It is 16 September 2436. The SS Nomad, a spaceship owned by the Presteign conglomerate, is a half-destroyed wreck, drifting in space in the outer reaches of the solar system. Aboard is the only survivor, Gulliver Foyle, a below-average, uneducated, unskilled mechanic’s mate, 3rd Class (p.58).
The ship was attacked and almost completely destroyed because there is war in the solar system, between the three inhabited Inner Planets (IP) – Mars, Venus, Earth – and the eight inhabited satellites of the giant Outer Satellites (OS). For centuries there had been co-existence and economic interconnection, as the satellites mined and provided raw materials which they sent to the inner planets to be turned into manufactured goods, which were in turn exported back to the satellites.
But all that has been upset by the discovering of jaunting. Jaunting? Yes, jaunting is just one of the many funky, pulpy, sensational, preposterous and gripping ideas Bester packs into this thrilling and visionary novel.
Jaunting is so named because discovered by a researcher named Jaunte, and it is the power to teleport using purely willpower, no machinery or technology – you just need to know your precise present location and then visualise your intended location, will it – and – poof! – you teleport there.
There are limits to jaunting: people have to be trained to do it, no-one can jaunte through outer space, and no-one can jaunte further than a 1,000 miles – although you can circle the globe in a series of well-planned jauntes if you’re so inclined.
Revenge
Anyway, the basic theme and engine of the book is simple: After managing to survive for 170 days by locking himself in a small airtight section of the ruined spaceship, and making occasional forays out in a space suit to scavenge for more air tubes and for remaining food, Foyle is hysterical with relief when he sees a moving light and slowly realises it is a spaceship approaching the ruined Nomad.
He finds the ship’s flares and lets them off in a mad firework display which the other ship, as it approaches, cannot fail to see. BUT, despite seeing his flares, the ship comes close enough for him to read its nameplate, the Vorga – T:1339, owned by the powerful Presteign clan… and then watch as it cruises past without stopping to rescue him!
At that moment Foyle conceives a murderous, furious lust to survive, to live and to devote his life to tracking down and destroying the Vorga and everyone responsible for abandoning him. This is the motivation which keeps him going through the hair-raising series of pulpy, sci-fi adventures which follow:
The Plot – Part One
The Scientific People and the tattoo
Foyle now sets about repairing the Nomad and firing up its engines but, in the ensuing thrust, is crushed under the floating detritus in the ship and passes out. He was trying to return to the inner planets, but the Nomad drifts into the gravitational field of the asteroid belt, and of the Sargasso Asteroid specifically.
This is inhabited the half-savage descendants of wrecked spaceships who have excavate burrows into the asteroid, made it airtight, and connected all the wrecked ships together to create an elaborate artificial environment. Much degenerated in mind they call themselves the Scientific People and worship processes they no longer understand, echoing orders and chants to the refrain of ‘QUANT SUFF!’
The Scientific People grab the Nomad as it drifts by, marry him off to one of their group, Moira, and cover his face with a Maori-style tattoo, a tracery of thick black lines leading to the word NOMAD tattooed on his forehead.
We 21st century citizens are used to the widespread use of tattoos but the book makes it clear that, in 1956, it is a source of absolute horror for most of the ‘civilised’ characters, and so marks Foyle off as an outcast from the rest of humanity.
Foyle breaks out of the Science People’s asteroid by stealing the spaceship they have rigged up as his living quarters. Characteristically he doesn’t give a damn that the ship was integrated into the People’s bodged-up asteroid-spaceship complex and that, by reconnecting the fuel lines and firing up its rockets, he may have either destroyed the entire asteroid or, at the very least, created a massive breach in their airtight walls. Foyle sets off back to Earth fuelled by mindless, burning vengeance, and is picked up by the Inner Planets’ navy 90,000 miles outside Mars’s orbit.
It is here, coming to in the navy ship sick bay, that he first sees his tattooed face in a mirror and lets out a howl of anguish.
Escape to earth
We find Foyle pretending that he has lost the power to jaunte and enrolled in ‘jaunte rehab’ led by a polite young black woman, Robin Wednesbury, who is a ‘telesend’ i.e. a telepath who can send thoughts but not receive them and so is of limited economic usefulness.
