"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

[waiwode.livejournal.com]

It's awesome, but I never really liked the sequel, The Deceivers.

One of my favourite Bester novel is still The Demolished Man, about a telepathic detective trying to solve a murder in a future when mind-reading counts as valid evidence.

Doug.

[momentrabbit.livejournal.com]

The first time I read TDM, near the end I had to abruptly flip back to the start - to confirm I'd made the same error the antagonist had. Very nice twist, that.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

THERE'S A SEQUEL????

[waiwode.livejournal.com]

Yes. Ish.

The Deceivers isn't a Gully Foyle book though. Rather it's a completely different story later in the same setting.

I was young when I read it first, and the Tor paperback version made a point of declaring that this was a sequel ... and I was upset to find it wasn't a sequel in a narrative sense. That disappointment has flavoured later adult readings of the book, so when I say "I don't like it as much as his other books" I admit there is an initial bias I can't shake free of.

Doug.