The Stars My Destination
The Stars My Destination is a science fiction novel by American writer Alfred Bester. It was first published in book form in the United Kingdom in June 1956, where it was titled Tiger! Tiger!; the novel was named after William Blake's 1794 poem "The Tyger", whose first verse is printed as the first page of the novel. The novel remains widely known under that title in the markets in which this edition was circulated. It was subsequently serialized in the American Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in four parts, beginning in October 1956. A working title was Hell's My Destination; the book was also associated with the name The Burning Spear. It was Bester's last novel for the next 19 years.
The novel was widely criticized and praised when it first appeared, but it is now appreciated as a classic work and a prescient forerunner of the cyberpunk science fiction subgenre.
Premise
In the 24th or 25th century, humans have colonized the Solar System and also learned to teleport. It tells the story of Gulliver Foyle, a man driven and transformed by a thirst for vengeance.Plot
At the time when the book is set, "jaunting"—personal teleportation—has so upset the social and economic balance that the Inner Planets are at war with the Outer Satellites. Gully Foyle of the Presteign-owned merchant spaceship Nomad—an uneducated, unskilled, unambitious man whose life is at a dead end—is marooned in space when the ship is attacked. After six months of waiting, a passing spaceship, the Vorga, also owned by the powerful Presteign industrial clan, ignores his signal and abandons him. Foyle is enraged and is transformed into a man consumed by revenge, the first of many transformations.Foyle repairs the ship and barely survives but is found and adopted by a cargo cult in the Asteroid Belt who tattoo a hideous mask of a tiger on his face and force-marry him to one of their girls. He recovers his health, escapes and is returned to Terra. His attempt to blow up the Vorga fails, and he is captured by Presteign. Unknown to Foyle, the Nomad was carrying "PyrE", a new material which could make the difference between victory and defeat in the war. Presteign hires security agent Saul Dagenham to interrogate Foyle, to find the ship and PyrE.
Protected by his revenge fixation, Foyle cannot be broken and he is put into a -proof prison. There he meets Jisbella McQueen, who teaches him to think clearly and tells him he should find out who gave the order not to rescue him. Together they escape and get his tattoos removed—but not with total success: the subcutaneous scars become visible again whenever Foyle becomes too emotional. The pair travel to the Nomad, where they salvage not only PyrE, but also a fortune in platinum metal. Jisbella is captured by Dagenham, but Foyle escapes.
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. Foyle tracks down the crew of the Vorga to learn the identity of the ship's captain but each person he finds has been implanted with a death-reflex and dies when questioned. Each time, Foyle is tormented by the reappearance of "The Burning Man", a vision of him on fire.
At a society party, Foyle is smitten with Presteign's daughter Olivia. He also meets Jisbella again—now Dagenham's lover—who chooses not to reveal Foyle's identity, although Dagenham has realized it. During a nuclear attack by the Outer Satellites, Foyle goes to Olivia to save her. She tells him that to have her, he must be as cruel and ruthless as she is. Robin, traumatized by the attacks, tries to buy her way out of her arrangement with Foyle by revealing the name of another Vorga crew member. Foyle agrees, but reneges and asks Robin to help him to earn Olivia's favours. Robin, who had feelings for Foyle all the time, gets jealous and goes to Central Intelligence to betray him.
Foyle learns that the captain of the Vorga has joined a Scoptsy cult on Mars and has had all her sensory nerves disabled, making her immune to conventional torture. Foyle kidnaps a telepath to interrogate the captain and learns that the ship did not rescue him because it was picking up refugees, taking their belongings and ejecting them into space. He also learns that the captain was Olivia Presteign. Now she rescues him from Martian commandos, as she sees in Foyle someone who can match her hatred and need to destroy.
Driven by a guilty conscience, Foyle tries to give himself up to Presteign's lawyer, Regis Sheffield, who is known as a Terran patriot. Sheffield turns out to be a spy for the Outer Satellites and he captures Foyle. Sheffield tells Foyle that when the Nomad was attacked, Foyle was taken off the ship, transported 600,000 miles and set adrift in a spacesuit to be a decoy to attract ships to be ambushed. Instead, Foyle had space-jaunted—teleporting a cosmic distance, very much further than had been previously believed possible—back to the Nomad. Now, the Outer Satellites not only want PyrE, they want Foyle to learn the secret of space-jaunting, and they are ready to use extreme measures.