We realise the scope of Foyle’s inhumanity and amorality when he intrusively grabs her, jaunts to her private apartment and, as she discovers his deception and his vengeful aims, he rapes her. (We don’t see this; it is implied.) Foyle needs Robin because he need help understanding how to track down the Vorga and its owner, rich Presteign.
We are also introduced to a set of powerful Terran characters who are to chase, imprison, dog and follow Foyle through the rest of his adventures, namely:
- Presteign, head of the wealthy Presteign clan. Part of his money rests on the humorously described chain of luxury department stores, each managed by an identical ‘Mr. Presto’. Presteign demonstrates his status by using outmoded methods of transport and never jaunting if he can avoid it. Presteign holds court in his Star Chamber, an elaborate old-fashioned office equipped with a bar, and staffed by robots.
- (Clans – in fact this futurworld is run by rich clans and we are introduced to them at the various social gatherings which dot the narrative, each clan claiming descent from a noted inventor in our times, so we have the clan Edison, the clan Roll Royce, the clan RCA, the Colas and the Esso clan, and so on.)
- Saul Dagenham, head of a private ‘special services’ agency contracted by Presteign to find Foyle and get him to reveal the location of the Nomad. Dagenham was a nuclear scientist who was irradiated in an accident at Tycho Sands (p.50) He cannot remain in a room with other people for more than a short time without poisoning them. The agents of his firm – ‘Dagenham Couriers Inc.’ – are a bizarre collection of freaks who specialize in FFCC, or ‘Fun, Fantasy, Confusion and Catastrophe’ to carry out their missions of theft, kidnapping and espionage.
- Peter Y’ang-Yeovil is head of a government Central Intelligence agency and a lineal descendant of the Chinese philosopher Mencius (p.48). Prophetically, Bester sees this as based on ancient Chinese principles, so that Peter is ‘a member of the dreaded Society of Paper Men, and an adept of the Tsientsin Image Makers’. Although of Chinese descent and able to speak fluent Mandarin, he does not look Chinese.
- Regis Sheffield: A high-priced lawyer working for Presteign.
These characters jaunte to attend the launch of a new Presteign spaceship at a spaceshipyard in Vancouver, to be christened by the great man himself who is accompanied by his majordomo, modestly titled Black Rod. But the assembled VIPs are amazed when a sole renegade breaks through the security barriers, runs forward and tries to throw a bomb at the Vorga which is being repaired in a nearby spaceship bay. Foyle fails, is captured by security and…
The baddies confer, then try to brainwash Foyle
In this chapter we are introduced to the VIPs listed above, and learn from their edgy conversation that the Nomad was carrying not only a fortune in platinum but a top secret weapon codenamed PyrE, a Misch Metal, a pyrophore (p.49). PyrE is a new material which could make the difference between victory and defeat in the war between the Inner Planets and the Outer System.
Dagenham takes charge of interrogating the captured Foyle, First he is subjected to the Nightmare Theatre where a combination of drugs and psychedelic light and sound is designed to replicate his worst nightmares. Foyle brushes it off and goes to sleep.
Next they take him to the Megal Mood room where he wakes up in a four-poster bed to be lavishly waited on by servants, including a pretty blonde who try to persuade him that he is actually millionaire Geoffrey Fourmyle who’s had a nervous breakdown. He is wavering under their assault but then sees his own tattooed face in a mirror and snaps out of the deception.
Impatiently Dagenham dismisses all his entourage and takes Foyle to a pleasant roof garden where he ) explains that he’s radioactive so don’t come too close and b) frankly admits that the Nomad was carrying a fortune in platinum, that’s why everyone is so keen to find its location. Dagenham offers him several chances to spill, but Foyle refuses, and so…
Gouffre Martel
Foyle is placed in one of the deepest, most escape-proof dungeons on earth, deep under the Gouffre Martel mountains on the border of Spain and France (p.62). He is held prisoner here for ten months or so and we are given a full description of the prisoners’ daily routine. From time to time there are loud bangs and reverberations through the rock. These are ‘blue jauntes’, prisoners who have become so desperate to escape that they jaunte without any clear idea of their destination and rematerialise inside the solid rock of the mountains, creating an explosion as two types of matter try to co-exist (p.63).
