“I’ve been a tiger all my life. I trained myself.. educated myself… pulled myself up by my stripes to make me a stronger tiger with a longer claw and a sharper tooth… quick and deadly… I went too far. I went beyond simplicity. I turned myself into a thinking creature.”
The Jaunte Age
The googly ball Alfred Bester tossed into ’Demolished Man’, as we’ve already seen, was telepathy. And telepaths do turn up, if in limited number, in the later ’The Stars My Destination’. But overall, this is the turn of teleportation. The jolly term ‘jaunting’, later taken up by ‘The Tomorrow People’, seems to stem from here.
And this becomes determining. It reads like a much more improvised book than its predecessor, Bester’s mind zipping from one crazy notion to the next as quickly as his ever-jaunting characters. ’Demolished Man’ had a primary setting, even if it left it at will. ’Stars My Destination’ bounces round the map. It’s way more about generating headlong forward trajectory than planting ground beneath your feet. (Typical line: “She broke away from him and swept across the ballroom floor. At that moment the first bombs fell.”) Yet, however bizarrely, the book’s also thick with foreshadowing, and has quite a strong thematic unity.
There’s two peculiarities; first, the way the origin of jaunting is consigned to a prologue. We’re shown the point in our future where the first jaunt happens. Yet it’s presented as an innate human ability, neither dependent on technological advances nor evolutionary leaps. The assumption is that threat stimulates innovation, as the first jaunter hits upon it to save his life. Yet do threats to life not exist in the here and now? The book spends absolutely no time pondering this question.
What’s important is that jaunting isn’t some potent of the ascent of homo superior, but a testament to the power of the survival instinct, technobabbled as to do with “Tigrid substance in nerve cells.” If not an evolutionary leap, it revolutionises society, the consequences are social. (“There were crashes and panics and strikes and famines as pre-jaunte industries failed.”)
Also, in a particularly exquisite detail, the rich carry on using antiquated tools - telephones, coach-and-horses, servants forbidden to jaunt themselves etc. - simply because they can, much like affected toffs today such as Jacob Rees Mogg parade their wealth though affected antiquation.
Tattooed On the Inside
The backdrop is the Solar War, between the Inner Planets and Outer Satellites. Which, not unusual in American SF, is presented as such an anti-imperialist war its almost a class war, fought between the labouring poor and decadent rich. Yet the striving Outer Satellite folk scarcely appear. Their contribution is to continually lob stuff over the dividing wall of what’s in and out of the novel, by their repeated but unexpected missile attacks, sometimes upon ballrooms.
And this is largely to focus those features on protagonist Gully Foyle.
Foyle is functionally much like Powell, the hero of the previous book. His aim is to take down his powerful and well-connected nemesis, Presteign, who left him to die in a wrecked spaceship. And in this mission he travels (not infrequently jauntes) through society, taking in both high and low. There’s the same device of chapters focusing on one or the other of them, with the other then appearing only externally. He also turns out to have a special ability akin to Powell’s, more of which anon…
But he’s nothing like good cop Powell in character. With all this future tech thrown against him, his defence is essentially his single-mindedness. When he breaks out of the warren of tunnels making up the underground prison of Gouffre Martel, it feels emblematic. This future society is a maze, of conventions and expectations, through which he drives a remorselessly straight path.
Which actually makes him less like the hero and more the villain of ’Demolished Man’. Like Reich, Foyle is not just outside but against society, relying on his own gut instinct to get where he wants. But then Reich wasn’t simply the villain nor is Foyle simply our hero. The polyglot nature of the novel and its refusal to set a moral centre seem related.
At the outset he’s living hand-to-mouth on a wrecked spaceship, a scavenging animal. Then on a foraging raid, he sees a reflection of himself, like an animal having a brief experience of self-awareness. And this is associated with his spying a rescue ship. He is, until that point, willing to survive from day to day until he doesn’t. But when the Presteign-owned ship fails to stop for him he vows revenge, which necessitates escape.
A common feature of pulp heroes is that they express themselves entirely through action. Yet, though he surely was a pulp writer, Bester was pretty much uninterested in heroics. To him, struggles to change things often fail, or cause their own problems. And what may seem like a standard Campbellian ‘overcoming the refusal of the call’ moment is portrayed quite clearly as a mistake. He’s likened to a “beast in the trap” in the first sentence of the first chapter. And that trap widens, into his all-consuming lust for revenge. Had he died in that tool locker, and subsequent events gone unwritten, it would simply have gone better.
