The Stars My Destination
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Image:GY 5610.jpg The Stars My Destination (originally called Tiger! Tiger!, from William Blake's poem "The Tyger") is a science fiction novel by Alfred Bester, first published in Galaxy magazine as a 4-part serial, beginning in the October 1956 issue.
Contents |
The book
The Stars My Destination anticipated many of the staples of the later cyberpunk movement—the megacorporations as powerful as the governments, a dark overall vision of the future, the cybernetic enhancement of the body. To this it added the standard "one weird idea" of science fiction—that human beings could learn to teleport, or "jaunte" from point to point, with various personal limitations but one overall absolute limit: no one can jaunte through outer space. On the surface of a planet, the jaunte rules supreme; off it, mankind is still restricted to machinery.
In this future world—extrapolated with convincing and sometimes frightening detail by Bester—we are introduced to the protagonist, Gulliver ("Gully") Foyle: "He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead..." Foyle is a cipher, a man with potential but no motivation, who is suddenly marooned in space. Even this is not enough to galvanize him beyond trying to find air and food on the wreck. But all changes when an apparent rescue ship deliberately passes him by, stirring him irrevocably out of his passivity...
The scenario of the shipwrecked man ignored by passing ships came from a National Geographic story that Bester had read from World War II: a shipwrecked sailor had survived four months on a raft in the Pacific, and ships had passed him without picking him up, due to their captains' fears that the raft was a decoy to lure them into torpedo range of Japanese submarines. (Source: An account by Bester in My Affair with Science Fiction, in Hell's Cartographers ed. by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss, 1975)
Gully Foyle is the lowest of the low. A murderer, a rapist, a driven man, a tiger. The book is in a sense his journey towards humanity and beyond. He destroys and kills wherever he goes, driven by his obsession with revenge. But things are not as simple as he thinks...
In a sense, The Stars My Destination is simply a SF rewrite of a far older classic, The Count of Monte Cristo. It is the study of a capable, vengeance-driven man who escapes from an apparently impossible situation (twice, in Foyle's case) and returns as an utterly different man to wreak the vengeance that he was denied under his old name. Unlike many other Monte Cristo homages, however, Bester's is written with language fully as evocative as the original's, and with added intricate plot threads that make Gully Foyle's odyssey unique.
Campbell's hero
Image:Stars my destination vintage.jpg The novel also conforms to what Joseph Campbell, in his The Hero with a Thousand Faces, calls "the monomyth": "The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation—initiation—return ... which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth." As he summarizes it, "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men."
Tech of the book
There are two major technologies here. The first and most significant is "jaunting", named after the scientist (Jaunte) who discovered it. Jaunting is the instantaneous teleportation of one's body (and anything one is wearing or carrying). One is able to move up to a thousand miles by just thinking. This suddenly revealed and near-universal ability totally disrupts the economic balance between the Inner Planets (Venus, Earth, Mars, and the Moon) and the Outer Satellites (various moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune), eventually leading to a war between the two. Jaunting has other effects on the social fabric of the novel's world, and these are examined in true science-fictional fashion. Women of the upper classes are locked away in jaunte-proof rooms "for their protection", the treatment of criminals of necessity goes back to the Victorian "Separate System", and freaks and monsters abound. It is to this world that a driven man comes, and the consequences are explosive.
The second technology is "pyrE", a weapon powerful enough to win an interplanetary war.
The story
Trapped
Image:Stars my destination masterworks.jpg
- Gully Foyle is my name
- And Terra is my nation
- Deep space is my dwelling place
- Death my destination
Gully Foyle is the last remaining survivor of the Nomad, a merchant spaceship attacked in the war with the Outer Satellites and left drifting in space. Foyle is a living zombie, a man who has not bothered to explore more than the minimum potential of his abilities. Trapped on Nomad, he blindly waits for a rescuer. Seeing a spacecraft named Vorga, he rejoices thinking he will be saved. The Vorga however passes him by, leaving him to die. This callousness triggers a consuming rage in Foyle that transforms him. Vengeance becomes his mission. Jury-rigging a repair to Nomad's engine, Foyle crashes onto an asteroid covered with the wreckage of other crashed ships and inhabited by the offspring of the wrecks' marooned crews. These odd descendants, dubbed the Scientific People, tattoo a Maori-style mask onto Foyle's face; horrendous and fierce, it includes the word "N♂mad" across his forehead. Foyle then escapes from the tribe with his new face.
Treacherous
Disguised as a student of jaunting, Foyle plans an attack on the Vorga. Before he can do this, he is discovered by his instructor, a telepath, whom he then rapes and forces to help him. The attack against the Vorga fails miserably and he is captured. The authorities question Foyle about the location of Nomad, which he stubbornly refuses to reveal. Incarcerated underground, he discovers that an acoustic quirk in the prison caves allows him to communicate with a fellow prisoner, a woman. During further questioning by the authorities, Foyle discovers that a vast treasure exists on board the Nomad. He sees this as an opportunity to complete his vengeance, which is now directed towards the Captain of the Vorga, rather than the ship itself. Escaping with his fellow prisoner, he returns to the Nomad seeking the treasure, a fortune in platinum. He is followed by the authorities, however, and he abandons his fellow thieves in order to escape with the treasure and continue his hunt for the Captain of the Vorga.
Transformation
Using an alias, Foyle publicly re-emerges as a rich dandy who charms high society with his antics. Foyle, however, is not the same person: he has extensively altered himself physically, and rigorously educated himself. Meeting Presteign, the owner of the Vorga, he falls in love with Presteign's daughter, Olivia. Despite this, he is unable to relinquish his hunt. Blackmailing the telepathic jaunte instructor, his old rape victim, he finds several ex-crewmembers of the Vorga, who perish at the mention of the Vorga. He finally keeps one crew member alive long enough to force him to reveal who captained the ship. To Foyle's horror, it is the woman he loves, Olivia. Driven by rage, remorse and self pity he tries to give himself up to the authorities who are frantically hunting him. He approaches a lawyer who turns out to be a double agent working for the Outer Satellites. Foyle is told that, while the authorities of the Inner Planets are most interested in the sample of isotope "pyrE" that was in the Nomad's safe (and is now in Foyle's possession), the Outer Satellites are more interested in Foyle himself. When the O.S. attacked Foyle's ship, Nomad, he was observed "jaunting" himself across space. This is something no one had ever done before and something Foyle himself did not know he could do. Foyle holds the holy grail of jaunting: space travel. The lawyer disables Foyle, but at the same moment a small amount of the pyrE is detonated.
Transformer
In the wreckage and confusion of the detonation, with his senses scrambled by the shock of the explosion, he once again jauntes through space and time, revisiting key moments of his journey to this point (finally explaining the mysterious Burning Man who had been appearing and disappearing throughout the novel). Finally he jauntes to some unknown location in the future, where he is given instructions (relayed from himself) for the exact route he needs—allowing for his confused senses—to escape the cathedral. Later, with his mind back to normal, in a conference with interested parties he decides not to hold the power of pyrE and time jaunting to himself, but to give a chance to the masses. Traveling throughout the world, he jettisons his pyrE urging the world's people to follow him into the future. He promises to teach them time jaunting if they can find him. He demands that they, like he has, find their full potential. That they, too, become the driven tiger. With that, he jauntes to the Scientific People to await the awakened human race.