But meanwhile Foyle has discovered a structural oddity about the prison which is that, in a certain position, due to fault lines and cracks in the rock, he can talk to a woman prisoner, miles away in the women’s wards. She is Jisbella ‘Jiz’ McQueen, serving five years of ‘cure’ in Gouffre Martel for larceny (p.65). She turned to crime in rebellion against the limitations imposed on women to ‘protect’ them in a world where everyone can teleport – for jaunting has returned women to a condition of Victorian purdah, locked away for their own protection, to preserve the virtue and their value and their mint condition (p.66).
Through a series of conversations along what she calls the Whisper Line, Jiz teaches the illiterate, dumb angry beast Foyle, to think more clearly and more logically, specifically about his quest for revenge. She tells him he shouldn’t have tried to dumbly blow up the spaceship Vorga, he should try to find out who gave the order not to rescue him.
Dagenham turns up again, having Foyle brought to an interrogation room, telling him he’s been there ten months and become a damn sight too smart for his own good, also suggesting that Peter Y’ang-Yeovil’s CIA have been at him. Foyle ignores all this, grabs Dagenham by the throat and smashes his head against the floor (p.71).
There then follows an epic scene where Foyle rampages through the underground prison braining anyone who gets in his way with a sledgehammer, until he finds and frees Jiz and they escape from Gouffre Martel, by creating chaos, running through various underground corridors and rooms, until they break through a dead-end wall into the original underground potholes, eventually coming across an underground glacier and falling into the underground river which finally bursts them out into the open air. It is night-time, and they crawl out of the river onto dry land, puffing and panting and naked, and then – somewhat inevitably – making love. All this in the dark, though – because Jiz cannot see Gully’s face!
Dr Baker
It’s a rip-roaring story to start with, but the breakneck momentum is kept up by the way that each of the sixteen chapters opens in a new scene, in a new setting, in a new situation, introducing new characters and new perils. It’s like a
Now we are in the surgery of a doctor friend of Jiz’s, Dr Henry Baker, who specialises in various criminal activities and knows how to remove tattoos (as well as tending a Freak Factory where he manufactures freaks and abominations for the entertainment industry, p.82.)
We learn that, upon waking up in the daylight, Jiz was overcome with total disgust for Foyle because of his facial tattoo. We learn that Jiz commissioned an underworld friend of hers, Sam Quatt, to protect Foyle from the police and detectives who have been set to recapture him after his audacious prison break, by jaunting round the world, keeping one step ahead of the cops.
Now Foyle lies on the operating table deep in the Freak Factory, undergoing extreme agony, as Dr Baker uses his needle to open and secrete anti-ink bleach into every single tattooed pore on his face. Outside the operating room Jiz and Sam feverishly discuss the secret Foyle is obviously keeping about his precious Nomad. Baker emerges saying the operation’s over and Foyle is all bandaged up and that, under anaesthetic, he revealed that the Nomad has a cargo of twenty million credits’ worth of platinum (p.89).
The crooks are just getting excited about this when the wall blows open to reveal a horde of armed police swarming in to recapture Foyle. He and Jiz make their escape, fleeing through the chaos of the devastated Freak Factory then through city streets, during which Foyle tears off the protective bandages and Sam leaps from the roof of the building to his death. They jaunte to a safe house in the country, where Foyle bullies out of Jiz the whereabouts of Sam’s personal spaceship, the Weekender.
Back to the Nomad
When Foyle was interviewed by Dagenham, the latter revealed that he is so important, and the authorities are paying him so much attention, because the Nomad was carrying this cargo of invaluable PyreE. Having escaped the raid on Dr Baker’s surgery, Jiz and Foyle travel in Sam Quatt’s spaceship and return to the Nomad embedded in the Science People’s asteroid. We learn that the Scientific People survived Foyle’s escape, though parts of their station were damaged.
The whole chapter is a nerve-racking, desperate race against time to locate the PyrE and extract it before the cops catch up with them. Foyle is rooting about in the Nomad, embedded as it is in the asteroid superstructure when Jiz reports that another spaceship is approaching. It is a Presteign ship manned by Dagenham’s forces.
In his increasing anger and stress we are told that, although the tattoo itself has gone, the subcutaneous scars become visible when Foyle gets angry or emotional, in fact the pattern glows, making him look like a tiger (hence the epigraph to the book, Blake’s Tiger Tiger burning bright’, and the fact the book was at one point entitled Tiger Tiger.)
