boocia's Reviews > The Stars My Destination

obviously dated on social, moral, and scientific axes, but (1) the datedness is so hokey that it's just pulpy fun now for the most part (2) the stylistic choices and general swashbuckling made it good anyway. cw: sexual assault mentions

so the orientalism was mostly funny - the fact that Alfred Bester wrote for the Charlie Chan tv show twinned with the below is just extremely good to me:

For two hundred years the IPAF had entrusted its intelligence work to the Chinese who, with a five thousand year history of cultivated subtlety behind them, had achieved wonders. Captain Y'ang-Yeovil was a member of the dreaded Society of Paper Men, an adept of the Tientsin Image Makers, a Master of Superstition, and fluent in the Secret Speech.

Why the apostrophe in Y'ang? the Secret Speech is further elucidated to be like, 4000 years old or something which makes it extant in the 1950s itself, a sort of techno-advancement-fantasy-of-the-present within this larger techno-advancement-fantasy-of-the-future. it's just too hokey to be anything too perturbing. also i just enjoyed it for being such a perfect example of techno-orientalism: the sneakiness that suggests inhumanity, with the terrifying advancement that suggests supremacy over western culture, with the ineffable mysticism that makes them impossible to confront with western tools.

the women were a little rougher for me. the protagonist rapes a woman, who is a primary character that goes on to being coerced to work with him, and in the far future even forgives him. the act is definitely depicted as a horrible crime, but the horribleness is centered around his moral growth from heartless ruffian to man with conscience, and is not really about her as a person. it ends up being a spin-off form of fridging, so that felt kind of bad. same with the other women Foyle abuses by seducing and then betraying in this book. as always all women have to be married by the end of this book.

i think i was really interested in this book's flavor of social darwinism, a common attitude in early science fiction (or like, just science fiction. or like, society). like Shockwaver Rider and several of the Walter M Miller shorts, there's this depiction of the criminal class as a species that is influenced by evolution/the environment. so when humans discover they can teleport ('jaunt'), Bester feels the need to create the class of jaunte criminals who teleport from city to city, avoiding the sun (??) to do night crimes around the clock, as well as other criminal classes besides.

Gully himself goes through a moral arc that seems to echo a social-darwinist-skull-measurement-y understanding of development. he starts out sort of catatonically in surviving in a storage locker (womb) in a shipwreck, too apathetic to do anything to save himself other than the bare minimum to survive hour over hour. then he becomes inspired by revenge to read enough ship manuals to jerry-rig himself out of this situation and goes on a brutal revenge-themed rampage of rape, torture, and betrayal, all while speaking a guttural deformed form of English that only criminals know. then he learns 'real' English, enters high society, falls in love, etc. and finally declares he's developed a conscience, and gives up his blood feud and turns himself in to the police. i mean, i am reading ontogeny and phylogeny also, so defo biased by that; but this leap from consciousness-lessness to brutality to civilizedness definitely seems to be the same general concept as the developmental path of consciousness-less child to brutal 'savage' or criminal to white european 'true' human that cast a long shadow from like the 18th century onward.

the social evolution is blended with libertartianism also, which is fun to think abt. the book's climax describes how the average person is lazy and stupid and doesn't have the will to make something of themself, and partially needs to be empowered to do so by a trial by fire - or in this case two: (1) everyone needs to know about and physically have this new material that creates a nigh nuclear explosion if anyone Wills it telepathically to (2) everyone needs to know how to teleport between the starts (not just on earth). and either the species destroys itself or it becomes better with this distributed, democratic power. the problem is that all the firebrands who make something of themselves gain power and try to govern the masses, and therefore aren't letting all the lowlies figure it out too after the fact. this sort of individualism + survival of the fittest blend is? indicative and interesting.

the above did not really depreciate my enjoyment; but i think as with many of the more outmoded parts of old SF it is more fun to take it as a primary source about movements and attitudes in science and culture and science fiction than to take it in full.

anyways deepshit aside the book is fun. i'm a big fan of count of monte cristo and so revenge stories are just cool - the hunting down of bad men in their dens of sin, their gibbering fear at being confronted with their past betrayals, the unraveling of a galactic conspiracy - just all fun. the sort of gothic hauntings of Gully's evil tattoo and the flaming spirit of himself that begins to haunt him as he gets deeper and deeper into his revenge (and it's ultimate scientific explanation) are both cool. there's some really fun stuff with font sizes and weird visual stuff with the text at the end that were really charming. the science is really hokey but again the camp is nice in this context: telekinesis, teleportation, radiation men, weird drugs that make you revert to your specific animal state (pythons vs tigers vs gorillas, etc) , weird cults, and on and on.

and finally i think despite all its sort of classic survival-of-the-fittest and humans-are-naturally-sucky vibes, the ending did get to me. Gully Foyle as sort of an inspirational/aspirational sign of a future that humans can have beyond this current war, with a classic SF colonial thing about further physical expansion to the stars representing civilizational and evolutionary expansion, too. flimsies aside i am a sucker for when the future is unspecified, but bright.