The Stars My Destination

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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. Gully Foyle is my name And Terra is my nation. Deep space is my dwelling place, The stars my destination. That's me,' he said, motioning to the robot. 'That's all of us. We prattle about free will, but we're nothing but response ... mechanical reaction in prescribed grooves. So ... here I am, here I am, waiting to respond. Press the buttons and I'll jump.' 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]

Theme Naming: Presteign, Dagenham and Sheffield are all named after towns in Great Britain. Bester got the names out of a phone book.

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Bester, Alfred. “A Diatribe Against Science Fiction.” 1961. Redemolished. New York: iBooks, 2000. 431–35. Alfred Bester began his career with stories published in Thrilling Wonder Stories , Startling Stories , Astounding Science Fiction - names that have come to define that brief period known as the Golden Age of SF, when the possibilities offered by science seemed limited only by the human imagination, and the opening of the road to the stars only a couple of decades away. Less concerned with practicalities like deadly solar radiation, terminal cold or the barrier of the speed of light, writers played the game of 'what if ...' and then went on to speculate on the chages future technologies and discoveries would play on the individual psyche and on society as a whole. Asimov, Isaac. “In Memoriam: Alfred Bester 1913–1987.” Nebula Awards 23, edited by Michael Bishop. New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1987. 24–27. Meaningful Name: 'Gully' is short for Gulliver...and both characters follow similar development arcs right down to becoming reclusive misanthropes at the end of their respective stories. 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.

Sagan, Carl (May 28, 1978). "Growing up with Science Fiction". The New York Times. p.SM7. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved December 12, 2018. Inexplicably Identical Individuals: Mr. Presto. Not inexplicably, though, as the narration mentions they're all given extensive cosmetic surgery to look identical.

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Este libro es de 1956, solo un par de años después de que Asimov publicara "Fundación" y "Fundación e Imperio", y si los comparas, parece como si Bester estuviera adelantado una década, como mínimo. En cierta manera, Bester parece un visionario: las corporaciones son la nueva aristocracia y dominan el mundo en un remedo de nuevo sistema estamental. Y además lleva sus ideas hasta las últimas consecuencias, como qué ocurriría si la gente pudiera teletransportarse ("jauntear" se dice en la novela) a voluntad. Qué pasaría con esa sociedad, con su economía. Cómo la gente se protegería construyendo laberintos para llegar a sus casas, cómo los ricos y poderosos utilizarían medios de comunicación y transporte obsoletos solo para demostrar lo ricos que son. Y todas esas ideas son fascinantes. Lo es menos que como Bester es un hombre de su tiempo, la conclusión lógica del jaunteo para las mujeres es que las encierran en sus habitaciones, para "proteger su honra". Aún así, hay tres personajes femeninos en esta novela y las tres son diferentes y, a su manera, interesantes. Aunque lo de la violación sobraba bastante.

There are elements of the 1950s all through this work, from the simmering cold war between the Inner Planets and the Outer Satellites, to the imminent apocalyptic destructive potential of the PyrE substance that much of the plot revolves around, to the rise of corporate conformity culture that we see with the Mr Prestos of the Presteign company. There's also a sign of the Campbellian SF times with a large part of the plot concerning mental powers of teleportation (Jaunting) and telepathy. Origins: 'Johnson Johnson is my name' A MYSTERY!". Mudcat Café. Mudcat Café Music Foundation. Archived from the original on May 22, 2011 . Retrieved October 18, 2009. [ unreliable source?] A couple of centuries from now humanity has developed the ability to teleport themselves using only their minds in a practice called jaunting. While it has revolutionized society in many ways it’s limited to just a few hundred miles at most so spacecraft are still needed to ferry people and goods around the solar system. Because people are always gonna be assholes there’s a war raging among the Inner Planets and Outer Satellites. Bester also gets extra points for having written the silver age Green Lantern oath, a ditty almost as cool as the one quoted above about Gully Foyle.) Ultimately, Gulliver realizes that the best thing he can do with the PyrE and his newfound skill for space-jaunting is to give it to all mankind, and he teleports and throws the PyrE out into crowds of people, urging them to either destroy themselves or follow him into the great void of space. Gulliver realizes that space-jaunting is caused by faith, not knowledge of any particular skill, and at the end of the novel he becomes a wise man for a cargo cult and spends his days discovering new worlds and offering his divine wisdom to those in need.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: [3] Gulliver Foyle (and his pseudonym, Fourmyle of Ceres), Robin Wednesbury, the Presteign clan, Regis Sheffield, Y'ang- Yeovil, Saul Dagenham, Sam Quatt, Rodger Kempsey, the Bo'ness and Uig ship underwriters. [12] Characters [ edit ] Most of all the cyberpunk elements are still contemporary. At times it is almost pulpy, it is grubby, it doesn’t hold punches – there’s a hint at a rape scene, for example! – which in the 1950’s should have put it in the darkest shadows of pulp fiction. And yet it is so gloriously baroque that it holds your attention. These days I can see it as an HBO series. Boucher, Anthony, ed. (1959). " The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester". A Treasury of Great Science Fiction (Volume Twoed.). Garden City, New York: Doubleday. pp.361–522, color reference p.465. Super-Speed: Foyle eventually has his body upgraded with various functions, including being able to think and move five times faster than normal humans. Notably, it doesn't give him Super-Toughness, so he has to avoid accidentally bumping into anything while super speed is engaged— especially other people who also possess this ability. (His one brief skirmish with some Martian commandos resembles a sped-up game of touch football, in which an actual collision would be messily fatal to both parties.)