Alfred Bester's Masterpiece: The Stars My Destination, Pt. 2

Alfred Bester
The Stars My Destination

Some random disconnected passing thoughts:


I have read that the original title was Tiger! Tiger! but was changed for some reason.  The title possibly may have come from the first line of Blake's poem, "The Tiger."

TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

I know many who prefer the original title, but I, of course, have the opposite view.  The only title I knew for decades was The Stars My Destination, so it's become part of it for me.   On the other hand,  Tiger! Tiger! does fit Gully Foyle, for it is much more closely related to Gully and to the story line,  because, if Gully is  nothing else, he is a predator.  And, then there's that tattoo. 




I read and enjoyed the Prologue to TSMD for several reasons. One is that it provided information helpful to the story, and the second reason is its opening paragraph, which struck me as being somewhat familiar.  I have reformatted it.  Does anyone else think this is remotely familiar to something else?



"This was a golden age,
                       a time of high adventure,
                       rich living, and hard dying.  .  .
but nobody thought so. 


This was a future
                      of fortune and theft,
                      pillage and rapine,
                      culture and vice.  .  .
but nobody admitted it.


This was an age
                      of extremes,
                      a fascinating century of freaks.  .  .
but nobody loved it."



This, however, is how it appeared in the book:


"This was a golden age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying.  .  . but nobody thought so.  This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice.  .  . but nobody admitted it.  This was an age of extremes, . . . a fascinating century of freaks.  .  . but nobody loved it."


And there's even an interesting short story buried there--the discovery of jaunting.  


Pyre, a horrific weapon,  becomes an important issue in the story, as there is a solar system-wide war going on at this time.  Foyle knows the location of Pyre and therefore becomes a person of great interest to the Earth government.  A pyre is also a funeral ritual, a traditional way of honoring a leader or important person in some societies.  Is this weapon signifying the death of the present human civilization?

Another mythic element that seems relevant is the myth of the Phoenix, a long-lived bird that is the only one of its kind.  Every thousand or more years the Phoenix in its nest bursts into flames and arises reborn out of the ashes.  Foyle is trapped at the end when the Pyre is set off and as he attempts to escape, makes a discovery that transforms him into being able to jaunte at a new level.  And humanity will be transformed from a species limited to the solar system to ultimately a galactic civilization. Both Gully and humanity, in one sense, are reborn.  

It's a great story, one that rewards rereading, which I do every couple of years regularly.  It's permanently in my TBR bookcase.  

Alfred Bester's Masterpiece: The Stars My Destination, Pt. 1

Alfred Bester
The Stars My Destination

 It's been often said that character development is rather weak in SF, as science and technology and problem-solving tend to be the central focus.  One very early exception to this is Gully Foyle, the  main character in The Stars My Destination (TSMD).  When I first read TSMD, I was amazed to find someone who emerged  from the crowd.  He is now my No. 1 Most Unforgettable SF Character.  As an early discarded title suggests, he can best be described as a predator.  There are also several other characters who could carry a novel of their own.  Some of which are mentioned later.  

 It's a classic whose literary roots now go back almost two centuries:  the revenge tale of Edmund Dantes, The Count of Monte Cristo.   Both Dantes and Foyle were trapped, and both manage to escape with considerable wealth which they use to remake themselves--from a fishing boat captain to a Count and from a lowly merchant seaman to one of the elite,  Foyle of Foyle.  And, both have the same goal, revenge on those who trapped them and, ironically, enriched them.

But, before Gully became a revenge-driven predator, he was a cypher, mostly just existing.  The following is a picture of his character as reflected "in the official Merchant Marine records.

---------------------------------------------------------

"FOYLE, GULLIVER------AS-128/127:006

EDUCATION:                      NONE
SKILLS                                 NONE
MERITS                                NONE
RECOMMENDATIONS       NONE

(PERSONNEL COMMENTS)

A man of physical strength and intellectual potential stunted by lack of ambition.  Energies at minimum.  The stereotype Common Man.  Some unexpected shock might possibly awaken him, but Psych cannot find the key.  Not recommended for promotion.  Has reached a dead end."

