Alfred Bester’s ‘The Stars My Destination’: A Critical Companion by D. Harlan Wilson
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
Reviewed by L.J. Hurst
How important is Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination in the history of sf? A couple of months ago I had the chance to find out when I thought that my hardback copy was lost and went online to buy another. That copy—fortunately found before I began reading D. Harlan Wilson’s Critical Companion—would have cost a fortune to replace. In money terms Stars (to abbreviate it) is very important. It is also not inappropriate a way to consider the book because one of the themes of the novel—and it has a number—is the persistence of finance capitalism. Money—or resources and what they can buy—is an engine of the story.
The Companion is large physically (a large octavo) but it is only 124 pages. The first and second of the seven sections are an Introduction and a detailed synopsis of the two parts of the novel, chapter by chapter. The title of the third section makes Wilson’s position clear: ‘Cyberpunk Previsions and Literary Influences’, which explains Stars as a work of ‘intertextuality in excess’. The fourth part goes on to identify the influence of Frankenstein; the fifth discusses psychology, while the sixth concerns the role of language, and the seventh is a concluding Coda. Alfred Bester had published one novel before Stars (The Demolished Man) and published no more for over two decades (his eventual return was never regarded as a success, as even he admitted), nevertheless Wilson writes ‘the novel accomplishes what pre-1950s SF novels failed to do in terms of style, structure, and attitude.’ Wilson goes on to point out that the book is a ‘pyrotechnic’ work: that is, it is full of ideas, themes and memes which explode like fireworks, some driving the story forward, some merely providing incredible bursts of literary illumination. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that the story is a Bildungsroman in which the protagonist Gully Foyle becomes a more complete person. Whether he becomes a better person it is more difficult to say as he has to leave people behind even while his purpose becomes one of revenge. On the other hand, Foyle rises from a common labourer (even starships—for Stars is set in the far future—must have labouring staff) to become one of the modern aristocracy.
While Wilson feels that Stars sets the standard as a trailblazer for modern cyberpunk, he points out that the novel has a number of influences, which must be known in order to appreciate them. He identifies these as the works of James Joyce, William Blake’s poem ‘The Tyger’ (mine is the original British edition with the title Tiger, Tiger), Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He mentions but downplays the role that Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo plays, even though their plots are identical. Some of the influences are pretty much copied from their originals—there is a surgeon who reshapes animal bodies who seems to have been lifted from Wells’ Island of Doctor Moreau, for instance, but other works are used in more intricate styles. In his Frankenstein chapter, consequently, Wilson says ‘Frankenstein and Stars share many of the experiment anchors [I have] listed above. They are both viscerally unsettling and disturbing’ while earlier he has analysed the roles of the characters in Shelley’s Frankenstein, and then extrapolated them to compare them with Stars: ‘If Victor is the mythological Prometheus, the monster is Milton’s Adam/Satan—and all of them are Gully’.
Chapter five begins with a discussion of the influence of Freudian theory on Bester but then continues into sections on class, gender relations and race. Freudian theory now is often represented as the promotion of patriarchy, but Bester had a different contest at the time when John Campbell, the dominant editor in the field, was promoting the theories of L. Ron Hubbard.
When he turns to language in chapter six Wilson also turns to religion. There are cellar Christians, and even more extreme figures, Skoptsys, who intend to cut themselves off completely from all experience by severing their nervous systems. On the other hand, we know that Gully Foyle has had to experience multitudes—from loneliness to oxygen deficiency and starvation—as well as lost hope when those who could have rescued him passed him by. When Foyle returns in Part Two as an aristocrat, he has been resurrected but he is not a Christ.
Interesting as the Critical Companion is, there is more to be said, and we must be careful of presentee-ism. In 1980 in Who Writes Science Fiction? Charles Platt went into ecstasies about Stars (Wilson quotes from a different article by Platt, who interviewed Bester at least three times), but twenty years earlier Kingsley Amis’s New Maps Of Hell repeatedly praised Bester’s Demolished Man but never mentioned the sequel. Attitudes to tattoos have changed, but more surprisingly Wilson pays little attention to theories of parapsychology, especially as the driving premise of the book is that anyone can ‘Jaunte’, that is teleport themselves from anywhere on Earth to anywhere else on the planet that they can envisage. A name missing from the index is J.B. Rhine, the American academic who seemed to be proving that humans had extrasensory abilities. Rhine's work influenced other authors of the period such as the crime writer Margery Allingham and even the ‘new existentialists’ Colin Wilson and his friend Bill Hopkins. The importance of The Count of Monte Cristo, too, should not be underplayed. If, though, D. Harlan Wilson’s wide-ranging references and sources send readers of Stars to all those works then his Critical Companion will not have been wasted.
Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.