[DTN]⋙ Libro Gratis The Stars My Destination Alfred Bester 9780679767800 Books

The Stars My Destination Alfred Bester 9780679767800 Books

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The Stars My Destination Alfred Bester 9780679767800 Books

Delany said many consider it "the greatest single SF novel." Gaiman noted that, while "nothing dates harder and faster than the future," this SF novel, written in 1956, "has not dated a moment." In fact, TSMD is still light-years ahead of its time. It is one of the most extraordinarily imagined stories out there, like Terry Gilliam and the Wachowski Brothers multiplied together and raised to a new power. It contains elements of the past, like Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo and references books that hadn't even been written yet, like A.C. Clarke's 2001. It recapitulates the evolution of mankind and presents a strange and terrifying, yet dazzingly optimistic portrait of the future. It is grand, comedic, tragic, absurd, visionary, transcendent. Certainly the best SF novel I've read and maybe the best novel.


Tags : The Stars My Destination [Alfred Bester] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Marooned in outer space after an attack on his ship, Nomad, Gulliver Foyle lives to obsessively pursue the crew of a rescue vessel that had intended to leave him to die. Reprint. 10,Alfred Bester,The Stars My Destination,Vintage,0679767800,Bester, Alfred - Prose & Criticism,Fiction,Fiction - Science Fiction,Fiction Science Fiction General,Science Fiction,Science Fiction - General,Science fiction.,Star signs & horoscopes,Sciencefiction,Astrology & Fortune-telling

The Stars My Destination Alfred Bester 9780679767800 Books Reviews

This is a classc, and like it or hate it, that can't be taken away. Gully Foyle is an absolutely unique protagonist. The style is page-turning of a sort that SF rarely exhibits (except in space operas). And what most distinguishes this is its breathtaking profligacy. Time and again Bester pulls up an imaginative idea that many another (Kuttner, Clarke, Pohl . . .) would have fashioned an entire story around, uses it for what the plot requires, and drops it. This is confident writing (maybe only approached by the author's own "Golem 100" 30 years later). Don't nit-pick. It's not all PC, but it's remarkably prescient (for the 1950s) in terms of who holds the power and how it's maintained, Foyle's gutterspeak is remarkably eloquent; his trasformation from a powerless brute to a powerful brute is relentlessly engaging and never dull. It's a fast enough read to be worth the time, even if you find yourself not liking it. Call it the SF equivalent of Garcia Marquez' "magcal realism."
The Stars My Destination has timeless elements. I first read as a teenager and now reread in my 60's. It held up, something unusual.

There is character growth. A timeless plot of revenge (with elements lifted from Count of Monte Christo). Consideration of the purpose/role of revenge (not simply the best temperature for serving). Vivid exploration of a future recognizablely human society and the impact of technology on it.

Particularly this year, the story of Gully Foyle as a "common man" becoming more resonances (for me) with our current political situation. Both parties claim to champion the common man, but one seems favour the economic powerful, while the other sides with the intellectual elite. This is a common phenomena in US history and the world; Alfred Bester suggests a dangerous alternative.
I read Alfred Bester's "Tiger! Tiger!" at 12. It was good, but not all that and a side of chips. Last night, many years later, I re-read it and was crying uncontrollably by the end and realized it's one of those books which comes along once a generation if we are very, very lucky. The Wild Machines haven't been messing with the text and changing the words. It's just a wildly different experience now, one from which I am still recovering
I had not realized there was ... well ... so much, and it would be a shame to over-reveal if you haven't read it. There was The Count of Monte Cristo. Freedom from imposed views of reality. Absolutely laser-sharp insights into how a couple simple technological changes would upset everything. A world which defies the trap of future history not aging well. Cadence and prose poetry guiding the experience of reading the book. Gog, Og, and Magog personified as the Norns. How a man becomes not exactly a god (too much baggage that word) by way of being a monster.
They come almost too fast because he moves the story in a way that keeps you turning pages without stopping at critical junctures and then trips you up and implies volumes with just the right words or punctuation at the right time such as casually fusing Skoptcism with Stoicism in a way which invites dangerous philosophical boundary-breaking or....
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' "the three Inner Planets (and the Moon) had lived in delicate economic balance with the seven inhabited Outer Satellites Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto of Jupiter; Rhea and Titan of Saturn; and Lassell of Neptune." '

[And Heinlein's best work gets swallowed up years before it was actually written]
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' Peter and Saul are here. They say au revoir and good luck. And Jiz Dagenham too. Good luck, Gully dear...”
“The past? This is the future?”
“Yes, Gully.”
“Am I here? Is…Olivia—?” And then he was tumbling down, down, down the space time lines back into the dreadful pit of Now. '
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“Because you’re alive, sir. You might as well ask Why is life? Don’t ask about it. Live it.”

[Uttered by a malfunctioning robot waiter]
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Delany said many consider it "the greatest single SF novel." Gaiman noted that, while "nothing dates harder and faster than the future," this SF novel, written in 1956, "has not dated a moment." In fact, TSMD is still light-years ahead of its time. It is one of the most extraordinarily imagined stories out there, like Terry Gilliam and the Wachowski Brothers multiplied together and raised to a new power. It contains elements of the past, like Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo and references books that hadn't even been written yet, like A.C. Clarke's 2001. It recapitulates the evolution of mankind and presents a strange and terrifying, yet dazzingly optimistic portrait of the future. It is grand, comedic, tragic, absurd, visionary, transcendent. Certainly the best SF novel I've read and maybe the best novel.