This was a mixed bag for me.

First the good things. This is an action psychedelic story that I would (to be honest) expect from Philip K Dick. Story is set in far future where humans have evolved in a way they are capable of physically jaunting - jumping to remote location using mere thought. This transformed the entire world in a way that for example actual locations of buildings are no longer relevant so buildings just pop up wherever builders want it. With this you would think that society is also advanced, right? Well, it is not. World is pretty much the same. Corporations are de facto rulers of the world and those that do not fit are left wandering space in hippy-like communes, left alone until they find themselves on the path of corpo's. Rich and influential enjoy in the old technology (hipsters anyone?) because jaunting and entire moderna is soooo boring. Of course they use every means of protection available (personal armies and armed ships) but they like to enjoy in the sophisticated things of the past. This is also time where soldiers and mercenaries get sub-dermal enhancements, cybernetic implants and get hypno-therapy conditioning to act as sleeping agents. People are very deadly in this future and depending on the situation sleeping agents are all around just waiting for key words to get triggered (Treadstone anyone?). So as you can see this is very rich world, miles away from our own and yet so close and familiar. People still hunger for power and they are ready to do anything to rule over others.

Now the weird. Main character, Gully Foyle is a complete anachronism in his time. In all honesty he would be anachronism in any time outside the early Medieval times. He is so low in society that he is basically just barely alive. No initiative, no ambition, nothing but sheer physical strength but even this is powered down that for everyone else Gully is a person so bland and unremarkable that you would not give him any notice, shadow, grey man. Stuck doing a very arduous job he gets fired up by that ancient, ever present and potent force - thirst for revenge. This most base force will force him to change, to improve himself and bring his vengeance to people responsible. Foyle's very evolution from a drag of society to becoming "illuminated" human, maybe first of many to follow, trailblazer, is what the book is actually about. Foyle does some horrible things, leaves his friends behind, does not care what happens to others as long they are useful for him. But he evolves and becomes better, he transcends his limitations and finally manages to see the future, what in Dune would be called the Golden Path. Now some would find this offending (in this age of never forget and Foyle truly has a record) but last few pages of the novel are very interesting. Should majority be treated like kids and mindless mob by the selected few (kinds sounds contemporary, right?) or left to chose its own path, provided with enough knowledge and facts (now this sounds like utopia, right? imagine world without all the media houses serving the news :) toouuuggghh). Is the future of mankind actual merge of savage and knowledge, man that goes (in a similar way as his biological changes before and after birth) through entire cycle of his social development - from aggressive, barely speaking savage to illuminated human.

And now the not so good. I wont say bad because of the fact that this is 1950's book and majority of SF from that time is inspired by hallucinogenics and drugs and all works from that time in history have that trippy feeling. To say that story line is basically a collection of several story lines running in very weird relative directions is to say the least. Story holes become so obvious at time that characters are unrecognizable just going from one page to next. There is no transition, no interlude, nothing just wham, X is now completely different person. If you are persistent person this can be easily overcome but for others this will be a rather difficult book to read. Weirdly though story is rather fluid even with this structure. Author truly knows how to write.

All in all very interesting book, that raises some of the old (and eternal) questions on how should humanity move forward. Whether we like it or not we come across these even today (this year especially).

Recommended to all fans of SF and revenge stories. ( )

Not a very high brow book, but a good read nevertheless. The book is so strange and unnatural. All elements of the plot are ridiculous and a lot of the dialogue, especially the romance, is weak. Everything just sort of worked.
Will definitely consider reading Bester again. ( )

I read it in my school years. And it was crazy. And remains like this just trying to remember it. I can safely say that this book set a certain standard in world craziness from which I measure every other such book. It just came to me crushing and smashing every perspective on world and what can be done to change it. Good or bad... I don't know and don't remember.

Maybe I re-read it one day, maybe not. But I sure never forget it. ( )

Read this some years ago and can't really remember it, but my notes at the time say "didn't like it, didn't like the characters, especially the protagonist". ( )

I intensely disliked main character, Gulliver Foyle, as an individual and really wasn't sure I wanted to keep reading, but about a third through I started thinking of him as a personification of the struggle of the lumpenproletariat to achieve class consciousness, and that seemed to work for me, though I wasn't sure if that was Bester's intention. Ultimately, it did work that way for me, and the story is, if imperfectly, a dramatised sci-fi setting of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the "cosmic" ending symbolising Foyle's awakening to his potential as a revolutionary liberationist figurehead. It was worth sticking with.

