The Stars My Destination (S.F. MASTERWORKS): Alfred Bester

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Some time later, Foyle re-emerges as "Geoffrey Fourmyle", a nouveau riche dandy. Foyle has rigorously educated himself and had his body altered to become a killing machine. Through yoga, he has achieved the emotional self-control necessary to prevent his tattooed stigmata from showing. He seeks out Robin Wednesbury, a one-way telepath, whom he had raped earlier in the novel, and persuades her to help him charm his way through high society. Because you're all different. You're not lemmings. Some must lead, and hope that the rest will follow.' After much investigation, Gulliver discovers that Olivia was in fact the person in charge of the Vorga during his rescue, and that the former captain of the ship has moved to a cult on Mars where she has become immune to torture because all of her nerve cells have been disabled. He discovers that Olivia was kidnapping refugees while on the Vorga, stealing their items, and then abandoning them in deep space. Gulliver tries to give himself up, driven by his own guilt, but instead he is captured by Presteign's lawyer and used as a decoy in space. During this period, Gulliver discovers space-jaunting, a kind of teleportation previously unknown, and because of this new skill he becomes even more of a target. This Loser Is You: As noted above, the book's idea of an "average man" is a pathetic piece of work. (You can hardly call Gully "average" after the Vorga incident.)

Space Is an Ocean: Foyle is an astronaut but is described as a sailor— this is probably at least in part because of the Recycled In Space aspect.Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth Reprint of the 1957 ed. published as Signet book, S1389, by New American Library, New York; with new introd. Bester describes a future society where personal teleportation – jaunting – has transformed human society in virtually every way, from economic to sociological to legal. This anthropological paradigm shift of society is vaguely reminiscent of Poul Anderson’s 1954 novel Brainwave. Though successful in all these fields, he is best remembered for his science fiction, including The Demolished Man, winner of the inaugural Hugo Award in 1953, a story about murder in a future society where the police are telepathic, and The Stars My Destination, a 1956 SF classic about a man bent on revenge in a world where people can teleport, that inspired numerous authors in the genre and is considered an early precursor to the cyberpunk movement in the 1980s. McGuffin: PyrE is one of the reasons that everyone with a bit of interest in what happens to the Inner Planets is chasing Gully Foyle across every corner of their territory.

Reading this is like being on fire, snarling like a Tyger, and being the dumb brute and the intellectual mastermind at the same time. Reading it a second time is like chumming up with a psychopath and learning that he's really the good guy because everyone else is just as crazy as him. a b c d Gaiman, Neil (1999). "Introduction". The Stars My Destination. SF Masterworks. London: Orion Publishing. ISBN 978-1-85798-814-7. In 1963, Australian comics illustrator Stanley Pitt and his brother Reginald worked on a proposed comic strip adaptation entitled Gully Foyle. Bester looked over the strips and gave his approval. A film company, which held the rights to the novel, apparently put a stop to this. Small circulation publications containing the strips appeared in 1967 and 2001. [ citation needed] Secret Identity: Foyle pretends to be an Upper-Class Twit in his Fourmyle identity, roving around with his "Four-Mile Circus".The name of Charles Fort Jaunte, who discovers teleportation, derives from Charles Fort, a writer principally of nonfiction, who coined the term "teleportation". [ citation needed] From Nobody to Nightmare: Gully goes from the most insignificant cog in the machine to one of the few who truly lives outside its control. Whitaker's Cumulative Book List: 62. 1956. {{ cite journal}}: CS1 maint: untitled periodical ( link) Busch, Anita (February 27, 2015). "Paramount In Talks To Acquire Rights To Sci-Fi Classic 'The Stars My Destination' ". deadline.com . Retrieved March 1, 2015. Towards the end the novel takes a huge conceptual leap, as perspective shifts over time and space. to create the jagged effect, Bester has used the printed word in very innovative ways - the letters are boxed in, stretched out, strung together to create wave patterns and pictograms... it's the nearest you can come to jump cuts in literature. The narrative becomes almost visual here, and it is this part of the novel which pushed it up from three to four stars for me.