------------------------------------------------------------
In the beginning Foyle was a non-entity, barely conscious of himself as a human being.  The psychological profile said it would take a shock to awaken Foyle to be able to function at somewhere near his potential.  The shock appeared--being abandoned to die by the sister-ship Vorga.  Whatever else was missing in Foyle's personality, self preservation was obviously functioning.   Once he manages to escape,  he changes from a non-entity to a brutal but intelligent individual driven solely by revenge.  



Significant characters in the novel;

Peter Yang-Yeovil (Yin-Yang?): the  Spy master who is a direct ancestor of Mencius (a real historical person who was the most famous follower of Confucius--confusion about dates, but could be as early as 385 BC and lived as late as 289 BC).

Saul Dagenham: the radioactive security chief

Robin: the jaunte and social graces teacher, who refuses to become his Romance Instructor

Jiz: frustrated by the restrictions placed on women and turns to crime to gain her freedom, a precursor of numerous female thieves, assassins,  and bodyguards found in later cyberpunk novels.

Olivia: the Ice Princess, bored by her luxurious but restricted life who engages in various illegal business ventures. 

I found it frustrating to encounter these people so seldom.

I think the creation of Gully Foyle is TSMD's greatest strength. Encountering him back in the 50s was a shock in comparison to the relatively bland and cardboard characters usually found in most SF stories, and in spite of the past 60 years of development of characterization in SF, I consider Gully to still be one of the strongest characters in SF. 

Probably the weakest aspect of the novel would be the culture created by jaunting--I think it's a bit thin--it reminds me of many rock-and-roll performances--lots of bright lights, smoke, noise, but a bit thin on substance or quality. While his world isn't as fully developed as Dune, for example, it still comes alive as an hectic, neon-lit, flashing world.   My copy is around 250 pages and it would take a lot larger work to really develop the culture to some depth.  However, it is fun to read and Bester's satiric eye has nailed the future aristocracy quite well. 

Bester has included a number of mythic elements in this work.  Gully can be seen as a dying and resurrecting god in one sense, for he does come back after being marooned in space and left to die by another ship, even though it belonged to the same company.  He then engages on a quest, not for a Holy Grail but for a far more human reason--revenge.

To be continued

Alfred Bester, "Fondly Fahrenheit"

Alfred Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit" is probably his best known short work. The title invariably brings up memories of another favorite short work, Ray Bradbury's longer short work, "Fahrenheit 451." While both feature "Fahrenheit" in the title, and high temperatures are associated with violence, those are the only significant similarities between them.

Bradbury's work satirizes a society that seeks to protect its citizens from unhappiness or suffering by banning all books that have the potential to confuse or sadden or make the reader question long-established beliefs and traditions. The banned books are burned by members of that era's fire department, and Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which books burn. In this story's time and place, firemen burn books not put fires out. The work was made into a film in 1966, directed by Francois Truffaut.

Bester's story isn't social satire, although I supposed an argument could be made by Marxists that the story recounts the horrors resulting from exploitation of the working class--the android. But, if one doesn't buy that, then one must also admit that the story is one that doesn't fit too well into genre pigeonholes--it could be SF or horror or even experimental mainstream lit, but clearly closer, I suppose, to an SF horror story than to social satire.

What interests me the most in this story is that it begins as a story about a serial killer android, and then slowly shifts into a tale that explores issues of identity, so much so that the reader, at least this reader, has difficulty in determining from whose point of view the story is being told. There are at least five points of view in this story. The first four are easy to determine, but it's not clear whom the fifth point of view belongs to.

The plot is simple: Vandaleur owns a multiple aptitude android, the most versatile type in existence. The android is his sole means of support. Without any skills or talents of his own, he would soon be penniless without it.

The story begins with a search party looking for a missing little girl, who eventually is found murdered. The reader soon learns that the android is responsible. (Wasn't Frankenstein's monster's first victim a small child?)