Dagenham’s agents start drifting round the asteroid in individual spacesuits, as Foyle finally locates the Nomad’s stronghold and identifies the big metal safe containing the fortune in platinum.
Foyle rampages like an angry god among the Scientific People to find the tools and acid he needs to loosen the stanchions fixing the safe in place. He gets Jiz to manhandle the big steel ball through space while he gets back into the control room of his spaceship to open its cargo bay doors and get ready for a quick getaway. But Jiz radios through that the safe has wedged in the doorway so that she can’t get in herself, and that Dagenham’s space cops are upon her, are seizing her, he hears Dagenham’s voice in his spacesuit radio, Jiz pleads with him to get away while he still can. And so amoral Foyle starts the ship’s engines, firing a great blast of energy behind him, presumably killing Jiz and the cops, blasting free and escaping.
And the blood red stripes blaze across his face, ‘the blood-red stigmata of his possession.’
The Plot – Part Two
Geoffrey Fourmyle
An unspecified period of time has passed since the exciting finale of Part One. We are back on earth and introduced to the eccentric multi-millionaire Geoffrey Fourmyle, who goes everywhere at the head of a travelling circus of performers, gymnasts, entertainers, prostitutes, gamblers and so on, gate-crashing high society parties, hobnobbing with the rich and famous.
I was initially confused by this abrupt change of tone and setting until I realised that Fourmyle is a disguise for Foyle. He has used the fortune in platinum he recovered from the Nomad to create an elaborate disguise which allows him to travel anywhere and mingle with anyone. But deep down his Quest remains the same, to exterminate everyone connected with the Vorga who betrayed him.
We discover that he has spent some of his money converting his body into a killing machine: he bribed the head of Mars Commando to get himself given the commando treatment, to have electrical circuits sown into his nervous system which give him superhuman strength, and also has the faculty for switching into hyper-high speed action, in which everyone around him suddenly seems to be moving in slow motion so that a) he can easily escape or eliminate opponents while b) looking like a blur of hyperfast activity to any outside.
Now Foyle jauntes to the house of the black telesend, Robin Wednesbury, only to find it ransacked and gutted by teleporting hobos or Jack-jaunters. He discovers Robin is being held in an asylum where he bribes his way into seeing her, discovering that she tried to commit suicide after he raped her. Initially she thinks he is who he claims to be, the super-rich Geoffrey Fourmyle who wants to hire her to guide him through high society, but then a sudden noise sets off Foyle’s red tiger stripes and she screams in horror,
The only way to calm her down is to share with her what he’s learned which is a) he’s discovered her family were from Callisto and so are, technically, enemy citizens b) he suspects the Vorga was being used to illegally smuggle refugees from the Outer Satellites back to the Inner Planets. Through his connections he’s come into possession of a locket in which Robin’s mother and sister send hologram good wishes. It was fenced by a member of the Vorga crew.
Foyle has discovered the names of three of the crew from the Bo’ness and Uig register, and now wants Robin to help him track them down, and he will beat out of them the whereabouts of Robin’s mother and sister, before he slowly kills them. Super-reluctantly, Robin agrees to help.
High society
It is New Year’s Eve and Foyle/Fourmile and Robin join the very cream of society as it jauntes from one elite New Year’s Eve party to the next, with some humorous description of the swells and nobs of 25th century society.
All this is an elaborate cover for Foyle and Robin to take a few hours out to jaunte to the Australian hideaway of one of the three crew names he’s gotten.
Ben Forrest This crew member’s house is super-defended by hi-tech security and they find out when they jaunte past it, that the basement is full of an illegal religious conventicle. In fact Forrest is not among them but upstairs in the attic where he has taken Analogue, a powerful drug. He is a ‘twitch’ who takes the drug to be reunited with his tribal animal and to act out its animal life. Foyle grabs him, inject him with a sobering drug and jauntes with him to a nearby beach where he starts ramming his head into the sea, shouting at him to reveal who gave the orders aboard the Vorga. But the man suddenly dies. He has been given Sympathetic Blocks, connected to parts of the brain, so even if he wanted to confess, his nervous system simply stops (p.134).
As they prepare to jaunte they see a huge burning figure stumbling towards them, and then vanishing.
