Tuesday 18 January 2011

The Stars My Destination

The Stars My Destination (S.F. Masterworks)
The Stars My Destination (S.F. Masterworks)
My rating: 5 out of 5 Stars
Brilliant. Took me a fair while to get into - it seemed fairly disjointed for the first half of the book, but that may have been due to the sporadic nature of my reading at the start of this month (January - just back at work). Second Part of the book accelerated and, like an urgent message from an anti-hero on speed, made it's impact. I liked it.

Written in the 1950's 'The Stars My Destination', despite sounding like a rather crap self help group, seems to be bang up to date even today. The only minor criticism that could be brought against it is that 'some' of the science seems fairly vague; this downfall, however, is more than made up for by the extra-ordinary imagination that drove the creation of the   more 'believe and they will come' based ideas.

In Gully Foyle's time: The world is a very different place with humans empowered, not just by knowledge, but by new physical abilities which (given their non-prejudiced distribution among the masses) have caused society to tear itself apart. This may now be all in the past - but such patterns have a tendency to repeat.
On a lighter note: Bester started writing this book in the UK and hence many of the names are based on English place names, book shops or a rather large holiday maker - so the locals said...

Go read it! Fancy buying it? Here's a link to Amazon and the book itself series: The Stars My Destination (S.F. Masterworks).