Dumas and teleportation
I tease you a bit, the stars do not stick with the mouse or over-simplifications by my destiny , but they are an interesting, sometimes only a bit tiring, mixture of classic solutions known from adventure literature and still giving thought to futuristic elements. Alfred Bester has created a world in which people can travel virtually unrestricted, since humanity discovered spontaneous teleportation. Freedom of movement, however, undermined the social order, led to great epidemics (some associations?), And attempts to control this chaos brought everyone back to Victorian customs with its clear division into poor and rich.
Against this truly original, sophisticated backdrop, the not-so-original story of Gulliver Foyle will unfold. Perhaps you have already heard about the comparisons of the plotlines from the book Stars of My Destiny to Count Monte Cristo (the main character devotes his life to revenge, it will become a stimulus for him to develop and cross all boundaries, even transcendence). In my opinion, this is the least interesting aspect of this novel, at least from the perspective of today’s reader. Torn by anger, Foyle is a character who learns a lot, but that doesn’t mean he changes. From a laborer working on mining ships, he turns into a goldsmithand then a dandy, but he is still driven by one feeling – revenge. The meaning of his existence is to punish the person who abandoned him to certain death in outer space, while he was a shipwrecked seeker.
Tiger in the dark
Bester wrote Stars of My Destiny in 1956. It is a post-war novel in the strict sense of the word – like the author’s Europe, Foyle’s world tries to recover from great armed conflicts and not fall into new ones. The 1950s were also a crisis moment for superhero comics. The Comic Code Authority was established, and there were trials concerning the harmfulness of this species. I don’t know if Bester was interested in Batman, but he definitely created a character suitable for Detective … or Action Comics. By the way, he described a world modified by the superpowers of teleportation, the artificial improvement of the human body and the colonization of the solar system. The future prophesied by Bester is not at all optimistic. The rich people rule. Humanity owes great changes to science, but academics only function as the last wild tribe in the world perched on a distant asteroid. Women wear heavy dresses and live in labyrinths because in times of free movement it is too easy to lose one’s virtue. This fantasy fiction has an ’80s vibe and is sometimes considered to be the first swallow of cyberpunk.
“In space, no one will hear you scream” – to raise your barbaric roar above the roofs of dormant houses, you must reach Earth, or at least a space station. And then gain power and money, because nobody listens to the poor. Initially, Bester’s novel was to be titled Tiger, Tiger or Hell’s My Destination . Gulliver Foyle is a dangerous man, a cloud of anger and anger, lurking in the darkness like a predator. And it makes no difference to him whether it is an eternal prison night or the darkness and dirt of the society of the future. Remember the original titles when reaching for this book. It has nothing of a heroic fantasy describing the beauty of the cosmos, and in this respect it is closer to the Alien .
Bester, read in the 21st century, is solid science fiction, dark and action-packed. The plot may refer too clearly to the classics of Dumas, but the background on which it plays out is especially interesting. As if, under the pretext of telling about the revenge of one man mad with anger and loneliness, the writer wanted to show us how easily we can lose our freedom and return to authoritarianism and rigid social norms. Fear is enough, for example of freedom of movement. Will Gulliver Foyle be able to get his revenge? Will the answer to this question change anything?