Sergei Orel After putting in an appearance at the Shanghai New Year’s Eve party, the pair jaunte to the consulting rooms of Segei Orel, retired physician’s assistant on the Vorga. Foyle has barely started beating up the terrified man before he too drops dead. Once again the burning man appears to them for a moment (p.140).
Angeo Poggi Our duo jaunte to the Spanish Steps in Rome to find it in fiesta mode. Amid the partygoers Foyle calls out for Angeo Poggi, who comes waddling up the steps at mention of his name in a greasy fat kind of way. Only it is Peter Y’ang-Yeovil in disguise and all the revellers are members of his dreaded Society of Paper Men. But Robin using her telepathy realises it isn’t Poggi, Peter triggers his revellers to go into riot mode, they attack and pin down Foyle, but at that moment the huge burning man appears again and makes everyone pause long enough for Foyle to activate his secret commando technology, moving ten times faster than everyone else and getting away.
Olivia Presteign
Cut to another high society swanky party at Presteign’s New York pad. Foyle as Fourmyle and Robin are in attendance. In the witty banter of the upper classes Fourmyle delights everyone by telling them that he and his entourage/circus have bought Old St Patrick’s cathedral on Fifth Avenue.
Now enters the one element in the story which I didn’t like or ring true, which is that Fourmyle/Foyle is introduced to Presteign’s virginal daughter, a blind albino, sitting like an Ice Queen on a raised dais, the absolute peak of desirability and disdain (p.151) – and Foyle is smitten with her. As if overcome by a love potion, he finds himself falling hopelessly into devotion to her.
Despite his schoolboy crush he is almost immediately dismissed from her presence and finds himself sandwiched between Presteign and Dagenham when who should glide into the packed party and be introduced to him than… Jiz McQueen. Foyle panics but keeps it together and at the first opportunity sweeps McQueen into a corridor where she tells him she has fallen in love with Dagenham (!) who has told her all about the platinum but, more importantly, about the twenty pellets of PyrE.
They’re speculating what this is when the first atom bombs fall on New York.
What?
Yes, the war with the Outer Satellites just hotted up and they’ve sent nuclear tipped rockets at earth. Most are intercepted by the defence systems, but quite a few aren’t, and the posh party guests either flee in terror or go up to the balcony to watch the fireworks (p.157).
Tempted to help panicking Robin, Foyle is overcome by love/lust for Olivia and runs up to the balcony where she gives a description of what she sees. Her sight is altered so she is blind to human wavelengths but can see infra-red etc and so sees the missile trajectories and the leaps of flame as wonderful traceries of webs of multi-coloured lights.
He is once again loftily dismissed and jauntes down into the streets of New York, mostly abandoned as everyone with any sense has long since jaunted to the country. He finds Robin out of her mind with grief but who tells him that, before Orel died, she, Robin, found on his desk some papers which included a letter from a fourth crewman of the Vorga, a certain Rodger Kempsey, whose address is given as the Mare Nubium, the Moon (p.164).
Short scenes
In a short scene Robin tracks down Peter Y’ang-Yeovil and tells him everything she knows about Foyle. She is convinced he is not going to keep his end of the bargain and help her find her mother & sisters.
Jiz has sex with Saul Dagenham, except they are in separate rooms separated by three inches of lead glass (because of his irradiation, p.172).
The moon
Foyle travels by rocket to the moon where he finds this Kempsey working among the lowest of the low, whores and pimps and robbers, in some barracks. He seizes Kempsey, drugs him, binds him to an operating table and, in a procedure his souped-up brain learned that morning, removes his heart from his rib-cage and puts him on an artificial heart pump. Then he revives the man who, between screaming to discover his plight, reveals that the Vorga was carrying refugees in from Callisto but that it was even more illegal and wicked than that. In deep space they stripped the refugees and put them out the airlock to die in space. Hence Kempsey’s nightmares and been reduced to a gibbering wreck (p.177).
Kempsey reveals the captain was a certain Lindsey Joyce, but goes on to say that Joyce is a skoptsy on the skoptsy colony on Mars.
A what?
A skoptsy. They have revived ancient religious impulse to be hermits and monks, to cut themselves off, and so pay for an extensive operation which removes every sense – nullifying sight, sound, smell, touch, etc. Turning into white mouldering insensate vegetables.
