping enough plot to keep me hooked. The SF ideas were ahead of its time but behind ours - space opera and teleportation being about all there was to it. It felt severely dated both in terms of the pure science fiction aspects and the societal attitudes. I'd rather read the Stainless Steel Rat any day.
Gully Foyle has been trying to survive in deep space for 170 days when a spaceship approaches, but the spaceship refuses his pleas to pick him, and Foyle is left with a deep hatred for the ship, its owners, and its captain. Foyle is captured and tattooed with a horrifying tiger on his face, and his anger grows stronger, and he is driven by a desire for revenge. His attempts are unsuccessful, and Foyle ends up in prison where he meets Jisbella McQueen who teaches him to hone his emotions and helps him to partially remove the tattoos.
I felt a need to read some classic scifi, and this book was at the top of many lists. I was intrigued by Foyle's world created by author Alfred Bester in 1956, with the rise of corporations and the wars going on between planets and the abilities of people to jaunt, to travel quickly between distant locations. The people were almost all unlikeable, especially the main character, and that made the story difficult to read.
I liked it, but didn't love it.
4 stars
???Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation.
Deep space is my dwelling place,
The stars my destination.???
A ???rags to riches??? book, set in the far future with an interesting mechanic ??? jaunting, basically thought teleportation. While criminally underused, it was something somewhat fresh in sci-fi, besides other novel concepts in the book, related to it. Also, it could be mentioned that it???s a sort of truncated retelling of The Count of Monte Crist by Alexandre Dumas, in my opinion.
You should read it if you???re a fan of sci-fi since it is a classic for obvious reasons.
I often find myself going back to the old classics, specially when I am busy and without enough time to read or when I am stressed and can not focus, just to find this. A fast paced, straight to the point and amazing ideas wisely packed in a short book.
The last 50p were absolutely great, everything was happening as if it were literally jaunting. Also all the crazy stuff with time-bending, elsewhere-elsewhen-NOW-etc were nicely done.
Indeed a very entertaining reading.
“Gully Foyle is my nameAnd Terra is my nation.Deep space is my dwelling place,The stars my destination.”
I haven't heard about Alfred Bester before and just dived in, not expecting much, despite the book having great reviews. And what a fantastic read!
Main protagonist Gully Foyle is despicable, only driven by revenge and I was absolutely captivated by him. The story itself is nothing incredibly new but the world building is just top notch and I found myself thinking about it all the time.
I still can't believe how immersed I was, how many great ideas were in the story and you just wouldn't know the book is from 1956 - on the contrary the age of it might just help. Must read if you're a fan of sci-fi, highly recommended.
terribly bombastic and cartoonish, fit only for the 1930s or 14 yo boys.
Not 1/5 because it has a lot of good ideas, but the writing, characters, story and twists are all badly written, as for a cartoon magazine, not a novel, and fail to exploit those ideas properly.
This book is so chock-full of SciFi concepts - each one alone would be another author's seed idea to make into a novel. Here Bester, writing in the 50s mind you, introduces us to dozens perhaps hundreds of sci-fi tropes, many of which could be explored easily in a series of books based on this work. Amazing!
You almost forget this book was written in 1956; it gets so many things right and it still blows your mind. It's a great story about a man possessed and what he'll do to get what he wants through space, people and time
Pros: some interesting world-building/science
Cons: unsympathetic characters
Gulliver Foyle has spent months trapped in a room on a destroyed space ship. When the Vorga passes by and fails to pick him up, he's filled with rage and determined to survive, if only to find and punish the Vorga for what it's done.
Originally titled Tiger! Tiger!, after the William Blake poem, “The Tyger” this is a science fiction rewrite of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. There's some interesting world-building going on, with people becoming able to teleport, or ‘jaunt', and how that affects humanity. There's also trouble brewing between the inner and outer planets (tired of being taken advantage of and seeing an economic downturn due to the ability to jaunt, which has reduced the need for the resources they mine).
