So, conditions finally conspired to make me read this book that I’ve heard of but never seen in real life. I got stuck in a town here in Germany for five hours with nothing to do, so I wandered around until I found a book store. Being in Germany, teh english language science fiction section was quite small and consisted entirely of “classics.” Most of them I’d either read before and didn’t have any interest in reading again, or else I already own a copy (the original Foundation trilogy, for example.) The only one I’d never read before was Alfred Bester’s " The Stars My Destination "
After I finished it, the only thing I could think was “why in the name of little green boogers would anyone want to call that a classic.”
That was the lousiest book I’ve read in quite some time, and I’ve read some real crap when desperation strikes - but damn, that book just takes the cake. Physics wrong. No consistency in applying the rules he made up for his universe. Rapid fire random bullshit substituting for plot and dialog. Every damn mistake an author could make is in there somewhere.
Could someone tell me why this damn book didn’t just sink into oblivion like so many of its similar cousins?
The concept of jaunting was (and still is) extremely interesting, and Bester put a lot of work into creating a society that works under such conditions. How do you set up a prison, for instance, when anyone can just teleport out of it?
Bester’s characters are all vivid and exciting and the story just explodes along (admittedly, it’s based upon a good source). It was revolutionary when it came out, and still packs a punch today.
It is a work of imagination and of great science fiction. You seem to object to the fact that it isn’t science fiction, but SF is not about science; it’s about storytelling.
Yep, the book is a great big pile of “What the hell was that?”. Along with “The Demolished Man”, another great big pile.
These aren’t exactly books or novels, but slabs of half finished story tropes and ideas and lines of dialog smashed together into a book-sized container.
… there are people who don’t love The Stars My Destination? Consider my horn swoggled. It’s one of my favorite classic sci fi books. I read it and can’t figure out how people can like things like Foundation and Ringworld when there are real books like that one to read.
Still looking at the period through rose colored glasses. The period was actually chock full of BAD ideas and generic to sucky writing, mostly in the form of cheap novels with a cowboy/knight/astronaut saving a farm lass/fair maiden/alien princess from evil indians/evil knight/evil space aliens by using his awesome prowess with handguns/swords/laser guns.
“The Stars My Destination” (or “Tyger Tyger” depending on which side of the pond you’re on) is one of my favorite 50s SF novels. Among the works considered good SF from the 50s, it’s different. No space aliens or robots or galaxy spanning space empires.
Al Bester was considerably better than the average hack and his ideas were more interesting than the volumes of generic hero fantasies that passed for SF back then (and still do to an extent).
So I trust you hate [i[The Martian Chronicles* also, since the physics there is even worse? Bester was not pretending to write hard sf. He was writing about an interesting take on the world and a very fascinating character. And it was hardly like other books written at the time. I really should reread it some day - that and a few hundred others.
I remember enjoying it but I read it a long time ago. Is it the 21st best SF novel of all time per this list? I don’t know. But it’s probably in my top fifty as another poster noted. I liked the social commentary, the non-stop action, the anti-hero protagonist. SF noir. Next on the block for Doper savaging: A Canticle for Leibowitz? The Martian Chronicles? More Than Human?
I read it in the early 90s and haven’t reread it, but I remember thinking it would make a better movie than it did a book, and it was a pretty good book.
I read it in high school. It was assigned in my Honors English class, in which we also read stuff like Gilgamesh, Macbeth, King Lear, Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and some of the Canterbury Tales. I didn’t understand why. Probably I should re-read it.
I tried to read it about ten years ago, and came away unimpressed, though I’m perfectly willing to admit that it may be my fault somehow. Near as I can remember, my reaction was something like Lemur866’s.
I wouldn’t say I hated it, but it’s definitely highly overrated.
And I’m absolutely baffled whenever anyone says it’d make a great movie. It’s exactly the sort of science fiction story that would be particularly ill-suited to a movie.
The hell? “Not to my taste” I can understand, but the book’s a classic for a reason. I love it, and still reread it every few years. But I’m not sure it’d make a great movie - there’s a lot going on in Gully’s head that would be hard to convey, I think - and he’s hardly a sympathetic modern protagonist, what with the raping and the blackmail…
I could see Daniel Day Lewis or Gary Oldman doing him justice, though. Although some cover artists would have you believe a shaven-headed Robbie Coltrane would do.
I think the opening sequence, with Gully Foyle being left by the Vorga, finding his Purpose and Motivcation, and setting out on vengeance would, if properly filmed, be one of the best all-time film openings, not just for an SF film, buit for any film. It is immediately graspable, visceral, and cinematic. I’ve filomed in my head dozens of times.
You’d need to handle a lot of the rest carefully, but it’d make a hell of a film, done properly.
I suspect it’s already struck a lot of people the same way. The appearance of the “burning man” in the film Event Horizon gives me the awful feeling that the project may have cstarted out as an attempt to film TSMD, and that film was the final result after the usual Hollywood meat grinder.
The jaunting is one of the things that is handled inconsistently, and which drives me nuts. Read the book carefully.
In the first few pages, he tells you that only people with a certain compound can jaunt, and implies that this is genetic and that only about one in five have it and can jaunt. He then goes on to a world in which everyone can jaunt.
The society is completely garbaged because people go to great lengths to protect themselves from random jaunters - and then towards the end, you find out that all that crap is unnecessary because an induction field can block jaunters anyway. No need to keep your prisoners in the dark, no need to hide your women away, no need for the labyrinths at the entrance to the houses, etc.
He also says quite clearly that you can’t jaunt to a place you’ve never been, a picture won’t do. He then has Foyle jaunting all over the world. Are we to assume that during the year he spent being rebuilt into a superman on Mars organizing the Four Mile Circus he was also making jaunts to all of the Earth just in case he needs them?
Random crap:
The fact that the outer colonies have been searching for him ever since his was shipwrecked on the Nomad is not mentioned until the very end of the book - nobody ever does anything that even hints at their interest in Foyle.
The people on the ship from outer colonies intended to dump Foyle near the shipping lanes in a spacesuit and jump any ship that came to rescue him. That must have been some damn busy shipping lanes, considering that Foyle himself knows that the suit is busted - no air tanks, and the connections for them broken. He has to live on the air in the suit when makes his foraging trips through the Nomad, and can’t be gone for more than a few minutes else he will suffocate.
Why in the name of little green boogers doees the person responsible for the one ship not rescuing Foyle turn out to be the blind, sheltered daughter of the guy who owns the shipping company? She’s never even been known to leave the house, let alone the Earth - but she apparently goes on months long trips to play smuggler and kill hundreds of people without anyone noticing that she’s left the house.
About her being blind: She can see in other parts of the spectrum, infrared and lower. I don’t call that blind, and it is deserving of more notice than Bester pays it - her father doesn’t even seem to know that she has these abilities. That kind of thing would be enormously useful in some technical fields, and at any rate doesn’t equate to blindness.
Caves do have whisper lines. They work from point to point within a cave, but only so long as nothing blocks the sound waves. Since Foyle is in a prison cell, we can assume there are walls around him - no whisper lines.
That’s just the stuff that pops to mind while I’m sitting here at work, answering when I should be working. The whole damn book is that way.