Foyle kicks Kempsey out the airlock and a great fiery light fills his ship. It is the burning man looking in at him.
On Mars
Foyle travels by rocket to Mars. In the first part of this section, he kidnaps a famous telepath, Sigurd Magsman, from the manicured ground of his mansion. Why? Because Joyce has no senses so can only be communicated with via telepathy.
Then Foyle jauntes with the screaming man-child to the skoptsy colony where he penetrates underground into the cells where the human slugs are maintained. He bullies the telepath into penetrating the mind of Joyce – who turns out to be a woman – and resists communication, everyone is shouting when, once again, the enormous terrifying figure of the burning man looms in front of all of them. For the first time the burning man talks, saying it is too loud, it is too bright, but then bursts out laughing, saying the white slug skoptsy Joyce is telling him that the person who gave the order for the Vorga to ignore the Nomad – was Olivia, Olivia Presteign.
Foyle staggers and falls at the revelation. The Ice Maiden who he worships. At that moment the commandos break in, having been in fraught search of the kidnapped millionaire Magsman. Foyle can switch to superfast mode, but so can they and he is only a few fractions of a second ahead of them as he arrives at the rocket pads, when fate intervenes. The Outer Satellites launch another atom bomb attack, this time on Mars. The commandos are distracted long enough for Foyle to jaunte into his ship and blast off.
Olivia
Foyle blacks out on the spaceship which he set for maximum acceleration. He wakes to find his ship was intercepted by the Vorga, captained by Olivia Presteign, who calls him darling and leads him to her chaise longue.
It took her scientists six days to repair and fix Foyle. She admits she was leading the Vorga when it ignored him. Why, and why did she kill the refugees? In anger at being allowed to live as a blind albino, at being treated like a freak all her life. In a wildly improbably scene they both declare their love for each other, and lament what a pair of freaks they are.
VIP meeting
The cohort of top men we met at the start meet again to review the situation and fill us in on the war i.e. Earth’s been hit and then Mars. Should they surrender? No the Outer Satellites’ plan to enslave them. In which case the PyrE becomes all the more important. Presteign now finally admits he knows what it is and that its inventor believed it had the potential to release the same primordial energy as at the creation of the universe (p.199). It is triggered by willpower, a bit like jaunting.
They know that Foyle, under his identity as Fourmyle, had stashed the PyrE at the Old St Patrick’s cathedral amid his circus troupe. So Peter Y’ang-Yeovil has a plan: chances are Foyle has been tinkering with a small amount of PyrE. They will trigger it, blow it up. And he has just the girl for the job, Robin Wednesbury. They’ll clear the area, set off a blast, and wherever Foyle is hiding, he’ll hear about it and come running into their trap.
Foyle hands himself in
Driven by a guilty conscience, Foyle tries to give himself up in the office of Presteign’s lawyer Regis Sheffield but, in an abrupt twist, it turns out that Sheffield is a spy for the Outer Satellites, who takes Foyle off-guard, drugs him and jauntes with him to Old St Patrick’s cathedral.
Sheffield now tells Foyle why so many people are interested in him: the Nomad was attacked by the Outer Satellites, and they found Foyle had survived, so they took him off the ship, transported him 600,000 miles away to the busy spaceship lanes and set him adrift in a spacesuit to act as a decoy to attract ships to be ambushed.
But instead Foyle space-jaunted – teleporting a cosmic distance, much further than had been previously believed possible – and through space – which had been thought to be impossible – back to the Nomad. The Outer Satellites want Foyle so that this skill and ability, if it can be ripped out of him, will transform the war, and human existence.
Now, we realise, the plot has been not only about the PyrE, but agents of both sides have been trying to get their hands on Foyle himself in order to learn the secret of space-jaunting.
PyrE and St Patrick’s cathedral
Not realising that Foyle and Sheffield are in the cathedral, Robin, under Yeovil’s orders, triggers all the PyrE which is not in its protective lead casing.
This includes all the fragments from the original tests which are on people’s clothes around the world or have been flushed down toilets or settled in waterlevels – all of it goes off causing explosions all round the world, but the buiggest one rips open the cathedral, where Sheffield has brought him.
