The Stars My Destination (S.F. MASTERWORKS): Alfred Bester

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This book has been quite the ride. Gully Foyle is your guide in a future where teleportation ("jaunting") is the main mode of transportation and where interplanetary tensions seem to mount up to an unavoidable Solar System War. The main character is Gully Foyle, a spacer with no real motivation in life. Content to be lazy, without purpose beyond existence, he's a bit of a drifter, until a spaceship he is traveling on is destroyed. Gully discovers a will to live and manages to keep himself barely alive, leaving the tiny reinforced space he exists in to scavenge supplies five minutes at a time in his barely functional spacesuit. At last, he sees a ship passing close by. He sends up a signal flare. The ship slows, almost stops, and then turns away. From here, the story takes off, as Gully discovers the heat of revenge as the one thing that can give him purpose. A dramatisation titled Tiger! Tiger! was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on September 14, 1991 and repeated on August 16, 1993. It was scripted by Ivan Benbrook and directed by Andy Jordan. Alun Armstrong played Gully Foyle, Miranda Richardson was Olivia, Siobhan Redmond was Robin Wednesbury and Lesley Manville was Jisbella McQueen. [23] Anime [ edit ]

Sci-fi from its formative days is funny. Not funny ha-ha (not always anyway), but funny-weird…at least for me. I am often unable to get over the clunky writing and wispy plots despite the many cool ideas on display. Sometimes even a premise as cool as a galaxy-spanning empire held together by the prods and pokes of a few cognoscenti using an arcane sociological science still can’t make a plodding plot with artless prose and paper-thin characters readable to me (sorry, Mr. Asimov). At other times the founders of the genre can suffer by comparison to their descendants who have taken the ideas that, while new and fresh when they used them, seem old and tired when you come to the foundational works after seeing them presented elsewhere, often with more compelling characters and well-crafted prose. Then there are books like this one, written by Alfred Bester, and you understand why some classics are still classics.I have been trying to write a proper review since the past one week - and I have to give up. There are certain books which impressed me, which resist all my attempts to condense them into a few short paragraphs. However, if I don't write something now, this book will join my "forever unreviewed books" list, so I am putting up a somewhat inchoate review. Both quatrains are based on a poetic form that was popular in England and the United States during the 18th-to-mid-20th centuries, in which a person stated their name, country, city or town, and a religious homily (often, "Heaven's my destination") within the rhyming four-line structure (see book rhyme). [10] This literary device had been previously used by James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Clareson, Thomas (1992). "Science Fiction: The 1950s". Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. p.74. ISBN 0-87249-870-0. By today’s reading expectations, there are a few problems with the book. Bester wrote it in the 1950s, so a number of corporate players are no longer recognizable to younger readers. And the dialogue and slang is a bit dated.

You ever have a novel that you know is considered a classic of its genre yet you know absolutely nothing about it other than the title? This is one of those for me. I knew nothing about it other than the vague notion that it was an important sci-fi novel, but when it popped up as a deal on Audible I took a chance on it and went in cold.

Dark Messiah: Foyle is one of these at the end. He spreads the MacGuffin all over the world, which is Made of Explodium and can be really easily set off. He gives people the chance not to mess up, but if Humans Are Bastards, the world will go kaboom. Origins: 'Johnson Johnson is my name' A MYSTERY!". Mudcat Café. Mudcat Café Music Foundation. Archived from the original on May 22, 2011 . Retrieved October 18, 2009. [ unreliable source?] Alfred Bester was an American science fiction author, TV and radio scriptwriter, magazine editor and scripter for comic strips and comic books.