My Cultural Diet

I’ve had a copy of Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination sitting on my bookshelf for God knows how long, so facing a bit of a lull in my reading, I finally decided to tackle it. Lauded by the likes of Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, Michael Moorcock, and Carl Sagan, The Stars My Destination is the story of Gully Foyle, an uneducated lout of a man determined to get revenge on the ship that left him marooned in space. Along the way, he rapes, pillages, and deceives, and may just hold the key to the next step in human evolution. The novel has some fantastical conceits — e.g., the discovery of personal teleportation completely upends society — and it’s impossible to not see Bester’s influence on everything from Neuromancer to The Expanse. The story is told in big, broad strokes — maybe too broad. I enjoyed it well enough, and can see how it could have easily caused a stir upon its original publication in 1956, but there are also parts that are so wild as to be silly.

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