The Stars My Destination: Gully Foyle’s Revenge in Space

The Stars My Destination was first published in 1956 and it’s a classic scifi retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo. It’s fast paced, almost frantic, and Gully Foyle’s transformation from a worthless nobody into a savior of humanity is a tragic story, but at the same time one that enthralls almost from the first word on the page. Foyle starts out as the only survivor on board the ship Nomad, and where he ends up is a long way from there. I’ve read it many times over the years and each time I find something else to enjoy and learn from.

I think a classic is one that has that hold on you and keeps teaching while it lets you enjoy the story and lose yourself in its elements. This book does both for me. It’s short enough that you can read it in a couple of sittings, and it still has more going on than most books twice its length, which is a big part of why it never gets old for me. And it’s the Count of Monte Cristo angle that gets you hooked, because you know the shape of the story and you still can’t wait to see how Bester bends it.

Tiger! Tiger!

Trapped and marooned on the spaceship Nomad, Gully Foyle has survived for over 170 days on the stores left on the ship, and by himself he’s slowly going mad. When his sister ship Vorga seems to pass him by after he releases flares to call her attention, he completely goes off the deep end. His new ambition is to get revenge on the people who left him to die. That’s a great place to start a revenge story, because there’s no ambiguity about it. Somebody could have saved him and chose not to, and Foyle never forgets it for a second.

Cobbling together a means of moving the damaged Nomad, Foyle is “rescued” by the inhabitants of the Asteroid Belt, and the quotation marks are earned. Here he’s tattooed by people who have degenerated, with a mask and the name Nomad emblazoned over his face. Escaping from them, he makes his way to the Inner Planets, Earth, where he’s sent to a hospital to recover from his injuries. As they can’t do anything about the tattooing, his “mask” is left intact, and in the early part of the book no one knows him without this horrible disfigurement. The face is what makes the book so memorable, because Foyle spends most of it hiding or hiding behind it.

It also sets him up as the sort of lead you can’t quite root for and can’t quite stop watching. He starts out as a worthless nobody, he’s been driven half out of his mind, and he’s got a single idea in his head. I like that the book doesn’t dress that up. A lot of revenge stories want you to cheer for the hero, and this one seems happier letting you watch him instead, which fits with it being a tragic story.

The Monte Cristo bones are easy to spot once you know to look. There’s the wronged man left to rot, the long wait, the treasure he has to get back to, and the new face and new name he uses to get close to the people who wronged him. Bester takes all of that and sets it in a solar system that’s split between the Inner Planets and the Outer Satellites, with a war running in the background. That’s what keeps it from feeling like a straight copy for me. The setting and the characters are completely his own, and Foyle isn’t anything like the gentleman he’s modelled on, since when we meet him he’s an uneducated, barely literate ship’s hand who’s been left to die.

Jaunting

In the universe of Gully Foyle, humanity has learned how to teleport itself, with people having varying and differing skills in this ability. The maximum distance is 1,000 miles at a time, and women are once again kept segregated and secure “for their own protection”. The ability is called jaunting, after its discoverer, and it has other implications too, because the structure of society as a whole has changed entirely. Property is handled differently, and with anyone able to “port” from place to place simply by knowing their arrival and destination locations, security has had to be radically altered in many different ways.

Not least of those is the way prisons are structured, as the only way to keep prisoners confined is to keep them in the dark without any access to the outside world at all. If you can’t picture where you are, you can’t jaunt out, which is a clever way to make a prison work. The only restriction right now on jaunting is that it’s limited to the surface of the planet. Any attempt to jaunt from one planet to another has always met with failure and death. A big idea like teleportation could easily have become a gimmick, and instead Bester lets it reshape the whole world.

It’s also a clever bit of worldbuilding because every rule has a consequence. A world where everyone can teleport needs a different kind of law, a different kind of prison and a different way of thinking about being somewhere. That the whole thing is held together by one simple restriction, no jaunting between planets, tells you it was designed carefully. If you want another scifi book built around one big idea, Old Man’s War is one I’ve written about, though it’s a very different kind of read. And it’s the sort of detail that rewards you on a re-read, since you keep spotting where the rule is quietly doing work.

What I notice on every read is how the world seems to respond to Foyle. The jaunting that has changed how prisons, property and security work in his universe is the same tool he ends up using against it, and the more he learns about it the more dangerous he gets. His investigation into the owners of the Vorga keeps pulling him further up the ladder of the powerful and the wealthy, and each rung is a bit more tangled than the last. It’s an excellent example of a plot where the setting and the story are doing the same job, and it’s why the book feels so tight.

Revenge, and a prison with no light

Gully Foyle discovers his own ability to jaunt in the hospital and starts his investigation into the owners of the Vorga, the ship that left him stranded all alone when it could have rescued him. Eventually he stages a daring raid on the ship itself, and he’s captured and sent to Gouffre Martel, a complex of underground caves in the Pyrenees. These are used as a prison where the inmates live in total darkness, unable to form a picture of their location in order to jaunte. It’s the clever prison from the setup paying off.

Managing to escape from Gouffre Martel, Foyle realizes he has to return to the Nomad to obtain the treasure that’s contained on that ship, and with this treasure finally complete his revenge on the Vorga and its true masters. I’ll leave the rest of it for you to discover. It’s the sort of plot where the next step always follows from the last one, so you keep turning pages without noticing, and a fascinatingly weird journey for Gully Foyle is as good a description as any.

The story is frantic from page one, Foyle is never at rest, and the pace barely drops from the Nomad to the end. It’s a short book, so there’s no time for anything to sag, and that fast, almost frantic feel is a big part of what hooked me the first time. Each time I come back I’m reading it a little differently, with more attention on the world around Foyle and less on whether he gets away with it. And it’s what keeps me coming back to see what I missed the last time.

Why I keep coming back

It’s one of the all time classics of the genre, and it’s an excellent read that I’d urge you to explore and enjoy. It will keep you interested from page one if you’re like me, up till late at night to see how it finishes. It’s even been adapted as a full graphic novel, which says something about how well its images stick.