A couple of the names struck me as being symbolic, though I'm struggling to fully integrate them, so maybe I'm pareidolically seeing what's not there:

• Gulliver Foyle - Gullible Foil - Gullible Fool
• Presteign - Pristine - Prestige - Priest-Stain ( )

A dude is on a quest to destroy a spaceship for a stupid reason and apparently becomes superhuman because of this I guess. Not exactly a thrilling page turner in that sense. Full of "oh no something has happened re something I made up! But it's ok a page later because it's resolved with more stuff I made up" crap - these devices aren't used to produce drama, they're straight "situation described, dude's gonna die, oh no he isn't anymore" things. The bane of "hard sci-fi": the plot feeling stupid because something new can always be made up. Conveniently you can't teleport if you don't know where you are (I think?) even though that doesn't really make sense and isn't consistent.

Teleportation is accomplished in several instances - eg in the star chamber - where people can't possibly know exactly where they are. Yet somehow a hospital which everyone knows the location of and the criminal underworld has mapped out can't be teleported out of because it's *dark*? Seriously? It also feels stupid that they don't mention the issue of the planet moving in space at all - not important to plot but a weird omission for this kind of sci-fi. Someone brings up the problem of telefragging on the platforms EVERYONE uses to teleport between but there's no reason given for why it doesn't happen (people materialising in other people). Rich people apparently use normal transport instead of teleporting, which is ass-backward: in modern day society rich people use faster transport, and here the difference is an order of magnitude greater, making rich people waste ridiculous amounts of time.

A few reviews say the main character is unlikable, but it's not even that - he's just a void of character. This is part of the point, but that doesn't make it any more enjoyable to follow along. In general the characters are super weak - I don't expect much from sci-fi but the first love interest's relation to the main character is completely incoherent. She wants to get a tattoo off his face and then refuses to pay 1000 more for anasthetic because she wants him to feel pain??? The book offers no explanation. I can't think of one.

In summary, fails as a character piece, an exploration of teleportation and as a page-turning plot-focused pulp novel. Rubbish. ( )

Whichever top science fiction book list I found this on is now dead to me. ( )

A great read, definitely a classic. Not sure that I really bought the main character's rapid self-transformation from clueless idiot into Batman, but it was still a non-stop flurry of ideas. The last couple of chapters are fairly mind-bending and kind of blur past, but this is certainly worth any science fiction fan's time. ( )

fantastic, didn't feel like it was written in the 1950s at all. ( )

It’s fortunate my Kindle is water resistant, because this book bored me to tears. The books that bore me are some of the hardest for me to write reviews for, because nothing engaged me enough to evoke any strong opinions.

The story starts off with a world-building dump which goes on for quite a while before we ever meet the main character. The main character is Gully Foyle, an unmotivated guy who plods along through life doing nothing spectacular. Until he almost dies, and somebody who could have rescued him chooses not to. Then he suddenly exercises his brain, figures out all sorts of technical things he had no knowledge of in order to save himself, then goes on a mad quest for revenge. Along the way, he ropes in various cardboard women and makes them miserable.

Gully was horrible. I dislike unmotivated characters, and I dislike characters motivated purely by revenge, and I hate the trope where (major spoiler) instalove conquers all. Gully falls in love with the girl responsible for not rescuing him, a girl he barely knows, and suddenly has a complete change of heart about everything. Blech.

The world-building was kind of interesting, if impossible to suspend one’s disbelief on. Mankind discovers by accident that they can “jaunte”, which is to instantaneously transport themselves to other locations using the power of their mind and their will. All they have to do is want it badly enough, and know the physical path between their current location and their destination. Which of course begs the question, how did the earliest humans not discover jaunting by accident, especially considering it was so easily taught to most of humanity after it was discovered and therefore didn’t take much skill to learn? You’d think the first person to think, “Oh no, I’m being chased by a tiger, I sure wish I was safely back in my cave!” would have discovered jaunting a lot sooner. It did amuse me though, because I’ve had an infrequent but recurring dream for, I don’t know, as long as I can remember, in which I was able to do something very similar to jaunting. It wasn’t something I’d ever given much thought to, I’d just think to myself, “oh, I had that weird dream again” and then forget about it. So it was kind of funny to suddenly read about it in a book. It made me wonder if the author had been inspired by similar dreams and/or if this is a more common thing to dream about than I would have thought. I’m pretty confident I’ve never had any exposure to this story before now.

