
The Stars My Destination
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Narrated by:
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Gerard Doyle
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By:
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Alfred Bester
About this listen
Marooned in outer space after an attack on his ship, Nomad, Gulliver Foyle lives to obsessively pursue the crew of a rescue vessel that had intended to leave him to die.
When it comes to pop culture, Alfred Bester (1913-1987) is something of an unsung hero. He wrote radio scripts, screenplays, and comic books (in which capacity he created the original Green Lantern Oath). But Bester is best known for his science fiction novels, and The Stars My Destination may be his finest creation. With its sly potshotting at corporate skullduggery, The Stars My Destination seems utterly contemporary, and has maintained its status as an underground classic for over 50 years.
©1956 Alfred Bester; copyright renewed 1984 by Alfred Bester; special restored text of this edition copyright 1996 by the Estate of Alfred Bester; Introduction copyright 1996 by Neil Gaiman (P)2017 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
At last, one of the world’s greatest works of science fiction is available - just as author Stanislaw Lem intended it. To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Solaris, Audible, in cooperation with the Lem Estate, has commissioned a brand-new translation - complete for the first time, and the first ever directly from the original Polish to English. Beautifully narrated by Alessandro Juliani ( Battlestar Galactica), Lem’s provocative novel comes alive for a new generation.
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A comment on negative reviews
- By Burns on 09-20-11
By: Stanislaw Lem, and others
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Diaspora
- By: Greg Egan
- Narrated by: Adam Epstein
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Behold the orphan. Born into a world that is not a world. A digital being grown from a mind seed, a genderless cybernetic citizen in a vast network of probes, satellites, and servers knitting the Solar System into one scape, from the outer planets to the fiery surface of the Sun. Since the Introdus in the 21st century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software.
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Fabulous Story, Disappointing Performance
- By Ben on 12-08-13
By: Greg Egan
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Ubik
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Glen Runciter runs a lucrative business - deploying his teams of anti-psychics to corporate clients who want privacy and security from psychic spies. But when he and his top team are ambushed by a rival, he is gravely injured and placed in "half-life," a dreamlike state of suspended animation. Soon, though, the surviving members of the team begin experiencing some strange phenomena, such as Runciter's face appearing on coins and the world seeming to move backward in time.
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Holy sh*t
- By Amazon Customer on 03-17-17
By: Philip K. Dick
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The City and the Stars
- By: Arthur C. Clarke
- Narrated by: Geoffrey T. Williams
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Diaspar is Earth's last city - surrounded by deserts, on a world where the oceans have long since dried up. It is a domed, isolated, technological marvel, run by the Central Computer. Diaspar has conquered death. People are called forth; they live for a thousand years and then are recalled, to be born thousands of years later, over and over again. No child has been born for at least 10 million years. Until Alvin....
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A Classic
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 12-10-11
By: Arthur C. Clarke
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The Dying Earth
- Tales of the Dying Earth, Book 1
- By: Jack Vance
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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The stories in The Dying Earth introduce dozens of seekers of wisom and beauty, lovely lost women, wizards of every shade of eccentricity with their runic amulets and spells. We meet the melancholy deodands, who feed on human flesh and the twk-men, who ride dragonflies and trade information for salt. There are monsters and demons. Each being is morally ambiguous: The evil are charming, the good are dangerous. All are at home.
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A Decadent and Hopeful Dying Earth
- By Jefferson on 06-27-10
By: Jack Vance
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Midnight at the Well of Souls
- By: Jack L. Chalker
- Narrated by: Peter Macon
- Length: 13 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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At the heart of a bizarre planet lay the goal of every being that had ever lived.… Below average in height and unprepossessing in appearance, Nathan Brazil is an unassuming if cynical starship owner, carrying passengers and cargo for a living - hardly the sort of person to hold the fate of the entire universe in his hands. But when Nathan detours from his route to answer a distress call, a hidden stargate hurls him and his passengers to the Well World, the master control planet for the cosmos. Billions of years ago, a godlike race unlocked all the secrets of space and time and remade the universe according to their grand design.
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Step Through The Portal, And Be Changed Forever!
- By Michael on 05-02-13
By: Jack L. Chalker
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Helliconia Spring
- The Helliconia Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Brian W. Aldiss
- Narrated by: Keval Shah
- Length: 19 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Helliconia follows an eccentric orbit around a double-star system with a twenty-six-hundred-year cycle of very long seasons. As spring slowly breaks the brutally long winter, humans emerge from hiding and a long sequence of civilization and growth begins to repeat again, unbeknownst to the participants but watched by an orbiting satellite station, Avernus, created by Earth some centuries ago. Humans free themselves from slavery to the aboriginal Phagors, and religion and science flower and expand.
By: Brian W. Aldiss
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The Shadow of the Torturer
- The Book of the New Sun, Book 1
- By: Gene Wolfe
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The Shadow of the Torturer is the first volume in the four-volume epic, the tale of a young Severian, an apprentice to the Guild of Torturers on the world called Urth, exiled for committing the ultimate sin of his profession - showing mercy towards his victim.