After the discovery, the reader listens in to a discussion among several men who were in the search party:

"What kind of blood doesn't clot?"
"Android"
"Looks like she was killed by one."
"Vandaleur owns an android."
"She couldn't be killed by an android."
...
"But androids can't kill."
...
"Androids can't kill. They're made that way."

And later in the story, another character says, "I thought androids couldn't kill or destroy property. Prime Directives and Inhibitions set up for them when they're synthesized. Every company guarantees they can't ."

I wonder just how much Bester was influenced by Asimov's robot stories. "Fondly Fahrenheit" appeared in 1954. Asimov's robot stories began appearing in the early '40s, and his three laws of robotics were spelled out as early as 1942 in a short story, "Runaround." His first robot novel, _Caves of Steel_ was published in 1953. While a robot was accused of committing a murder in one or more of Asimov's works, I can't remember any in which one became a serial killer.

In Bester's story we find a brief discussion of the differences between a robot and an android--one is machinery and an android is organic-or at least chemically based synthetic tissues. Given that distinction being made, there are still several curious statements made by others throughout the story which seem to reflect Asimov's influence here. My guess is that Bester, along with many other SF writers, were/are influenced by Asimov's Three Laws, whether it is an android or a robot in question.

However, there is more to this story than just a malfunctioning murderous android. The true horror of the story is the idea that one can project a mental illness or malfunction to others. Vandaleur consults several experts about the problem, and all bring up the issue of projection as a significant problem.

However, the explanation by the psychologists that involves projection sounds very weak to me, primarily because the process they describe is not really projection. Projection is not contagion. Projection is the attribution of one's own attitudes onto others. If one is a habitual liar, then one calls others liars and believes that they are liars, for the most part. However, that does not make the second person a liar. Projection does not affect the other individual except in so far as how the projector acts towards the recipient of its projection.

That's projection, and that clearly is not what is happening here. We are seeing something quite different than one person attributing an attitude to another. The experts themselves don't understand what is taking place.

For example, we should look at the following paragraph from the text:

"Vandaleur rushed to Dallas Brady's workshop, stared once, vomited and fled. I had enough time to pack one bag and raise nine hundred dollars on portable assets. He took a third class cabin on the Megaster Queen which left that morning for Lyra Alpha. He took me with him. He wept and counted his money and I beat the android again."

The first sentence is third person POV, focused on Vandaleur. Someone tells us what happened to Vandaleur and what he did. The second sentence is now 1st person POV, with Vandaleur now telling us what he did. We now experience the story through Vandaleur's consciousness. The third sentence is a return to third person POV, just as in the first sentence. The fourth sentence suddenly is 1st person POV again, but the android is now talking to us and explaining what it did or what happened to it. We are now in the android's mind, experiencing the events as the android experiences it.

The last sentence is a mix--two POVs in one sentence. The first part is third person POV, about Vandaleur once again, but the second half--"I beat the android again"--is first person--Vandaleur is now talking to us once again.

The narrator changes from being an observer of the action, the third person POVs, to being the two actors in the story, both Vandaleur and the android. Also scattered throughout are parts in which the narrator is "we"; both Vandaleur and android are now one telling the story; and in other places, the narrator uses "they" and "them," which suggests that the narrator is now neither Vandaleur nor the android, but someone observing them. It is as if this blended consciousness has become independent of both Vandaleur and the android.

Throughout the story Bester's skillful use of five little words, pronouns to be exact--I, he, we, they, and us--blurs the boundary between Vandaleur and the android so profoundly at times, that they no longer seem to be separate individuals. I find it fascinating to read what a writer like Bester can do; he takes a common grammatical error--technically called a pronoun reference problem--and turns it into a horror story.

The ending is clear: there is no ending.

Alfred Bester, a brief look at two novels

Alfred Bester, is probably best known for two novels, The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination.

While many SF writers are able to come up with ideas or concepts or technology that equal those of Bester, his strength, which is shared by very few, is his ability to take that idea and make it an integral part of the culture that it is embedded in and also an integral part of the story. Removing that SF element from a novel by Bester results in a culture with inexplicable elements and a story that makes little or no sense at all. Many stories that claim to be SF, yet, upon close examination are stories that could be set anywhere, anytime, anyplace. That's not to say that these are bad stories; it's just that they aren't true SF tales at their core but simply stories with a few SF trappings.