There were a few interesting twists toward the end, but I was too numb to really appreciate them by then. I think there are a lot of tangible issues in this book that one could complain about, and probably plenty of things to praise as well, but in my case I was simply too bored to care. ( )

terribly bombastic and cartoonish, fit only for the 1930s or 14 yo boys.
Not 1/5 because it has a lot of good ideas, but the writing, characters, story and twists are all badly written, as for a cartoon magazine, not a novel, and fail to exploit those ideas properly. ( )

I read this book because it came highly recommended, though I don't see all the fuss. The story is ok, the pacing is good and breakneck, and it smells of inventiveness. But I didn't care for any of the characters, and the teleport/jaunte thing is too much of a stretch and not well thought out. It seems dated in some parts while thoroughly modern at others.

It is a good read, but it's a lightweight one. I read it as a palate cleanser between The Book of the New Sun and the Culture series, which I'm just now starting to read, so I didn't expect anything engrossing, but still, I thought it would be better. ( )

Gully foyle is a Spaceman who is marooned on his wrecked spaceship. He's been 5 months dying.
"...since he was already wearing the patched space suit he might just as well run the gauntlet vacuum again and replenish his supplies.
he flooded his space suit with air from the tank, resealed his helmet and sailed out into the frost and light again. He squirmed down the main-deck corridor and ascended the remains of a stairway to control deck which was no more than a roofed corridor in space. most of the walls were destroyed.
with the sun on his right and the stars on his left, foyle shot aft toward the galley storeroom. Halfway down the corridor he passed a door frame still standing four square between deck and roof. The leaf still hung on its hinges, half open, a door to nowhere. Behind it was all space and the steady stars.
As foyle passed the door he had a quick view of himself reflected in the polished chrome of the leaf ... Gully foyle, a giant black creature, bearded, crusted with dried blood and filth, emaciated, with sick, patient eyes... And followed always by a stream of flowing debris, the raffle disturbed by his motion and following him through space like the tale of a festering comet."
He can't believe his eyes when he sees this spaceship coming towards him. He rushes to the supply locker, taking out emergency flares, and lights one after another. The spaceship, obviously seeing his flares, slows as it comes near him. But with astonishment, foyle sees the spaceship take off again. The rest of the book is foyle's attempt to avenge this abandonment. He is so outraged, he is motivated to save himself in his desire to go after and destroy the spaceship.
In the beginning, he's too stupid to realize that the spaceship itself is not at fault. He traces the spaceship to its home in a launching pad. Attempting to destroy the spaceship, he is caught and sent to a cavernous prison in france. Prisoners are kept in absolute darkness, and are not allowed to speak. Foyle becomes despondent and is considering a blue jaunte (where you jaunte into space, and are thus destroyed), when he discovers that he can hear someone whispering:
"It whispered in his ear from nowhere, and suddenly, with the logic of desperation, it came to him that there was a way out of gouffre martel. He had been a fool not to see it before.
'Yes,' he croaked. 'there's a way out.'
There was a soft gasp, then a soft question: 'who's there?'
'me, is all,' foyle said. 'you know me.'
'where are you?'
'here. where I always been, me.'
'but there's no one. I'm alone.'
'got to thank you for helping me.'
'hearing voices is bad' the furious Angel murmured.'the first step off the deep end. I've got to stop.'
'you showed me the way out. Blue jaunte.'
'Blue jaunte! My god, this must be real. You're talking the gutter lingo. You must be real. Who are you?'
'Gully foyle.'
'but you're not in my cell. You're not even near. Men are in the north quadrant of gouffre Martel. women are in the South. I'm south-900. Where are you?'
'north-111.'
'you're a quarter-mile away. how can we -- of course! It's the whisper line. I always thought that was a legend, but it's true. it's working now.'
'here I go, me,' foyle whispered. 'blue jaunte.'
'foyle, listen to me. forget the blue jaunte. Don't throw this away. It's a miracle.'
'what's a miracle?'
'there's an acoustical freak in gouffre martel... They happen in underground caves... A freak of echoes, passages, and whispering galleries. Old timers call it the whisper line. I never believed them. no one ever did, but it's true. We're talking to each other over the whisper line. No one can hear us but us. We can talk, foyle. we can plan. Maybe we can escape.' "
So foyle meets jisBella McQueen [!]. They plan their escape and after incredible mishaps and hardship, they are successful.