For the most part I found Gully an unsympathetic and horrifying character. He's so hell bent on his revenge that he ignores the fact that he's survived horrors (in part because their ‘betrayal' galvanized him into saving himself). In many ways he throws away years of his life and several opportunities he's given to live for the future, in order to get his revenge. There's no personal enmity towards Gully by the crew of the Vorga, so his quest feels excessive and unreasonable, especially when you learn what happened on the Vorga, and why they didn't pick him up.
The female characters aren't the greatest. There's a bit of variety, though none of them felt particularly fleshed out. They all fall in love (and out of love) quickly and act in somewhat bizarre ways at times. Jisbella's love/hate relationship with him annoyed me because she waffled so much I was never sure where she stood, and I was horrified by how he manipulates Robin into helping him, considering what he did to her. And for some reason, despite what he does to them, the women forgive him in the end. There's also an off page rape that factors into the story later on.
I enjoyed the ending in that Gully finally seems to snap out of his mindless revenge kick and actually says a few profound things with regards to the potential war. But aside from his stint in prison (which was for the wrong reasons), he never seems to get any punishment for his actions beyond what he does to punish himself, which seemed unequal to what he did. On the whole I found reading this a bit of a slog, and as it's not a long book, that's saying something.
Feeble 2D characters, paper-thin plot, ropy dialogue.
In the 25th century, "jaunting" — personal teleportation — has so upset the social and economic balance that the Inner Planets are at war with the Outer Satellites. Gully Foyle of the Presteign-owned merchant spaceship Nomad — an uneducated, unskilled, unambitious man whose life is at a dead end — is marooned in space when the ship is attacked and he alone survives. After six months of his waiting for rescue, a passing spaceship, the Vorga, also owned by the powerful Presteign industrial clan, ignores his signal and abandons him. Foyle is enraged and is transformed into a man consumed by revenge, the first of many transformations.Foyle repairs the ship, but is captured by a cargo cult in the Asteroid Belt which tattoos a hideous mask of a tiger on his face. He manages to escape and is returned to Terra. His attempt to blow up the Vorga fails, and he is captured by Presteign. Unknown to him, the Nomad was carrying "PyrE", a new material which could make the difference between victory and defeat in the war. Presteign hires Saul Dagenham to interrogate Foyle and find the ship and PyrE.Protected by his own revenge fixation, Foyle cannot be broken, and he is put into a jaunte-proof prison. There he meets Jisbella McQueen, who teaches him to think clearly, and tells him he should find out who gave the order not to rescue him. Together they escape and get his tattoos removed — but not with total success: the subcutaneous scars become visible when Foyle becomes too emotional. They travel to the Nomad, where they recover not only PyrE, but also a fortune in platinum. Jisbella is captured by Dagenham, but Foyle escapes.Some time later, Foyle re-emerges as "Geoffrey Fourmyle," a nouveau riche dandy. Foyle has rigorously educated himself and had his body altered to become a killing machine. Through yoga he has achieved the emotional self-control necessary to prevent his stigmata from showing. He seeks out Robin Wednesbury, a one-way telepath, whom he had raped earlier in the novel, and persuades her to help him charm his way through high society.Foyle tracks down the crew of the Vorga to learn the identity of the ship's captain, but each is implanted with a death-reflex and dies when questioned. Each time, Foyle is tormented by the appearance of "The Burning Man", an image of himself on fire.At a society party, Foyle is smitten with Presteign's daughter Olivia. He also meets Jisabella again — now Dagenham's lover — who chooses not to reveal Foyle's identity, although Dagenham has realized it anyway (Foyle's alias was implanted in his subconscious mind during Dagenham's interrogation). During a nuclear attack by the Outer Satellites, Foyle goes to Olivia to save her. She tells him that to have her, he must be as cruel and ruthless as she is.Robin, traumatized by the attacks, tries to buy her way out of her arrangement with Foyle with the name of another Vorga crew member. Foyle agrees, but immediately reneges. In response, Robin goes to Central Intelligence to betray him.Foyle learns that the captain of the Vorga joined a cult on Mars and has had all her sensory nerves disabled, making her immune to conventional torture. Foyle kidnaps a telepath to interrogate the captain, and learns that the ship did not rescue him because it was picking up refugees, taking their belongings, and scuttling