In Bester's stories, we find just the opposite. Many writers have employed telepathy or other ESP powers in tales, but for the most part, the telepathy/ESP aspects could be removed with little difficulty, and the tale would remain the same. However, in Bester's The Demolished Man, the telepathy is such an integral part of the work, that removing it leaves little that makes much sense.

A man plans the death of a business rival. Rather than risk blackmail, he decides to do it himself. In this culture, the potential murderer must not only take into consideration the usual problems of committing the crime at a time and place so that there are no witnesses nor leave any evidence that he was at the scene, but he must also come to grips with the situation that the police employ telepaths who would quickly be able to detect his guilt simply by reading his mind. Lacking any psychic powers of his own, he can not prevent this. Since most people have secrets they would not want to become general knowledge, those who are rich will hire their own telepaths to warn them when other telepaths are approaching and therefore take steps to protect themselves. Consequently, in addition to the police, the murderer now has to contend with the problem that other telepaths will be around who would be able to quickly detect his intentions even before he committed the murder. Much of the novel depicts his activities prior to the crime as he works to counter the problems caused by telepathy. The reader also is confronted by a variety of cultural responses to the awareness that now even one's thoughts are no longer safe.


In The Stars My Destination Bester plays again with ESP, but this time with the ability to teleport oneself from one place to another. Teleportation is simply the power to move oneself by power of mind itself. One does not have to get in a car to go across town; one simply imagines ones' destination and one is there. Considering the high price of gas today, this means of transportation looks better every time I think about it.

This is not a story in which teleportation or jaunting, as it is called, is simply tacked onto the society in which it was developed. Bester has gone to considerable lengths to work out the possible effects that this power, which can be taught and is possessed by the majority of people in that society, might have upon that society. One of the most significant effects of this power is the threat to privacy, anywhere and everywhere.

Fortunately juanting has its limitations. One of most significant is that one must be familiar with and be able form a picture of the destination that one wishes to jaunt to. This means that people can jaunt only to places that they have already visited. As the narrator points out, this gives new meaning to the Grand Tour. Moreover, those with superior ability to form an image of a destination can go more places and also farther at one jump than those with a lesser ability to form a mental image of their destination.

Because of jaunting's threat to privacy, the rich and powerful and famous take extraordinary precautions to protect their homes. Each mansion or estate now has a central core that no one but family members are able to enter. Women's bedrooms have no doors or windows; one must jaunt to enter and one can jaunt only to places one has been and therefore can visualize. Bodyguards are selected for their jaunting abilities as well as their ability to react quickly to immediate threats. Speed and flexibility are now all important: the strong but dumb bodyguard is gone.

As with any human ability, jaunting develops its own hierarchy At some levels of society, one's skill level can raise or lower one's status. However, at the upper levels of society, the reverse becomes true; it becomes a reverse status symbol. Prestign of Prestign, one of the wealthiest men on earth, if not the wealthiest, looks down with scorn on jaunting to such an extent that he hasn't jaunted in years. He hires people who jaunt for him.

Cultures have effects upon the elements which are a part of it, and those elements also influence the culture it is embedded within. The automobile in the US is a classic example of the interrelationship between a culture and the elements within that culture. What would our culture be like without the auto, and how has our culture, which believes in that bigger is better, that speed is all important, and that competition is a major part of life, influenced the auto? More recent examples would be the computer and probably today one would have to consider the mobile phone (cell phone). Ask yourself, as you read this text on the Internet, whether life would be different today without the computer or that little phone. Bester's novels show an awareness of this, and this awareness makes his novels what they are--some of the best SF novels ever written.

The next time you are reading an SF novel, ask yourself the following question: is the gizmo or the gadget or whatever the SF component consists of really embedded in the story and the culture so as to be an integral part of it, or is it simply a post-it note that's there temporarily and won't be missed if it is removed.