Foyle was tattooed with a tiger's markings and the words "Nomad," the name of his wrecked spaceship, on his face, by a crazy chieftain of a people living on an asteroid that he crashed his spaceship into. jisBella pays a cosmetic surgeon to remove the tattoo, but the tattoo reappears when Foyle gets angry.
" 'I don't think this can be fixed, gully.'
'Skin graft...'
'no. the scars are too deep for graft. You'll never get rid of the stigmata, gully. You'll have to learn to live with it.'
'foyle flung the mirror from him in sudden rage, and again the blood-red mask flared up under his skin. He lunged out of the main cabin to the main hatch where he pulled his spacesuit down and began to squirm into it.
'gully! Where are you going? What are you going to do?'
'Get tools,' he shouted. 'tools for the safe.'
'Where?'
'in the asteroid. they've got dozens of warehouses stuffed with tools from wrecked ships. There have to be drills there, everything I need. Don't come with me. There may be trouble. how is my goddamn face now? Showing it? By christ, I hope there is trouble!' "
As it turns out, the Nomad had on board a valuable material, called pyrE, which its holder controls the means of winning the war between the inhabitants of the inner planets (I.P.) and the outer planets (O.P.). The owner of the ship, Presteign, who throughout the book is always "coldly" replying to someone or other, is desperate to get this back from its concealment inside a disguised safe. Gully Foyle doesn't know what the substance is, but he knows that its possession will give him the means to find the person who gave the order for the rescue ship to abandon him, and destroy them.

I don't want to spend anymore time on this review, because I didn't like the book. Some reviewers have said that this is a sci-fi takeoff on "the count of monte cristo." I have read that book and this doesn't rate. I despised the protagonist. I don't like the women characters, either. The book is sexist. I don't think I would've liked Alfred Bester. ( )

I haven't liked the book so much as to give it 4 stars, but then it's true that this book does a lot of things well, and when there are a lot of good things, you must acknowledge it.

The pace is good, the story is good, there are some brilliant moments. I still expected more. ( )

a lot of cool ideas here (especially for the time), some boring tropes ( )

What a very strange book. Not a single likeable character but that doesn't bother me. I was occasionally lost - there were a few HUH moments. Not sure what to make of it at all, tbh. ( )

Am citit o cateva capitole dar e ceva in stilul lui care nu imi place.
Si poveste care parea interesant s-a schimbat in rau cand s-a reintors Gully Foyle pe pamant. ( )

Very fun, even though I was expecting the final dramatic conclusion to be the basis for the book after I read the Prologue. I kept waiting for that the whole time. Still, page turner, with lots of imagination. The anger and hatred inherent in the main character was hard for me to stomach, though--I've really become less entertained by violence in the past year. ( )

Very fun, even though I was expecting the final dramatic conclusion to be the basis for the book after I read the Prologue. I kept waiting for that the whole time. Still, page turner, with lots of imagination. The anger and hatred inherent in the main character was hard for me to stomach, though--I've really become less entertained by violence in the past year. ( )

More dated than I expected and too much of the super man for my taste. I chose to read it as surreal and fantastical. In that light it was OK, not requiring me to believe or empathize with the narrative and characters. The Gully-as-everyman and thrown in populism of the conclusion was unwelcome, gratuitous and cheap. He built no movement to overthrow the status quo so why should we believe it would be overthrown by his actions? ( )

I thought I was going to like this more then "The Demolished Man" and I was right. While often noted as a precursor to cyberpunk, something I agree with. Reading the story reminded more of the "Expanse" series then William Gibson's early work, most especially the "Scientific People" and J♂SEPH out in the asteroid belt. This is a short classic SF novel everyone who enjoys SF would probably enjoy. ( )

I read Bester's The Demolished Man (which won a Hugo) a few years ago, but it did not leave much of an impression. I enjoyed The Stars My Destination much more. This is an intense and frenetically-paced novel manifesting many different science-fiction elements. There is space travel, teleportation, cybernetics, telepathy and time travel. Since it was written in the 1950s, much of the content and manner in which the story is told is necessarily experimental and innovative. I am not usually keen on books in which the main protagonist is an antihero, but the reader can relate to Foyle's obsessions and the educational and introspective processes which raise him up from savagery. I am sure that this story will leave a deep impression, and that I will remember the images it evoked for a long time to come. ( )

More Action Than 5 Novels Combined

If by some oversight you have missed The Stars My Destination, then take this opportunity to read what some sci-fi writers and critics consider among the best, if not the best, sci-fi novel to date. You’ll find it jam-packed with action, wildly inventive, paced fast, insightful and prescient for its time, and too boot exceptionally well written. It’s a novel about a man driven to the ends of the solar system, and ultimately beyond, by his thirst for revenge, loosely patterned after Dumas’ The Count of Monte Christo.

