Alfred Bester The Stars My Destination (1956)
This is why I've tended to steer clear of the classics. I'm sure everything said of this novel is approximately true, but as with Asimov's Foundation, Zelazny's Lord of Light, Larry Niven's entire body of work, and many, many others, I probably should have read it when I was a teenager; because I'm nearly fifty-five and I think the moment has gone for myself and this novel. I don't recall being particularly knocked out by The Demolished Man either, for what that may be worth.
The Stars My Destination tells of Gully Foyle, a raging thickie stranded in space who swears bloody vengeance on the crew of a passing spaceship which fails to respond to his distress call. He's eventually rescued by other means, has his face tattooed, receives an education, acquires superhuman powers, disguises himself as the bon vivant owner of a weird futuristic fairground and, in pursuing his vendetta, saves the world from a super-weapon which presumably serves as part of some cold war metaphor. It's weird, fast-paced, imaginative, and ticks all of the boxes which might require ticking, and yet I just wasn't feeling it. For all it has in its favour, it tends to jabber in much the same way as C.M. Kornbluth, lending the text the slightly disagreeable jazzy quality of those Marx Brothers movies amounting to somebody saying something stupid very fast, and that's before we even get to the parole in libertà of the finale.
Some men on the internet said that The Stars My Destination is a precursor to cyberpunk with its pacing and corporate espionage, but I couldn't really give a shit about cyberpunk, so one might just as well call it a precursor to Joe Dolce's Shaddap You Face for all the difference it makes. Certainly it's hard not to think of said Ultravox defusing novelty record each time Gully Foyle asks what's a matter, you?, which he does with frequency sufficient for me to have noticed.
The story is actually, on close inspection, a little too weird to be sustainable under ordinary circumstances and is as such exactly the sort of thing A.E. van Vogt churned out on a fairly regular basis, except van Vogt usually made it work in spite of itself, screwy shit that doesn't quite add up being his natural literary habitat. So The Stars My Destination is good, or at least it's not bad, but it could have been better and probably was when I was fifteen. Never mind.
This is why I've tended to steer clear of the classics. I'm sure everything said of this novel is approximately true, but as with Asimov's Foundation, Zelazny's Lord of Light, Larry Niven's entire body of work, and many, many others, I probably should have read it when I was a teenager; because I'm nearly fifty-five and I think the moment has gone for myself and this novel. I don't recall being particularly knocked out by The Demolished Man either, for what that may be worth.
The Stars My Destination tells of Gully Foyle, a raging thickie stranded in space who swears bloody vengeance on the crew of a passing spaceship which fails to respond to his distress call. He's eventually rescued by other means, has his face tattooed, receives an education, acquires superhuman powers, disguises himself as the bon vivant owner of a weird futuristic fairground and, in pursuing his vendetta, saves the world from a super-weapon which presumably serves as part of some cold war metaphor. It's weird, fast-paced, imaginative, and ticks all of the boxes which might require ticking, and yet I just wasn't feeling it. For all it has in its favour, it tends to jabber in much the same way as C.M. Kornbluth, lending the text the slightly disagreeable jazzy quality of those Marx Brothers movies amounting to somebody saying something stupid very fast, and that's before we even get to the parole in libertà of the finale.
Some men on the internet said that The Stars My Destination is a precursor to cyberpunk with its pacing and corporate espionage, but I couldn't really give a shit about cyberpunk, so one might just as well call it a precursor to Joe Dolce's Shaddap You Face for all the difference it makes. Certainly it's hard not to think of said Ultravox defusing novelty record each time Gully Foyle asks what's a matter, you?, which he does with frequency sufficient for me to have noticed.
The story is actually, on close inspection, a little too weird to be sustainable under ordinary circumstances and is as such exactly the sort of thing A.E. van Vogt churned out on a fairly regular basis, except van Vogt usually made it work in spite of itself, screwy shit that doesn't quite add up being his natural literary habitat. So The Stars My Destination is good, or at least it's not bad, but it could have been better and probably was when I was fifteen. Never mind.
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