Gene Wolfe's "The Book of the New Sun" is one of speculative fiction's most-honored series. In a 1998 poll, Locus Magazine rated the series behind only "The Lord of the Rings" and The Hobbit as the greatest fantasy work of all time.
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great writing, won't appeal to everyone
- By Ryan on 03-20-10
By: Gene Wolfe
How this has yet to be made into a movie is baffling,especially when considering all the crap that does get made
Gully Foyle is his name!
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Still Best
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My first SF read still holds up...
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great book really enjoyed it
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a A Sci-Fi classic
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The audio version is amazing
Omg this was great!!
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The novel begins with a prologue explaining 25th century solar system culture, “an age of freaks, monsters, and grotesques” in which teleporting by an act of will (jaunting) has transformed human transportation, economics, and relationships, and led to an endless war between the Outer Satellites and the Inner Planets.
In that future, Bester imagines many interesting cultural trends: jaunte jackals who scavenge the sites of accidents or disasters; women who chafe at being confined to the “seraglio” that is a reaction to the freedom that jaunting would otherwise give them; workers who jaunte to and from work and often quit too soon cause they can jaunte anywhere anytime; rich family corporation heads who show off their wealth by eschewing jaunting in favor of antique forms of transportation like cars and bicycles; Cellar Christians (and adherents of other faiths) who practice their banned religions in secret; people who voluntarily disconnect their nervous systems to abandon their five senses; commandos whose bodies are electronically enhanced to speed up so normal people move in slow motion; a form of torture which uses nightmarish virtual reality scenarios; a corporation which specializes in growing bacteria in giant vats on a moon; a robot bartender who suddenly gives insights like “Life is a freak. That’s its hope and glory”; and much more.
In that future, Bester’s anti-hero, the uneducated, brutish, ambitionless “stereotype Common Man” Gulliver Foyle, spends six months dying and yet remains alive when the Nomad, the spaceship on which he is Mechanic’s Mate 3rd class, is attacked and wrecked, leaving him the sole survivor, mostly confined to a coffin-like tool locker on the ship. When another spaceship, the Vorga, owned by the Presteign family corporation, happens by, raising his hopes for rescue but then goes on its way ignoring his desperate flares, Gully’s transformation into a unique uber-man driven by his obsession for revenge begins. Gully teaches himself to read the Nomad manuals and then finds a way to get the ship moving again, which sets in motion the plot of the novel, which reads like a compact 25th century Count of Monte Cristo.
Gully becomes a monster, a tiger, for revenge (“Rot you I kill you filthy!”), symbolized by the tiger-demon mask tattooed on his face by the Scientific People he happens upon, a research group lost in space and living for 200 years by scavenging wrecked spaceships. He will go on to rape and torture, to use brains rather than bombs, to assume a buffoonish Bruce Wayne-like false identity, to dabble in physics, chemistry, poetry, judo, and yoga, to speak more standard English than his original gutter variety, to try to control his emotions, to become Solar Enemy #1, and to single-mindedly pursue his revenge.
Supporting characters in the novel are compelling: Robin Wednesbury (a black “telesend” who can send her thoughts to others but can’t receive theirs), Jisbella McQueen (a thief who tries to get Gully to control himself and to think—Maybe your target should be not the Vorga itself but the person in charge of it?), Saul Dagenham (a radioactive skull-faced man who runs the biggest jaunting courier service), Peter Y’ang-Yeovil (a clever Central Intelligence chief who speaks Mandarin but doesn’t look Chinese), Presteign (a basilisk-smiling business clan chief who follows the credo “blood and money”), Olivia Presteign (his blind albino ice princess daughter who has some issues with sighted people). They are convincing and larger than life, less potent versions of Foyle.
Lurking in the background of Foyle’s vengeful ambitions and the war between the Outer Satellites and the Inner Planets is PyrE, a thermonuclear explosive element detonated by thought. The way in which Bester brings together PyrE, the major characters, and humanity in the transcendent climax of the novel is apt, satisfying, exhilarating, and neat. The way he writes the climax, with disorienting and poetic synesthesia and chronological tricks, is impressive. And Bester’s insights into human nature (hate, love, revenge, forgiveness, growth, etc.) are cool, like this one: “There’s no defense against betrayal, and we all betray ourselves.” The mental jaunting is something most sf would explain with scientific innovations and technological breakthroughs, but Bester wants to say it’s all a matter of mind over matter. Finally, the novel demonstrates that it’s up to each of us (or should be) how we shape ourselves and our world, whether we destroy everything or transcend.
Audiobook reader Gerard Doyle is fine, but perhaps his voice is not deep enough for the burning core of Gully Foyle.
Some things feel out of place in the 25th century future, like paper mail, and the sequence set in Gouffre Martel, an impossible to escape from prison, feels a little long and labored, but fans of Golden Age, classic, influential and well-written sf should read Bester’s novel.
“We stand apart and shape our own world”
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Nester's Best
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Best science fiction story ever told
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Mind blown
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