True Bester may be having it both ways a touch. There’s times when we’re clearly meant to thrill to Foyle’s acts of derring-do. And his act of rape isn’t seen in a particularly serious light, presented as little more than a character flaw. (Treatment of women… well, we had that last time.) But we’re also made aware that we’re spending much of our time in the company of an emotionally stunted creature who we’d shun in real life, tattooed face or otherwise.
He’s described alternately, and by those who known him best, as a “brute”, “beast”, “savage”, “ox”, “thing”, “dirt”, “dregs”, “bastard”, “Cro-Magnon”, “caveman”, “ghoul”, “walking cancer” and “a damned tattooed tiger”. (I could have easily missed some.)
Yes, the tattoo… Bester conveys his characters through SF-sized symbols. Robin is a ‘telesend’, with telepathically sends out thoughts but cannot receive them, making her near-on incapable of lying. Dagenham, a dangerous enemy, is literally radioactive, to the point you can only be near him for so long. His ship is yellow-and-black, like a hazard sign. And so on. Foyle has his failing literally written on his face via his tiger-stripe tattoo, where even removing it doesn’t really remove it. (It flushes back as soon as his bloods’ up.)
Yes, the tattoo… Bester conveys his characters through SF-sized symbols. Robin is a ‘telesend’, with telepathically sends out thoughts but cannot receive them, making her near-on incapable of lying. Dagenham, a dangerous enemy, is literally radioactive, to the point you can only be near him for so long. His ship is yellow-and-black, like a hazard sign. And so on. Foyle has his failing literally written on his face via his tiger-stripe tattoo, where even removing it doesn’t really remove it. (It flushes back as soon as his bloods’ up.)
This mark gets utilised on most of the book covers. And Neil Gaiman, writing an outro to the edition I read, is right to say that the British title of 'Tiger! Tiger!’ is more effective. The other title, in its boldly going, is more Captain Kirk than Alfred Bester. The via-Blake British version is about a thing you cannot help but admire, but wouldn’t want to be near, and for the very same reasons.
But then…
“Without Mercy, Without Forgiveness, Without Hypocrisy”
For much of the time we might imagine that if Foyle started out somewhere beneath us, he will ascend to our level. The tiger that learns first to plan then think like a man, he’ll swap his stripes for morality before the final chapter’s out. In fact, Bester probably leads us to believe that, then shows him accelerating past us. Foyle is not one of us nerds soon to be seen in our true form, no longer needing to hide or conform, the way Jommy was in ’Slan’.
There’s so much talk of space jaunting being impossible, we figure it’ll be along. But when it happens, he’s able to time jaunte too. (Perhaps based on Einsteinian notions of space/time?) And while land jaunting merely shook up the economy, space jaunting is a total paradigm shift.
Interestingly, this occupies the same formal space in the narrative as Reich’s vision, and has the same sense of dark revelation. Except Reich’s universe essentially closes in on him. Whereas Foyle effectively expands to fill his. He starts the book in a tool locker, and ends it jaunting throughout the cosmos, to the point he’s become virtually omnipotent.
And the typographical effects which peppered ’Demolished Man’, but so far withheld here, suddenly appear like never before. Bester could have formatted those earlier efforts on his home typewriter, by playing with the page margins. Whereas here they’re vivid word shapes, like something from a Russian Futurist poem, calligraphy representing onomatopoeia representing synaesthesia. (It also seems remarkably close to the sort of formal experimentation the New Wave in SF went in for, a decade later.)
And what triggers this ability in Foyle is his being caught in an explosion, so he is simultaneously everywhere and trapped in pain. In fact, the two then become almost indistinguishable. (“”He was not only trapped within the labyrinth of the inferno; he was trapped in the kaleidoscope of his own cross-senses.”) The ‘burning man’ images, which people see as foreshadows of him in this moment, have something sacrificial about them - which makes him almost Christ-like. And this is enhanced by the way we’re not with Foyle in this moment, but see him through the eyes of secondary characters.
But it’s also wider than that, the mythological notion of creation coming through an act of primal sacrifice. And, though Bester forever leaps from one crazy notion to the next, I tend to think this is deliberate. Foyle becomes an example of what’s sometimes called the bestial celestial, where the high is to be found in the low and vice versa. It’s not savage to messiah but Savage Messiah. (His voice emits “burning laughter.”)
And, as you’re probably used to by now, Bester then throws in something else. PyreX is a explosive device which can be triggered by the power of thought alone. We’re told several times it’s pronounced like funeral pyre, which feels a little like rubbing the point in. In a fairly unabashed nuclear bomb analogy, whichever side has it wins the war.
