A burning spear flung from unknown into unknown: a review of The Stars My Destination.
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, originally published serially in four parts in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1956 (the copyright is held by Galaxy Publishing Corporation), and titled Tiger! Tiger! when it was published in book form in the UK by Sidgwick & Jackson -- it was also published under the titles Hell's My Destination and The Burning Spear -- is a sort-of science fiction take on The Count of Monte Cristo that is much more exciting than Dumas's windy tome ever thought of being.
In the 24th century, the human race has been completely reorganized thanks to the discovery a century or so prior that most humans can teleport themselves as well as anything they can carry or wear distances of at least a few miles -- some few can teleport hundreds or even thousands of miles -- by merely believing that they can, as long as they've memorized the location they're starting from and the location that they're "jaunting" to. (The verb for this wild talent, "jaunte," comes from the discoverer of this faculty, Charles Hoy Jaunte.) The upper classes keep their females in jaunte-proof purdah to protect their virtue, and ordain that their attire reveals as little skin as possible; the upper crust also seeks to distinguish themselves from the common herd by not jaunting in public and by vying with each other in their archaic modes of transportation: horse and carriage, bicycles, automobiles, even personal locomotives. The widespread ability to jaunte has also resulted in truly hellish revisions to the prison system, and in the near elimination of distinctive ethnic features. However, unlike in Bester's previous novel, The Demolished Man, telepathy here is so rare that there are only a dozen or so full telepaths (i.e., able to both send and receive thoughts) in the entire solar system.
Gulliver ("Gully") Foyle is a lumpenproletariat, an unskilled spaceman left to die on a wrecked spaceship, the Nomad; incensed at having his distress signals ignored by the only spaceship to pass close by, the Vorga, he bestirs himself enough to peruse the various technical manuals that he could never previously be arsed to study, even for the promise of promotions and raises, to save himself and seek revenge on the Vorga. He soon attracts the attention of both the Inner Planets (Venus, Earth, the Moon, and Mars) and Outer Satellites (some of the moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune), who are on the brink of a shooting war with each other since they can't resolve their economic war by non-military means, because they think that he holds the secret by which one side can conquer the other.
That's the pitch, but Bester jams more hellzapoppin' incident and spectacle into about 200 pages (my 1970 Bantam mass market paperback edition runs 197 pages) than most authors put into books twice as long or longer. (Hell, the first 27 pages alone are more eventful than a few 200-300 paged sci-fi novels I've read.) The Stars My Destination has been seen as kind of a godfather of the cyberpunk genre; it also manages to do more of what Philip K. Dick's work is supposed to do (at least in my admittedly limited experience of reading Dick), as well as encroach on Arthur C. Clarke's "evolution of man" shtick, which Clarke in turn picked up from Olaf Stapledon. Bester's penchant for textual experimentation -- weird layouts of text and crude, woodblock-type graphics to convey Foyle's altered state of mind -- can't help but recall the work of the surrealists, while his bits of hipster lingo to describe a drug called Analog (the name is possibly a dig at Galaxy's rival publication) is vaguely reminiscent of William S. Burroughs.
That said, there are a few plot holes (or, at minimum, a couple of deus ex machinas....) that could've been resolved by Bester slowing down his narrative just a little and doing a better job at exposition; it should come as no surprise that the only real character developed here is that of Foyle's, and his growth isn't entirely credible due to the breakneck pace of the narrative. (A few other characters' spirits can be said to rise and advance, but in even less credible fashion than Foyle's.) The women tend to be bitch goddesses to one level or another, in the best Norman Mailer tradition (and one has the unfortunate porn star name of Jiz -- short for "Jisbella" -- McQueen; I tend to suspect that Bester was pulling a sophomoric prank á la Ian Fleming ["Pussy Galore," "Honeychile Rider," etc., etc.]); and, much as with Robert A. Heinlein, lesbians might be tolerated, but homosexuals are beyond the pale: the crowd of low lifes congregating on Rome's Spanish Stairs are enumerated as "pimps...whores, perverts, lesbians, catamites" (p. 116; this falls in Chapter Ten), which strongly suggests that, for Bester, all homosexuals are perforce child molesters. And if I never quite bought all of the societal differences -- disease junkies, a sect of neo-Skoptsys, the government of the Inner Planets, if not that of the Outer Satellites, stringently outlawing all organized religions (one consequence of which is that simple pictures of "cellar Christians" holding clandestine services are regarded as being among the ripest pornography available) -- well, the book does rip along fast enough so that I didn't really have time to dwell on my reservations.
And for all that Bester's science and unquestioning reliance on sci-fi tropes might be suspect in places -- telepathic communication is rendered, for the most part, in fully formed sentences rather than a mish-mash of lone words and brief phrases salted over various emotional states; the bushwah about "the speed of thought, far exceeding that of light" (p. 178) -- The Stars My Destination manages to make, in the best science fictional fashion, some pointed remarks about the Second World War (specifically the millions of persons displaced by same), the nuclear arms race, and the national security state that had been brought into being by the secret directive of President Truman just a few years prior to this novel's publication. While The Stars My Destination is usually regarded as a libertarian novel, one can also read such non-libertarian statements as, "'You must go along with society, whether it chooses destruction or not'" (p. 191), as well see the conclusion as being suspiciously close to a Christian one. Indeed, Bester, in a more forceful fashion than Dumas in The Count of Monte Cristo, ultimately questions the viability of the classic Romantic vision of the "superman" against the world, as famously explored by Jules Verne with his creation, Captain Nemo: a surprisingly humanist -- and humane -- conclusion for a legendary "man alone" tale of obsessional revenge.