Throwback Thursday: The Stars My Destination Serves Up Revenge as Cold as the Vacuum of Space

Starting in the 1930s, Bester wrote SF short stories for legendary magazine editors John Campbell and H. L. Gold. By the ’50s, he was writing novels too, albeit novels initially serialized in magazines. The Demolished Man won the very first Hugo Best Novel award in 1953, and The Computer Connection was nominated for both Hugo and Nebula awards in 1976. Yet somehow, The Star My Destination, my favorite Bester (and the book many consider his masterpiece) received no awards or nominations.
For that, blame circumstance, not the book’s relative quality: in 1957, the year The Stars My Destination would have been eligible for awards, the field was still nearly a decade away from awarding the first Nebula for Best Novel, while at that year’s WorldCon, no award was given for best novel. I don’t mean to say fans voted for “No Award” over any of the nominees (a frequent occurence of late, thanks to the whole Puppies fiasco): the only award categories at the 1957 Worldcon in London were for periodicals—Best American Magazine, Best British Magazine, and Fan Magazine. Jo Walton talked about this strange occurrence when revisiting the Hugo Awards years past for Tor.com.

The Stars My Destination explores how the ability to “jaunte” (teleport oneself by the power of thought alone) changes society in the 25th Century, not unlike Bester’s exploration of how telepathy shook up humanity in The Demolished Man. More than that, though, it is the story of Gulliver “Gully” Foley, a “stereotype Common Man” with great potential but no ambition (at least according to his Merchant Marine file), who comes to change the course of human civilization.
When we first meet Foyle, he is the only survivor of a brutal attack on the spaceship Nomad, marooned in the wreckage halfway between Mars and Jupiter. Through extraordinary effort, he has survived there 171 days, when a ship finally passes—and neglects to rescue him, despite his distress calls. This is the spark that unlock Foley’s true potential. No longer content to merely survive, Foley’s anger and thirst for revenge ignite a fantastic hidden ability, literally fueling his return to Earth to hunt down whoever gave the order to leave him to die in space.

Foyle’s road to revenge echoes another classical tale, Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. Like Edmond Dantes, Foley is imprisoned, educated by a fellow prisoner, and told of a vast hidden treasure. He likewise escapes, even when escape seems impossible. Both men use their newfound wealth to create false identities and construct an ornate latticework of vengeance. Both schemes also end up punishing the innocent as well as the guilty, as all suffer through the men’s obsession with revenge.
Considering its age (the book turns 60 next year), there is some inventive writing to be found here. In the tone and technology (Foyle’s body is augmented with modifications that allow him to control and enhance his biology), it functions as a sort of proto-cyberpunk. In the second to last chapter, Foley suffers from synesthesia in the wake of an explosion. That neurological condition causes the stimulation of one sense, such as smell, to be subjectively experienced as another, like, say, touch. For Foyle, “Molten metal smelled like water trickling through his fingers.” Bester illustrates the experience of synesthesia not just with lyrical descriptions, but graphically, with drawings and unusual typesetting; the sentence “Indigo undulated with sickening speed like a shuddering snake” slithers in serpentine curves across the page.

Foley is not a likable character. Through most of the book, he is single-mindedly driven to commit dreadful deeds, including murder, rape, and treason. But at some point, he becomes, in his own words, “a freak of the universe… a thinking animal” and develops “a rare disease called conscience.” His heart is touched by love, and remorse. Foley defies government, military, and corporate elites who attempt to use the two powerful secrets he has discovered, instead appealing to his fellow Common Men, telling them those in power “got the most in you, and you use the least.” He challenges them to make themselves great, so he can give them the stars as their destination.
The Stars My Destination (initially published in the UK as Tiger, Tiger! in reference to the Blake poem and to Foyle’s jarring facial tattoos) is a moving tale of revenge and redemption. Bester creates a richly imagined future that manages to logically integrate the idea of most people being able to teleport themselves locally, but no one able to do so beyond a thousand miles (hence the continued need for spaceships), yet in his descriptions of the social and economic dislocations caused by the world-changing ability, there is a quaint idea: he says that teleportation allowed humans to spread diseases and invasive species across the globe. We seem to have managed just fine on that score with normal 21st Century travel and commerce.