Review: The Stars My Destination

It took me a long time to get around to reading this classic novel from 1957, but I'm glad I did.
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The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow. Just wow. I'm not often won over by hard sci-fi - this is an exception. I rarely find books from this era riveting - this is an exception.

After a brief history of humanity's discovery of teleportation, called jaunting, the book opens with Gulliver Foyle's formidable fight for survival under horrific conditions. The experience molds the brutish, uneducated mechanic into an anti-hero who bulls through the rest of the book with the single-minded and all-consuming motive of revenge. The stakes start out high as they can get, and they spread across the cast of characters as Gully Foyle encounters each of them. One of the things I loved best was that Bester took the book beyond the normal aspects of any good novel: stakes, pacing, a character who changes; and constantly introduced new and intriguing details. The albino woman who sees only in certain spectrums, the telepath who can send but not receive, Dagenham, who is permanently radioactive, the Scientific People, Jeffery Fourmyle and his circus, the burning man. My one caveat is a trigger warning for the use of rape - and subsequent emotional abuse of the victim - as a plot device. The clunky handling of it is one of the few reminders of the age of the book. Overall, though, a surprisingly good read, and a book that's going on my to re-read list. Wonderfully read in this audio version by Gerard Doyle.

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