The science fiction novel did not come of age until the 1950s, but when it did, and with the sudden profusion of mass-market paperback publishers, a new literary form was born. Though the 1940s were regarded as the "golden age" of SF, the '50s were equally gilded in a different way. Not only were the landmark works that exploded upon the scene better written, they extended the conceptual boundaries of the form into social criticism and consciousness speculation.
Alfred Bester was one of the most influential SF writers of the '50s, primarily for two novels: The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination. The former involved telepathic detectives; the latter was an adventure story based on teleportation. In a world where everyone can instantly transmit themselves mentally across large regions, social status seems to track the distance one is able to "jaunte."
Bester's style is fantastical and pyrotechnic, exuberant, over the top. His story is a revenge tale: The Count of Monte Cristo in space, jumping around the Solar System in sudden explosions of action. It wears its historical and literary allusions on its sleeve. But it seems a thoroughly modern science fiction book; it could have been written yesterday. The setting is a hypercapitalist future ruled by giant corporations. It has often been noted that The Stars My Destination is a proto-cyberpunk novel. It has the urgency of tone that we find later in William Gibson. The first lines of Bester's novel are indicative: “This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living and hard dying… but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice… but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks… but nobody loved it.” Literary echoes (Joyce, Blake, Dumas) pepper Bester's stylish landscape, providing historical depth while plunged into radical future excursions.
One can legitimately question whether there is substance beneath the style. At times the reader can feel exhausted by the density of characters, incidents, and sudden shifts in scene. The book is not an epic but it reads as if it has epic scope. In short, the suspicion is that there is less here than meets the eye. The main character, Gully Foyle, begins as low and rough with more muscle than brain, and ends up a sort of god-man, the first human with the ability to "space-jaunte" across millions of miles. But we never know this man, or feel much kinship with him. The character and the stars themselves, his "destination," leave us cold in the end. Still, the journey is compelling on its own terms, and one every science-fiction lover must take.