And Foyle’s solution isn’t to ban the bomb but decentralise control. Do not think Gully Foyle comes to bring peace on Earth. In fact he’s not even packing a sword, but a shedload of dangerous explosive, then handing each one of us a fuse.
Everyone having their own access to such powers of destruction, that would be pushing it even for the NRA. But in this sink-or-swim approach to parenting, he seems largely unconcerned about the outcome. There’s no guarantee it will turn out well, and not much sign he cares. The human race will either make it or they won’t. That’s up to us, not Gully Foyle. (“No more secrets from now on… No more telling the children what’s best for them to know… Let ‘em all grow up. It’s about time.”)
And the self-contradictory notion of primal sacrifice extends to here. The PyreX is hidden in a secret religious altar, while Presteign compares it to creation. There’s even the suggestion that PyreX and space-hopping Foyle are equivalents, dark revelations which we may not want to acknowledge but won’t be able to shut out. There’s a prelude to this when Presteign’s daughter Olivia, perceiving a missile attack on Earth through her electromagnetic and infra-red sight, is rapturous:
”the explosions… they’re not just clouds of light. They’re fabrics, webs, tapestries of meshing colours. So beautiful. Like exquisite shrouds.”
Though some of the price paid is narrative coherence. Up to now, everything has centred around Foyle’s feud with Presteign. Their first confrontation happens off-page. Then they meet while Foyle is in disguise. We feel things are being saved up for a final conflict, a page-turner punch-up perhaps atop some space-age Reichenbach Falls. Yet while the two do come face-to-face in the final chapter, it’s with several other characters present, who essentially elbow him to the margins. The central conflict, the novel’s driving force is essentially forgotten about.
Which seems par for the course. If better-known than ’Demolished Man’, this book is considerably less focused. While that had digressions this sometimes feels *all* digressions, pulpily episodic and strung together with frequent daredevil last-minute escapes. Robyn’s line “I’m thinking all over the place” seems apposite. If we were snarky types we’d be calling it ’The Stars My Deviation’.
In what’s both boon and curse there’s simply too many ideas here, jostling against one another for the spotlight. The upside of this is, much as van Vogt had been, Bester is able to disgorge his febrile imagination onto the page. The downside is that one notion never stays uppermost for long. I’m always fascinated how so many pulp-era SF writers work as if for a graphic novel, throwing new visual and conceptual notions at you in a seemingly endless series. (Bester essentially invents bullet time, decades ahead of *’The Matrix’,* despite it being so visual an effect.)
But out of this cavalcade, what will stay with you? I’m quite sure it will be the ending, the savage messiah making the primal sacrifice, crucified and yet omnipotent.
And the self-contradictory notion of primal sacrifice extends to here. The PyreX is hidden in a secret religious altar, while Presteign compares it to creation. There’s even the suggestion that PyreX and space-hopping Foyle are equivalents, dark revelations which we may not want to acknowledge but won’t be able to shut out. There’s a prelude to this when Presteign’s daughter Olivia, perceiving a missile attack on Earth through her electromagnetic and infra-red sight, is rapturous:
”the explosions… they’re not just clouds of light. They’re fabrics, webs, tapestries of meshing colours. So beautiful. Like exquisite shrouds.”
Though some of the price paid is narrative coherence. Up to now, everything has centred around Foyle’s feud with Presteign. Their first confrontation happens off-page. Then they meet while Foyle is in disguise. We feel things are being saved up for a final conflict, a page-turner punch-up perhaps atop some space-age Reichenbach Falls. Yet while the two do come face-to-face in the final chapter, it’s with several other characters present, who essentially elbow him to the margins. The central conflict, the novel’s driving force is essentially forgotten about.
Which seems par for the course. If better-known than ’Demolished Man’, this book is considerably less focused. While that had digressions this sometimes feels *all* digressions, pulpily episodic and strung together with frequent daredevil last-minute escapes. Robyn’s line “I’m thinking all over the place” seems apposite. If we were snarky types we’d be calling it ’The Stars My Deviation’.
In what’s both boon and curse there’s simply too many ideas here, jostling against one another for the spotlight. The upside of this is, much as van Vogt had been, Bester is able to disgorge his febrile imagination onto the page. The downside is that one notion never stays uppermost for long. I’m always fascinated how so many pulp-era SF writers work as if for a graphic novel, throwing new visual and conceptual notions at you in a seemingly endless series. (Bester essentially invents bullet time, decades ahead of *’The Matrix’,* despite it being so visual an effect.)
But out of this cavalcade, what will stay with you? I’m quite sure it will be the ending, the savage messiah making the primal sacrifice, crucified and yet omnipotent.
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