Presteign reveals that PyrE is activated by telepathy and Robin is enlisted to trigger it to flush out Foyle. Bits of PyrE left exposed by Foyle's tests to determine its purpose cause destruction worldwide but primarily at Foyle's abandoned encampment in St. Patrick's Cathedral, where Sheffield has brought him. The church partially collapses, killing Sheffield and trapping Foyle, unconscious but alive, over a pit of flame. Suffering from synesthesia brought on by the explosion affecting his neurological implants, Foyle through space and time as "The Burning Man". Finally he lands in the future, where Robin telepathically tells him how to escape from the collapsing cathedral.
Back in the present, Foyle is pressured by Presteign, Y'ang-Yeovil, and Dagenham to surrender the rest of his cache of PyrE, which had been protected from exploding by its Inert Lead Isotope container, and to teach mankind how to space-. He leads them to where the rest of the PyrE is hidden but makes off with it and across the globe, throwing slugs of PyrE into the crowd at each stop. He asks humanity to choose: either destroy itself or follow him into space. Foyle realizes the key to space-jaunting is faith, not the certainty of an answer but the conviction that somewhere an answer exists. He from one nearby star to another, finding new worlds suitable for colonization, but reachable only if he shares the secret of space-jaunting. He comes to rest back with the cargo cult, where the people see him as a holy man and await his revelation.
Description
Composition
The novel was outlined by Bester while he was living in Britain, and actually written mainly when he was living in Rome. The project had its origins in a newspaper clipping that Bester read about Poon Lim, a shipwrecked World War II sailor on a raft, stranded in the South Atlantic. He had drifted un-rescued in the Atlantic for a world record 133 days, because passing ships thought he was a lure to bring them within torpedo range of a hidden submarine. From there grew the story of the antihero Gully Foyle, seeking revenge for his abandonment and causing havoc all about him: a future-set retelling of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo.Like Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo, Foyle is thrown into prison, in this case the supposedly -proof Gouffre Martel located in caverns. He establishes a clandestine connection to another prisoner, Jisbella McQueen, and through her he is educated to the point where he can conceive a plan to escape and exact his revenge. Escaping with her and locating the wreck of the Nomad, he uses its treasure, as Dantès did, to reinvent himself as Geoffrey Fourmyle.
Bester once wrote that he used playful narration at one point to grab the reader's attention.
Publication and reception
First published in book form in the UK in June 1956 as Tiger! Tiger!, The Stars My Destination was subsequently serialized in Galaxy, where The Demolished Man had also appeared. It ran in four parts, then was published in the US later in 1957.The novel has often featured in lists of the best science fiction novels of all time.
Influence on cyberpunk
The novel has been described as proto-cyberpunk, predating the literary movement by over two decades. Specifically, the novel features megacorporations as powerful as governments, a dark overall vision of the future, and the cybernetic enhancement of the body.Allusions
The name of Charles Fort Jaunte, who discovers teleportation, derives from Charles Fort, a writer principally of nonfiction, who coined the term "teleportation".The title "The Stars My Destination" appears in a quatrain quoted by Foyle twice during the book. The first time, while he is trapped in outer space, he states:
Toward the end of the novel, after he has returned to human life and become something of a hero, he states:
Both quatrains are based on a poetic form that was popular in England and the United States during the 18th-to-mid-20th centuries, in which a person stated their name, country, city or town, and a religious homily within the rhyming four-line structure. This literary device had been previously used by James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and M.R. James in A Warning to the Curious.
Bester may have come across his title expression in the writings of John Whiteside Parsons, one of the fathers of modern rocketry, who was also a science fiction fan and occultist. In 1943, Parsons wrote: "Rocketry may not be my True Will, but it's one hell of a powerful drive. With Thelema as my goal and the stars my destination and my home, I have set my eyes on high".
Bester's initial work on the book began in England, and he took the names for his characters from a UK telephone directory. As a result, many of the characters are named after British or Irish towns or other features: Gulliver Foyle, Robin Wednesbury, the Presteign clan, Regis Sheffield, Y'ang-Yeovil, Saul Dagenham, Sam Quatt, Rodger Kempsey, the Bo'ness and Uig ship underwriters.