Our world in the 25th century has greatly expanded to include colonization on the inner planets Mars and Venus and the Outer Satellites, certain moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. In this century, the Inner Planets are at war with the Outer Satellites and the O.S. appear to be winning. Giant hereditary cartels comprise the controlling powers of the I.P., the Morses, Peenemundes, Essos, Greyhounds, Colas, and others, but the most powerful and ruthless is Presteign. People jaunt, that is mentally teleport their physical bodies from one location to another memorized location by force of will (the maximum being a thousand miles). Giant ships traverse the solar system carrying passengers, goods, natural minerals exploited from the plants and moons, and human slave cargo.

Gulliver (Gully) Foyle is not among the rich. He’s a toiler, big, strong, naturally intelligent but unmotivated and completely raw in action and manners. After a prologue that sets the scene in the 25th century and hints at the great civilization altering skill this man will eventually unleash, we meet Gully trapped on a wrecked freighter, the Nomad. He struggles to stay alive for months, until another ship passes within signaling range, the Vorga, a Presteign vessel. Though it sees his distress flares, it passes him by. In that moment, he gathers up all his energy, recruits all his raw intelligence and aims it toward survival and most particularly finding and taking vengeance on the crew and captain of the Vorga.

After using his ingenuity to fix the Nomad enough to limp into the asteroid belt, the Scientific People pick him. They live on a rock enhanced with the hulls of scavenged ship parts and consider themselves, though primitive, ruled by science. They restore and accept him and, as their custom, tattoo his face (Maori style) and marry him to a girl named Moira. He finds a small ship among the those fastened into the asteroid, repairs it, and blasts off, ripping out a part of the little world, without regard to the destruction or death he may have caused.

Next, he ends up in a hospital in New York undergoing jaunt therapy with others, guided by Robin Wednesbury. She’s a telesender but cannot receive, so in this world she is second class. She also harbors a deadly secret. Gully, for his part, can jaunt very well and uses his ability and time to gather information on the Vorga. He finds the ship and attempts to destroy it, only to be captured by Presteign. Presteign is trying to find the Nomad because it carries 20 million credits and 20 pounds of PyrE, a psychokenetically ignited thermonuclear explosive, that could both end the war and civilization, while making more of a fortune for Presteign. Without telepaths available to extract the ship’s whereabouts from Gully, they send him to Gouffre Martel, an underground prison hospital in France. There he meets hot tempered, tough Jizbella (Jiz) McQueen. Together, they escape, but not before Gully learns of Nomad’s cargo. With Jiz’s help, he has the tattoo removed (though in times of extreme emotion it reappears). After, they find the Nomad and collect the 20 million credits and the safe holding the PyrE, but Gully jilts her.

Years pass with the war worsening. The bright spot in all this is the The Four Mile Circus, the wild, strange entourage of Geoffrey Fourmyle of Ceres. When he arrives in town, spirits brighten. Fourmyle is a new Gully, reconstituted, with the help of Robin Wednesbury (and the 20 million), as an intelligent wit. He also wears a special body suit under his clothing that when activated allows him to move five-times faster than others, useful in the various skirmishes he often finds himself.

Eventually, he finds the various crew members, all of whom perish, until he discovers who he has moved heaven and earth to discover. This turns out to be the lovely but cold, blind albino daughter of Presteign, Olivia, with whom he has fallen in love. This, along with additional startling information, breaks him. When the united parties of the Inner Planets plead with him to release the PyrE to him, he decides that rather than one group own it, all humankind should and then decide for themselves their own fate. After this, Gully learns of his most profound skill, another startling revelation and after much self pity and personal torture, finds his way back to the Scientific People, who receive him well. He wraps into himself and we are left with the hope he will reemerge a transformed man.

Though this description might strike you as long, it merely outlines some of the twists and turns Bester devised, enough for several whole novels. And all of this, if you can believe it, in under 250 pages. Really, this is not to be missed. ( )

More Action Than 5 Novels Combined

If by some oversight you have missed The Stars My Destination, then take this opportunity to read what some sci-fi writers and critics consider among the best, if not the best, sci-fi novel to date. You’ll find it jam-packed with action, wildly inventive, paced fast, insightful and prescient for its time, and too boot exceptionally well written. It’s a novel about a man driven to the ends of the solar system, and ultimately beyond, by his thirst for revenge, loosely patterned after Dumas’ The Count of Monte Christo.

