The Stars My Destination

by Alfred Bester

258 pages

English language

Published Nov. 11, 1996 by Vintage Books.

ISBN:: 978-0-679-76780-0

View on OpenLibrary

(91 reviews)

A science fiction retelling of the Count of Monte Cristo.

10 editions

Allen Shull reviewed The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

As Operatic as Space Opera Gets

4 stars

Content warning CW: Spoilers, Violence

Undeniable to see why this book is a classic. At the same time, it is problematic as all get out. The main character is terrible; at least, Bester seems to be saying, he knows he’s horrible. You’ll see people comparing this to The Count of Monte Cristo—but does that main character commit rape in the first 30 pages, and then halfway through kidnap his victim in order to force her to obey him? Everyone in this story is utterly out for revenge.

And yet, the imagery and the invention is so particular. The grandeur of scenes is arresting. There is pure spectacle—not mere garishness but also interesting and strange and fascinating images. There’s so much going on in the occasional details. A man builds train tracks to make a grand entrance. A street hustler sells photos of Christians offering illegal prayers. A space colony of stoics is kept in shelves like sardines. A woman who is blind to the visual spectrum but sees above and below it delights in the flashes of an orbital bombardment. And of course I’m not even mentioning the ending. I’ll say this: I don’t know how this book works as an ebook, strictly because of the typesetting.

Is it worth it? Dostoevsky can show terrible people doing terrible things with a good message to the reader; just because the main character is a monster does not mean the main character is a hero. We do not want to identify with Gully Foyle, and we readers can tell that everyone who judges him is right. But still, I just don’t know.

altlovesbooks reviewed The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

Review of 'The Stars My Destination' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

"Gully Foyle is my name.
Terra is my nation.
Deep space is my dwelling place.
The stars my destination."

Our main character is a bit of an asshole. Well, that's an exaggeration. He's way more than a bit of an asshole, but he's a resourceful one at least. Trapped aboard a wrecked freighter, stuck inside an 8x8 cube of a room for months, subsisting on what meagre rations he salvages during his brief trips into the vacuum of space, he wants nothing more than to leave. Just when he'd almost given up all hope, the sister ship Vorga approaches. Making every sign and signal he can, Gully awaits the rescue that....never comes. The Vorga passes him by, and thus begins a long revenge-fueled quest that pits Gully against huge sci-fi megacorporations, a war between the inner and outer planets, and drives him almost to madness (if he wasn't there already).

I loved the jaunting system that the author fleshed out in this book. Essentially, mind teleportation, at-will, only restricted by your own personal ability. The author carefully constructs a world where everything has decentralized, where new countermeasures need to be created to keep jaunters at bay, that takes into consideration the consequences of being able to teleport in and out on a whim. There's a lot of nice touches here that I wouldn't have considered otherwise.

I really loved this book as it starts out, then slowly cooled on it until I almost wondered why I was still going. There's a lot of loose plot threads that aren't tied up until the end, but the book doesn't really tell you that or guide you in any sort of way, there's a lot of blind faith in a satisfying ending involved. I also slowly started hating Gully Foyle, as he's an incredibly unlikeable character. Actually, most of the people in the story are unlikeable in different ways, but Gully really takes the cake. What brought me around was the ending, and the revelation (thanks to reviewers here) that this is just a retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo. Gully declares revenge on the Vorga and all aboard her, uses his considerable talents and money (thanks to salvaged cargo from his ship) to carefully construct the perfect revenge scenario, and then runs into problems seeing it through.

But even after all that, I just wasn't able to rate it higher than three stars. It's a nice clever take on the revenge theme, but I wasn't able to get past Gully Foyle as a character. There's also a lot of old sci-fi baggage here as well, so be warned.

The audiobook narrator killed it though, by the way. Highly recommend, if you're looking to listen to this one.

bondolo reviewed The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

Review of 'The Stars My Destination' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

More dated than I expected and too much of the super man for my taste. I chose to read it as surreal and fantastical. In that light it was OK, not requiring me to believe or empathize with the narrative and characters. The Gully-as-everyman and thrown in populism of the conclusion was unwelcome, gratuitous and cheap. He built no movement to overthrow the status quo so why should we believe it would be overthrown by his actions?

Smoak reviewed The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

Review of 'The Stars My Destination' on 'Storygraph'

3 stars

The last 30 pages of this are amazing, too bad you have to slog through so much misogyny, assault, racism, etc. to get there. An interesting contrast to the Terra Ignota series I just finished.

Zivan reviewed The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

Review of 'The Stars My Destination' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Really 1957?

Sci-Fi this old shouldn't be this exciting. Gullie is abhorrent and the hole thing is a mixed bag of great and terrible ideas, but overall package is exciting and sometimes mind blowing.

SharonC reviewed The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

Review of 'The Stars My Destination' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Gaiman's introduction to this edition was very helpful to pull out the proto-cyberpunk threads: slick lady-thief, technologically enhanced killer, impossibly stratified society, techno-garble magic substance... As a classic, this was a very enjoyable read. Also very nice to read a novel from an age when 268 pages was considered a perfectly fine length for a book.

Allen Shull reviewed The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

Review of 'The Stars My Destination' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Interesting in concept, but a little flat in style and plotting, with an ending that manages to be both grandiose and inconsequential. My first Bester, he seems to be right between Heinlein and Delany.

Nuno reviewed The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

Review of 'The Stars My Destination' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

It starts with an interesting world setting. The exploration of the mind of Foyle was ok, but could have been taken further to better describe and explore his process of learning. The end was interesting to say the least, and is rather open to interpretation.