Last week, I decided to read The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. I did not realize until our class discussion that this story is roughly based around The Count of Monte Cristo, and although I am not very familiar with that narrative, I do know that it is a revenge tale. I wonder how knowing about this connection beforehand may have affected my expectations of Bester’s book. Before I started reading the story, I was expecting there to be a lot of space travel, advanced science, possibly violence and romance. The Stars My Destination certainly provided all of these things.
Despite the monstrous actions of the main character, I actually quite enjoyed falling into the future envisioned in this book. The most fascinating element to me was the teleportation ability humans have. It is referred to as jaunting. The author does a very thorough job of exploring how this instant traveling would effect the economy, the transportation industry, crime, and society in general. He explores what it would mean to not be able to jaunt in this world, and how extreme of a disadvantage that would be. This careful world building made jaunting more believable as a possible next step in the evolution of humanity. It is essentially explained as a sixth sense that was in humans all along, it just needed to be awakened. I definitely appreciated the detailed timeline that explained how jaunting went from an accident in a science lab, to something everyone could do at will in only three generations.
In The Stars My Destination, there are civilizations all across the solar system, each planet, asteroid, and satellite having its own culture. The main character, Gully Foyle, even ends up on an asteroid full of the descendants of an old spaceship crash. These children all have frightening tattoos on their faces, and they inflict the same on Foyle. However, other locations are very different, from the dark prison to the high society. This variety of different places to explore and people to interact with is what really kept the story engaging for me. Each new part of the narrative introduced fascinating ideas and characters. I think this is one of the main reasons science-fiction and space stories are so popular. It really lets authors’ minds run wild with exploration and amazing ideas, all held together by familiar (albeit advanced) technologies and characters for us to enjoy.
Despite the monstrous actions of the main character, I actually quite enjoyed falling into the future envisioned in this book. The most fascinating element to me was the teleportation ability humans have. It is referred to as jaunting. The author does a very thorough job of exploring how this instant traveling would effect the economy, the transportation industry, crime, and society in general. He explores what it would mean to not be able to jaunt in this world, and how extreme of a disadvantage that would be. This careful world building made jaunting more believable as a possible next step in the evolution of humanity. It is essentially explained as a sixth sense that was in humans all along, it just needed to be awakened. I definitely appreciated the detailed timeline that explained how jaunting went from an accident in a science lab, to something everyone could do at will in only three generations.
In The Stars My Destination, there are civilizations all across the solar system, each planet, asteroid, and satellite having its own culture. The main character, Gully Foyle, even ends up on an asteroid full of the descendants of an old spaceship crash. These children all have frightening tattoos on their faces, and they inflict the same on Foyle. However, other locations are very different, from the dark prison to the high society. This variety of different places to explore and people to interact with is what really kept the story engaging for me. Each new part of the narrative introduced fascinating ideas and characters. I think this is one of the main reasons science-fiction and space stories are so popular. It really lets authors’ minds run wild with exploration and amazing ideas, all held together by familiar (albeit advanced) technologies and characters for us to enjoy.
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