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

Product Information

I spent some time to count things out and have a list of what I think are the 20 Binary Systems in the base game (not including NG+) as well as the only Three-Star System. From my count, that leaves 77 individual Star Systems. I do not plan to list those out but I can with pictures if people request it in the comments. If I've made any errors, let me know and I'll happily update things. 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.

It is an inverse of the levels of hell; each reinvention has Gully reinventing himself to become more surfacely human, moving up the ladder of society into something that appears more socially acceptable but that remains rotten at the core. Depending on the reader's point of view, he may become more accessible, but really he is the same single-minded psychopath, single-minded in pursuit of his goal and unable to recognize or empathize with others. At one point he thinks he 'falls in love' but as with everything, he's fallen in love with an idea, an instant of emotion and not anything real. The main character is Gully Foyle, a spacer with no real motivation in life. Content to be lazy, without purpose beyond existence, he's a bit of a drifter, until a spaceship he is traveling on is destroyed. Gully discovers a will to live and manages to keep himself barely alive, leaving the tiny reinforced space he exists in to scavenge supplies five minutes at a time in his barely functional spacesuit. At last, he sees a ship passing close by. He sends up a signal flare. The ship slows, almost stops, and then turns away. From here, the story takes off, as Gully discovers the heat of revenge as the one thing that can give him purpose. Phlebotinum: PyrE— a psychically activated explosive that's even more powerful, gram for gram, than plutonium. Humans Are Psychic in the Future: in the setting, "jaunting" is a learned skill and random people simply developed telepathy out of nowhere.Despite thinking of myself as a Sci-Fi fan, I'd never encountered any Bester before this and as such had no expectations, but my god was I pleasantly surprised. Bester appears to be a master of the anti-hero protagonist (see also Demolished Man) and his scope for world building, nay universe building is second to none. He tells a fantastic story here, reaching through time and space with a huge arc of plot and character development. I was hooked from the first chapter, never once bored and ultimately satisfied by the end. At one point he goes against a bunch of Martian commandos who have similar augments AND military training on top of it. He barely escapes with his life.

Cold-Blooded Torture: Foyle inflicts this on the people connected to the Vorga, and it's especially grisly when he realizes that they are implanted with an Involuntary Suicide Mechanism... which Foyle gets around by cutting a man's heart out and keeping him on full life support (and in agony) while he interrogates him. I can confirm that clearing multiple eras with all stars cleared did not award this achievement to me on Steam. Course, so many Steam achievements are bugged tf out that I can't know if I was supposed to get the achievement and didn't, or if I failed to meet the criteria. Translated by Vittorio Curtoni. First published in this translation in the Bester collection Tutti i racconti (1939-1942) La tigre della notte.

Change Website Language

I used to be almost exclusively a SF and fantasy reader. One of the pleasures of expanding my literary horizons is that having now read many more classics and literary works than I used to, I recognize references even in my favorite genre novels. So I was a third of the way through the book when I realized that Bester was totally writing a SF version of The Count of Monte Cristo. 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.