The church partially collapses, killing Sheffield and trapping Foyle, unconscious but alive, over a pit of flame. Peter Y’ang-Yeovil and the others don fire suits and tunnel into the ruins but discover that…
Foyle has been transfigured into the Burning Man. These last twenty or so pages are trippy and hallucinogenic, and the typography itself starts crawling and spiralling and looping across the page as Foyle experiences things no other human has before, all his senses short-circuiting to create synaesthesia and, as he struggles desperately to escape the flames, he jauntes not only immense distances in space but back in time too, to all the key moments of his quest.
He went hurtling along the geodesical space lines of the curving universe at the speed of thought, far exceeding that of light. (p.217)
Now we understand the appearance of the immense looming Burning Man at all those points in the narrative. He is like a bird trapped in lime desperately flapping its wings.
Suddenly he is in the future, or he is receiving messages from Robin from a future, apparently thirty years in the future. She partly explains what is happening to him, and then explains how he can escape from the fire.
Foyle’s revenge
Back in the present, Foyle finds himself once again surrounded by the VIP characters from the start – Presteign, Dagenham, Y’ang-Yeovil, joined by Jiz and Robin. They mke him offers to surrender the PyeE at which Yeovil explains to the others the real secret, Foyle’s ability to jaunte in space.
There are several pages of morality, where Foyle and the others argue about forgiveness and sin. Foyle in particular is sick of his quest and his anger. He wants to be punished. He wants to be sent back to Gouffre Martel. Instead He is pressured to take the others to the ruins of the cathedral where he shows them where he hid the Inert Lead Isotope container of PyrE.
But before they can stop him he sets off jaunting round the world and throwing slugs of PyrE into the crowd at each stop. He asks humanity to choose: either destroy itself or follow him into space.
Foyle now realizes the key to space-jaunting is faith: not the certainty of an answer, but the conviction that somewhere an answer exists. He jauntes from star to star, a whistlestop tour with brief dazzling descriptions of what he can see…
And the book ends as he comes to rest back with the Scientific People, back in the locker room of the Nomad where the narrative began and where he snuggles up and goes to sleep, where the people regard him as a holy man, and wait patiently for him to awaken and enlighten them.
English placenames
Bester’s initial work on the book began in England – a quiet cottage in Surrey, as he put it in an introduction to the novel – and so he took the names for his characters from a UK telephone directory. As a result, many of the characters are named after British towns or features, such as Gulliver Foyle, Robin Wednesbury, the Presteign clan, Regis Sheffield, Y’ang-Yeovil, Saul Dagenham, and the Bo’ness and Uig ship underwriters
After a while his inspiration ran dry and so he and his wife moved to Rome, which explains why there is an extended description of the Spanish Steps.
Thoughts
The Stars My Destination is an extraordinary rollercoaster of a book, unashamedly pulpy, trashy, full of exorbitant action scenes — with underground escapes, cops blasting in walls, a battle in space, attacks of atom bombs and a wide range of colourful and florid characters – most disturbing probably being the white, bloblike skoptsy cult members. It is a total attack on the sense and the imagination, which ends up melting the nature of text itself into pages where the text turns into corkscrews or twirls or geometric patterns.
It would be easy to dismiss it as adolescent, comicbook trash, but it’s of a higher order of imagination and, above all, of pacing. I couldn’t put it down, I was riveted. All the scenes happen very quickly, and Foyle talks in a street patois which makes everything he says sound punchy and energised.
And it builds to a genuinely weird climax where the typography of the text itself crumbles and transforms under pressure of the final metamorphosis of Foyle into the terrifying Tiger-bright Burning Man.
On one level it is quite clearly twaddle – and I was let down by the true love romance element between Foyle and Olivia which intrudes into the later stages, quite unnecessarily. But on another level, the ferocity of its images and ideas and concepts have haunted me for days — and through them all strides the terrifying figure of the unrelenting, endlessly vengeful Burning Man on his eternal, terrifying, endless Quest for vengeance.
Related links
Other science fiction reviews
Late Victorian
1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen
1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps
1900s
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels
1910s
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic
1920s
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…
1930s
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,
1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance
1950s
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester –
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1960s
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped andys
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after a catastrophe on the moon
1970s
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1980s
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the ‘Golden Era’ of the genre, basically the 1950s
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke* – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
Books & Boots 