The Stars My Destination

The Count of Monte Cristo - in space! Source: Here

“Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation.
Deep space is my dwelling place,
The stars my destination.” 

What I like the most about this book was just how quick a read it was. The day I bought this, I sat down with it and by the time the afternoon was nearing dark I was finished. It is a testament to the writing of this book that I didn't notice the time fly by...

Written by Alfred Bester in 1956 (though originally serialised in four parts and condensed into this one novel), The Stars My Destination (TSMD) is a classic of the 1950s. Set in the 25th century, this future revolves around the idea of "jaunting", whereby individuals can teleport vast distances in the blink of an eye. Such an advance has completely upended the societal and economic order, seen with the Inner Planets and Outer Satellites at war with one another; and while all this is happening, protagonist Gully Foyle is adrift in space upon the wreck of the spaceship Nomad, biding his time until rescue arrives - and subsequently passes him by. This slight sees him consumed by the hunger for revenge, and the rest of the book follows his transformation into the noble Geoffrey Fourmyle, blending into the upper echelons of society while still searching for the person who left him for dead.

Such a narrative inevitably draws comparisons to The Count of Monte Cristo - a protagonist thought dead by wider society, returns a number of years after completely reinvented but kept true by the thought of vengeance, and on the surface they appear to share that central narrative (though TSMD is substantially shorter). I would argue that TSMD stands alone as its own thrilling yarn; describing a future where people can travel at the speed of thought and where revenge can be carried out instantly, it only makes sense Gully Foyle arrives at his destination faster than Edmond Dantes.

• The Presteign: the head of the wealthy Presteign clan and leader of a multinational megacorporation.
• Olivia Presteign: albino daughter of Presteign who sees the world along the infra-red and electromagnetic spectrums.
• Saul Dagenham: head of a private agency and nuclear scientist who was rendered radioactive in an accident - cannot remain in the same room as anyone else for an hour without killing them.
• Jisbella McQueen: criminal miscreant who guides Gully Foyle on his journey of vengeance.

Such an astounding imagination with more than enough ideas to match our colourful settings and characters: cybernetic implants, the aforementioned "jaunting" and its effects on future society, corporations as powerful as governments, shades of cyberpunk can be seen long before Gibson and Sterling and their contemporaries!

Gully Foyle is not a sympathetic character, nor is he intended to be. What I found especially masterful was how Bester turned this psychopathic, almost remorseless individual with nothing but revenge on his mind and turned him into mankind's saviour:

“You pigs, you. You rut like pigs, is all. You got the most in you, and you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties. All a you. Every you...'

[...]

Take a war to make you spend. Take a jam to make you think. Take a challenge to make you great. Rest of the time you sit around lazy, you. Pigs, you! All right, God damn you! I challenge you, me. Die or live and be great. Blow yourselves to Christ gone or come and find me, Gully Foyle, and I make you men. I make you great. I give you the stars.”

I absolutely could not put down this book, and when I did I couldn't help but feel a twinge of regret when leaving this universe, this vivid kaleidoscope of fresh ideas and characters ripped straight from a comic book (fitting, given Bester's background writing in comics). I cannot recommend this book enough.

The Left Hand of Darkness

A true classic of science fiction. Source: Here

“Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.”

Finally, a female author to break up the monotony! And who better to start with than Ursula Le Guin and her most famous work?

The Left Hand of Darkness is a science-fiction novel published in 1969 by Ursula K. Le Guin and is part of her Hainish Cycle series. In this universe humanity originated not on Earth but on the planet Hain, expanding outward and colonizing neighbouring planetary systems. For unknown reasons, these planets lost contact and in the present the Hainish are once again attempting to form a galactic civilisation.

Our story plays out on the planet Winter (known as "Gethen" in the native people's tongue, and referred to as such because it is always cold) where galactic envoy Genly Ai has been sent to persuade Gethen to join the Ekumen - this is complicated by the fact that Gethen is divided into two nations, Karhide and Orgoreyn,who do NOT get on very amicably. The people of Gethen are an androgynous, only adopting male or female sexual attributes once a month during a period referred to as kemmer,  and with no inclination toward either sex.

The significance of this book cannot be understated. Science-fiction for a large part of the 20th century has predominantly been a boys' club, with female and minority authors overlooked or lucky enough to get anything published to anywhere near the same degree as their male or white counterparts. When The Left Hand of Darkness was published in 1969, it arrived in the midst of two significant movements:

• In the wider world second-wave feminism was in full swing, and contrary to its predecessors this focused on gaining equality with men in social and political spheres and gaining greater legal rights for women.
• The New Wave was still in force in science fiction, marking a shift toward more experimental forms of writing and moving away from science fiction focusing on the hard sciences and toward the social sciences.

While Le Guin certainly wasn't the first female writer working in science-fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness certainly helped break down the barriers preventing women from writing more and went on to meet significant critical acclaim, winning both the Hugo and Nebula awards - the big two awards a sci-fi book can hope to attain.

What I really enjoyed about this book was almost the anthropological approach that Le Guin took in writing this story. Her own father, Alfred Louis Kroeber, was an anthropologist, and you can see how this influence permeates the book - what with the main protagonist's central struggle focusing on successful integration and coming to grips with an alien society. We have chapters fleshing out the Gethenian race which focus on their origins, religion, and even local myths, just little features I thought helped flesh out these strange beings more than we're used to in science fiction.

Another aspect I enjoyed was seeing how Genly grappled with the concept of "the Other" all throughout. Having come from Earth, with its own gender roles and delineations, to then be thrust into Gethenian society without the same notions of gender throws him for a spin. This difference makes relating to the Gethen a great difficulty for Genly, and even his assignation of value to their perceived gendered traits (e.g. equating femininity to weakness) doesn't help matters. His alien nature prevents him from fully understanding how Gethenians and their society work.

Easily my favorite part is the character of Estraven. Not just as the mentor guiding Genly - and by extension the reader - through this frosty alien world but as a person trying to do the right thing. Even when exiled and disgraced, he still risks his life for Genly, to the extent of helping take him across a glacier in order to return to civilisation. Indeed, both Estraven and Genly appear symbolic of the book's thematic core; learning from and aiding one another regardless of it the gap between us is unbridgeable.

The gender aspect of the book I thought could have been executed better. Le Guin writes the Gethenians almost solely using male pronouns ("fathers, sons, brothers") when we have a multitude of gender neutral pronouns ("parents/guardians, children, siblings") that could have been more than acceptable. For the time it was published, the fact that there was an effort to make such different notions of gender a central part of your narrative in my eyes should be commended.

All in all, I really enjoyed this thought-provoking book. It left me with so much to mull over and I'm certain I'll come to revisit it soon enough. I think this end quote really sums up the essence of what Le Guin was aiming for here; that even when there gaps between you and "the Other" that cannot be overcome, that shouldn't stop us from attempting to try:

“And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with that fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality.”