Our world in the 25th century has greatly expanded to include colonization on the inner planets Mars and Venus and the Outer Satellites, certain moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. In this century, the Inner Planets are at war with the Outer Satellites and the O.S. appear to be winning. Giant hereditary cartels comprise the controlling powers of the I.P., the Morses, Peenemundes, Essos, Greyhounds, Colas, and others, but the most powerful and ruthless is Presteign. People jaunt, that is mentally teleport their physical bodies from one location to another memorized location by force of will (the maximum being a thousand miles). Giant ships traverse the solar system carrying passengers, goods, natural minerals exploited from the plants and moons, and human slave cargo.

Gulliver (Gully) Foyle is not among the rich. He’s a toiler, big, strong, naturally intelligent but unmotivated and completely raw in action and manners. After a prologue that sets the scene in the 25th century and hints at the great civilization altering skill this man will eventually unleash, we meet Gully trapped on a wrecked freighter, the Nomad. He struggles to stay alive for months, until another ship passes within signaling range, the Vorga, a Presteign vessel. Though it sees his distress flares, it passes him by. In that moment, he gathers up all his energy, recruits all his raw intelligence and aims it toward survival and most particularly finding and taking vengeance on the crew and captain of the Vorga.

After using his ingenuity to fix the Nomad enough to limp into the asteroid belt, the Scientific People pick him. They live on a rock enhanced with the hulls of scavenged ship parts and consider themselves, though primitive, ruled by science. They restore and accept him and, as their custom, tattoo his face (Maori style) and marry him to a girl named Moira. He finds a small ship among the those fastened into the asteroid, repairs it, and blasts off, ripping out a part of the little world, without regard to the destruction or death he may have caused.

Next, he ends up in a hospital in New York undergoing jaunt therapy with others, guided by Robin Wednesbury. She’s a telesender but cannot receive, so in this world she is second class. She also harbors a deadly secret. Gully, for his part, can jaunt very well and uses his ability and time to gather information on the Vorga. He finds the ship and attempts to destroy it, only to be captured by Presteign. Presteign is trying to find the Nomad because it carries 20 million credits and 20 pounds of PyrE, a psychokenetically ignited thermonuclear explosive, that could both end the war and civilization, while making more of a fortune for Presteign. Without telepaths available to extract the ship’s whereabouts from Gully, they send him to Gouffre Martel, an underground prison hospital in France. There he meets hot tempered, tough Jizbella (Jiz) McQueen. Together, they escape, but not before Gully learns of Nomad’s cargo. With Jiz’s help, he has the tattoo removed (though in times of extreme emotion it reappears). After, they find the Nomad and collect the 20 million credits and the safe holding the PyrE, but Gully jilts her.

Years pass with the war worsening. The bright spot in all this is the The Four Mile Circus, the wild, strange entourage of Geoffrey Fourmyle of Ceres. When he arrives in town, spirits brighten. Fourmyle is a new Gully, reconstituted, with the help of Robin Wednesbury (and the 20 million), as an intelligent wit. He also wears a special body suit under his clothing that when activated allows him to move five-times faster than others, useful in the various skirmishes he often finds himself.

Eventually, he finds the various crew members, all of whom perish, until he discovers who he has moved heaven and earth to discover. This turns out to be the lovely but cold, blind albino daughter of Presteign, Olivia, with whom he has fallen in love. This, along with additional startling information, breaks him. When the united parties of the Inner Planets plead with him to release the PyrE to him, he decides that rather than one group own it, all humankind should and then decide for themselves their own fate. After this, Gully learns of his most profound skill, another startling revelation and after much self pity and personal torture, finds his way back to the Scientific People, who receive him well. He wraps into himself and we are left with the hope he will reemerge a transformed man.

Though this description might strike you as long, it merely outlines some of the twists and turns Bester devised, enough for several whole novels. And all of this, if you can believe it, in under 250 pages. Really, this is not to be missed. ( )

Hard to believe that this book is 60 years old. Except for referring to African-Americans as "Negro" (not even in a derogatory way), this book could easily have come out within the last few years. Obviously it holds up very well. ( )