them into space. He also learns that Olivia Presteign was the person in charge. Olivia rescues him from Martian commandos, as she sees in Foyle someone who can match her hatred and need to destroy.Driven by a guilty conscience, Foyle tries to give himself up, but is captured by Presteign's lawyer Regis Sheffield, who turns out to be a spy for the Outer Satellites. Sheffield tells Foyle that when the Nomad was attacked, Foyle was taken off the ship, transported 600,000 miles away, and set adrift in a spacesuit to be a decoy to attract ships to be ambushed. Instead, Foyle space-jaunted — a previously unknown possibility — back to the Nomad. Now, the Outer Satellites not only want PyrE, they want Foyle as well, to learn the secret of space-jaunting.Meanwhile, Presteign reveals that PyrE is activated by telepathy, and Robin is enlisted to trigger it to flush out Foyle. Bits of PyrE left exposed by Foyle's tests into its purpose cause destruction worldwide, but primarily at Foyle's abandoned encampment in St. Patrick's Cathedral, where Sheffield has brought him. The church partially collapses, killing Sheffield and trapping Foyle, unconscious but alive, over a pit of flame. Suffering from synesthesia brought on by the explosion affecting his neurological implants, Foyle jauntes through space and time as The Burning Man. Finally he lands in the future, where Robin telepathically tells him how to escape from the collapsing cathedral.Back in the present, Foyle is pressured to surrender the rest of the PyrE, which was protected from exploding by its Inert Lead Isotope container, and to teach mankind how to space-jaunte. He leads them to where the rest of the PyrE is hidden, but makes off with it and jauntes across the globe, throwing slugs of PyrE into the crowd at each stop. He asks humanity to choose: either destroy itself or follow him into space.Foyle now realizes the key to space-jaunting is faith: not the certainty of an answer, but the conviction that somewhere an answer exists. He jauntes from one nearby star to another, finding new worlds suitable for colonization, but reachable only if he shares the secret of space-jaunting. He comes to rest back with the cargo cult, where the people see him as a holy man and await his revelation.
No idea how this is a ‘Masterwork'. Answers on a postcard please!
Firstly, I'd like to say I enjoyed this book, but there were many points in the book that made me scratch my head and it starts with the premise.
Basically the whole book is just a revenge story from a perceived slight of the main character. Gully gets stranded on a floating wreck and then doesn't get picked up by a passing ship. That's enough to send him on this epic quest to exact complete and utter revenge?
I do like the underlying theme of the book: with enough willpower you too can become great. The book starts out describing Gully as an underachiever (something we can all relate to) but we watch him quickly become powerful due to the sheer strength of his willpower. I'm just not sure the perceived slight which set him off would really be that motivating for 99% of characters. The whole book I kept thinking “man, this sure is a lot of trouble and death defying in order to exact revenge”.
I love the universe in which this story takes place. I just wish it would have been explored more - honestly, I felt like the story got in the way of my desire to see more of the jaunting and telepathic world! That's another thing - I felt like the author kept adding these duex ex machina devices to level the playing field. First it was telepathy (fine, why not- people can teleport why not telepathy too?), then the whisper channel in the prison (why on earth would that be there, but OK some buildings in DC have that too), then the TIME ACCELERATION TEETH (really?), PyrE (an explosive that can only be blown up telepathically?), then finally time travel itself. It just felt hacky to me.
All in all, still a decent enough read. The main character is a bit more vicious and barbaric than I felt was warranted given his reason for revenge and the author took some liberties to finish out the story, but I still had a fun time reading it.
Not a very high brow book, but a good read nevertheless. The book is so strange and unnatural. All elements of the plot are ridiculous and a lot of the dialogue, especially the romance, is weak. Everything just sort of worked.
Will definitely consider reading Bester again.
Brilliant. Madcap. Uncontrolled chaos that occasionally breaks, like ragged clouds, to reveal unexpected revelations. Space opera at its best. Fantastic, inventive, marvelously complicated, filled with characters you can't decide whether to loathe or love. Layers and layers of story that keep you changing your mind about whose side you're on. There's so much action it feels like a condensed version of a 1000 page story, but I couldn't imagine it written any other way.
Read this first in 1980, again in 1985, and again in 2000. One of my favorites.