The acid of fury ran through him, eating away the brute patience and sluggishness that had made a cipher of Gully Foyle, precipitating a chain of reactions that would make an infernal machine of Gully Foyle. He was dedicated.
'Vorga, I kill you filthy.'
Gully Foyle is the lone survivor of a wrecked spaceship, struggling to survive in the indifference of outer space. When another ship, the Vorga, marked with the symbol of one of Earth's wealthiest tycoons, passes by, he thinks he's been saved--but then the ship moves on, despite his distress signal. Its indifference to Gully's life breeds in him a bloody need for revenge, so after saving himself, he returns to Earth, intent on destroying whose who left him to die at any cost.
What a crazy book this is! Despite a relatively simple and recognizable throughline--Gully's lust for revenge--it's packed with enough ideas to power a hundred science fiction books. Gully lives in a distant future in which the planets of the Solar System are at war with their satellites, and all human beings have learned to teleport, or "jaunte." In a prologue, Bester describes the discovery of this ability as a new understanding of the will: the first jaunter is a man who, about to drown, zaps himself out of the water through the sheer force of his desire to keep living. There's a connection here between the jaunting and Gully's bloodlust; Gully himself is a man reduced to nothing but will.
The teleportation produces some great and absurd facets to Bester's vision of the future: women, suddenly vulnerable to perverts jaunting into their bedrooms and showers, are repressed in a neo-Victorian cultural shift. The rich flaunt their wealth by never teleporting anywhere, but instead traveling in the most ornate and cumbersome ways possible. This leads to a scene in which Gully, having accumulated wealth and prestige in his pursuit of revenge, arrives at a party via a railway train that lays its own tracks out ahead of it on the street. But there's more, much more, too much even to really dig into: primitive asteroid-dwellers who tattoo Gully's face with tiger stripes against his will, a blind albino woman who "sees" infrared, an enormous underground prison, a radioactive investigator who can only be around others for 30 minutes, ascetics who have all of their senses surgically removed. The Stars My Destination reads a little like Bester was afraid that he might die before he got all of his ideas down on the page.
Stars is weakest, for me, when it relies most heavily on its pulp sources. The novel is insanely action-heavy and fast-paced, but not always in a way that produced, for me, the actual tension that a movie scene might. And I often rolled my eyes at the way that women keep falling head over heels for Gully, despite his dreary singlemindedness. The women characters reminded me of the Frank Frazetta women you see on the covers of old science fiction magazines, wearing mostly ripped-up clothes and pressing their bosoms to the hero. And although we're meant to believe in Gully's moral transformation over the course of the book, I didn't find his rape of one of those characters to be worthwhile or necessary.
About that transformation: when the novel begins, Gully is an idiot. He speaks in a kind of patois we're meant to understand is the language of the interstellar lower classes, and he's so literally stupid that he tries to blow up Vorga the ship instead of whoever was inside of it, in his bloodlust literally blaming the vessel itself. Like Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo, he becomes a rich and powerful man for the sole purpose of wreaking his revenge, but in becoming a rich and powerful man, he himself changes. He becomes more intelligent, his dialect changes, and eventually he begins to question the moral quality of his revenge.
Gully's transformation is social, cultural, economic, moral, intellectual, and eventually, transhumanist. His will to survive after the wreck makes him the only human able to jaunte in space; later, he discovers the ability to jaunte through space-time. By the end of the novel--with an assist from a cataclysmic space weapon--Gully becomes an ubermensch who can travel at will to the ends of the universe. This climax produces some of Bester's best writing, and to capture the new way that Gully experiences the world Bester has to turn to Dadaist shape poetry. In the end, Gully exhorts the "common" people of earth to be like him, and shake the bonds of contingent reality:
'You pigs, you. You rut like pigs, is all. You got the most in you, and you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties. All of you. Every you...'
Although the future Bester imagines is a familiarly capitalist hellscape, The Stars My Destination is ultimately optimistic about humanity's future. Technology gives Gully the ability to enact his will without limitation; this, to me, expresses a belief in the future perfectibility of humankind. It's not a vision I find particularly compelling: I think it's obviously overlaid with classism and sexism, and it skirts pretty close to the Nazi way of reading Nietzsche. But Gully is compelling, and so is this book.
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