"Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end..."

[pyat]

Alfred Bester's 1956 SF novel, The Stars My Destination, is the most engaging book I've read this year, perhaps the best piece of fiction I've read in several years. Highly, highly, highly recommended. It ranks with the best John Brunner stuff in terms of frenetic pace and curiously contemporary feel, combined with Theodore Sturgeon's descriptive powers. It could have been written yesterday. I am very sorry I didn't read it as a teenager, 20 years ago, while at the same time I'm pleased that I could discover it now for the first time.

Good grief. If you don't know the book, it tells the story of Gully Foyle, unskilled spacehand. Imagine all the wonderful and terrible things suggested by Roy Batty's dying speech at the end of Bladerunner. Gully Foyle has seen things you people wouldn't believe... and you get to see them, too. Cross Dune with High Colonies and Neuromancer, and maybe a bit of The Fountain. I am becoming incoherent with praise!

Gully Foyle is my name,
And Terra is my nation.
Deep space is my dwelling place,
The Stars my destination.

Comments

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

It's a cool SF story, and had made use of many cyberpunk riffs even before that term was popularized by Gibson some 30 years.

It also underlines just how strong a motivating force that revenge can be, this demonstrated how Foyle catastrophically reacts to being ignored by the Vorga. The them of revenge is similar to the the motivating force driving the hero of The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantes; the plot of the latter book was borrowed liberally by Bester.

I've read this a couple of times over the last 10 years, and like you say, it holds up well despite being over a half century old.

::B::