The Stars My Destination

The Stars My Destination (S.F. Masterworks)

by Alfred Bester

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).

Ender in Exile

Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Got the thing from a lovely second hand book shop in Brixton, turn left when you get out of the tube and second left - it's down that road on the right. Being second hand (cheap) and a reminder of the first book in the series I read when I was sixteen, this one is a pleasure to read. A bit like a holiday to times past...

The plot of the original book is far too fantastical to try to summarise; I've noticed that much from reading the odd review of 'Ender's Game' before - they tend to leave me with that feeling, 'Bloody Sci-Fi nutters - they'll read anything'; the characters are reasonably well 'explored', so there's enough there to empathise with (to use reviewers parlance), the sci-fi ideas (i.e. future technology) give the author plenty of scope to get his characters from one side of the galaxy to the other without breaking into a sweat (which ultimately lead you to consider faster than light travel and transportation via de-materialisation and re-materialisation). It's all good fun.

So, in short, we're talking about a series of books about a child who is psychologically messed with to produce a human being who is capable of mass murder on a planetary scale and, as a consequence, able to save lives on the same scale. An intelligent monster who is entirely human and so equally adept at creating harmony out of the chaos he may well have caused (or, at least, was held responsible for) in the first place.

So: I like it. Although it's only a bit of fun. The characters' interactions are far more interesting than the storyline itself - which makes me wonder why I'm reading sci-fi AGAIN!

Fancy buying it? Here's a link to Amazon and the Ender series: The Ender Quartet Box Set: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind.

Tom’s Latin American Vacation (Part 3): Uruguay – or how to break a bunk bed

It was somewhere betwixt Christmas and New Years when I met her. The stripy dress was the thing that caught my eye, I was curious enough to see the face of whomsoever would go out in such an outrageously stripy outfit. Without really thinking, I semi-drunkardly wandered around to the front with as much panache as a car salesman checking out the front of a car to see what it looked like. I got to the front-end and, well, not a bad frontage it was too. She smiled at me – and I introduced myself. Once the introductions were over I paused and said, “I have to go – lovely to meet you.”

I walked out onto the street (still in Buenos Aires at this stage) to get some fresh air and within a few minutes the rest of the crowd (that I was with) decided to move on to the next club. She appeared and commented on the fact that I had not yet left – I took this in a positive way, as only I can. The night went on and I found myself in a taxi with her cousin and another girl on the way back to the hostel being propositioned by the taxi driver (via their translation) to a night in the seedier districts of Buenos Aires (an odd story, one I still don’t understand myself). This must have sparked their interest as a couple of days later they had invited me to Uruguay to celebrate New Years – which, of course, I did.

Uruguay (well, certainly the capital: Montevideo) is fantastic, the place is full of beautiful and decrepit old buildings (just waiting for someone with money to restore them), cars that look like they’ve been transported in time from the 1940’s and a whole host of characters who seem to spend all day playing and betting on street chess games. This isn’t a bad place to have a think about things.

The hostel we stayed in, Che Lagarto, was right next door to the ‘old district’ towards the sea side of town and only cost about 10 pounds a night. It was in a beautiful building – with interiors still being repainted and refrub’d whilst we stayed. The place was gorgeous – as was the company, of course. There was a celebratory city wide water fight a day or two before New Years, which ended up being more a city wide cheap fizzy wine fight – and I resisted the temptation to drink whatever was fired my way, despite what you might think. During the mayhem nearly everybody involved (those hanging from balconies, those running down the street brandishing bottles or water pistols) got hair-singe-ingly sun burnt and sticky. Returning to the hostel was painful for some, with backs reddened as well as cheeks, quite possibly for more than one reason (I’ll let your imagination take that one).

The New Year’s party that ensued has been made infamous by the breaking of a bunk bed – the exact details of which I will leave out – but needless to say it involved two persons, one of whom was male, the other of whom was female. They deny any wrong-doing, but we couldn’t help take the mickey out of them anyway. That’ll learn ‘em.

Meanwhile I was passing out in the hallway and being talked at by the stripy-dress woman – a good job too, hic. There was a fleeting moment when I thought I understood everything everybody was saying and then I realised I was drunk – thankfully, though, I realised I was empathic – which led to my hostess for the evening declaring me to be a woman. Just great – and she was my only opportunity for the night. Never mind, hopefully she’ll come round at some stage and realise I’m a man after all...

So the evening drew to a close and the festivities faded from our memories as hang-overs began to kick in by about 5am. I clambered into my bed at some hour – god knows when - and realised that Christmas may have been a downer, but New Years was most certainly not. I think I may still be recovering from it.

P.S. The mysterious ‘Stripy Dress Woman’ in photo above – showing off her tan, I like a woman who isn’t shy.

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