Hugos Side-Step: The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

Trade paperback, 244 pages
Published 2009 (originally 1956)
Acquired August 2017
Read October 2017

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

Everyone has their instance of "the Mandela effect," I suppose. For me, it's a belief that when working at Kroger as a cashier in the early 2000s, one of the songs that frequently rotated on corporate radio (along with the inferior Counting Crows cover of "Big Yellow Taxi") included the lyrics "deep space is my dwelling place / the stars my destination." I'm pretty sure this isn't actually true now because no evidence exists, but by God I remember it. How those lines from a poem in a 1950s sf novel would have otherwise ended up in my consciousness, though, I don't know, because I didn't read the book until fifteen years later. I probably first heard of Alfred Bester in the mid-2000s, reading episode guides for Babylon 5 and the terrible 1970s British children's telefantasy programme The Tomorrow People. The former named a character after him; the latter reused the term jaunte from this novel to describe mental teleportation.

All this is to say, the book was a long time coming for me. I finally felt moved to read it when I read Bester's other big sf novel, The Demolished Man, because it won the 1953 Hugo Award for Best Novel. There was no 1957 Hugo Award for Best Novel, but if there had been, The Stars My Destination might have won it.

But I found the novel disappointing. I would say it failed to grab me, but it actually did grab me: the opening is great, with Gully Foyle stranded on a spaceship and doing his damndest to survive, going from ordinary man to extraordinary. I love the exploration of how jaunting would change our culture's conceptions of privacy and security. Gully's adventures in prison and such are clever and interesting. However, somewhere around the midpoint of the novel, once Gully embarked on his ripped-from-Count-of-Monte-Cristo campaign of anonymous revenge, I found that my interest had evaporated. The set-up is great, and Bester's prose is miles above his sf contemporaries, but he just doesn't do anything particularly interesting with it all, and like Demolished Man, things get all mindtrippingly weird in the last few chapters, and not in a good way.

Also I think it's weird that the back cover of my Gollancz SF Masterworks edition trumpets an introduction by minor sf critic Graham Sleight, but fails to mention at all the presence of an afterword by Neil Gaiman!