Galaxy magazine cover from October 1956 The Stars My Destination (also called Tiger! Tiger!) is a science fiction novel by Alfred Bester, first published in Galaxy magazine in October 1956.
The Stars My Destination anticipated many of the staples of the later cyberpunk movement -- the megacorporations as powerful as the governments, body and mind redesign to specs, the dark overall nature of the world, even the cybernetic enhancement of the body. To this it added the standard "one weird idea" of science fiction -- that human beings could learn to teleport, or "jaunte" from point to point, with various personal limitations but one overall absolute limit: no one could bridge the gap between a planet and anywhere in outer space. On the surface of a planet, the jaunte ruled supreme; off of it, mankind was still restricted to machinery.
In this future world -- extrapolated with convincing and sometimes frightening detail by Bester -- we are introduced to the protagonist, Gulliver ("Gully") Foyle: "He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead..." Foyle is a former nobody, a man who had lots of potential but never had to use it, completely lazy, doing the minimum he could to get by, who is suddenly marooned in space with no escape. Even this isn't enough to motivate him beyond trying to find air and food on the wreck; he hasn't learned enough to know it's possible to find a way out of his situation. But he is galvanized to action when an apparent rescue ship deliberately passes him by.
In a sense, The Stars My Destination is simply a SF rewrite of a far older classic, The Count of Monte Cristo. It's the study of a capable, vengeance-driven man who escapes from an apparently impossible situation (twice, in Foyle's case) and returns as an utterly different man to wreak the vengeance that he was denied under his old name. Unlike many other Monte Cristo homages, however, Bester's is written with language fully as evocative as the original's, and with added intricate plot threads that make Gully Foyle's odyssey unique.
The novel also conforms to what Joseph Campbell, in his The Hero with a Thousand Faces, calls "the monomyth": "The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation--initiation--return...which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth." As he summarizes it, "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men." At the ending of Bester's novel, Gully Foyle returns with powers to bestow on humanity, only what they are is wisely left to the imagination of the reader.
To go more in depth, there are several other themes in The Stars My Destination. One is the technology or the ability to "jaunte". The technology is named after the scientist who discovered it and is described as instantaneous telepathic teleportation. One is able to move up to a thousand miles by just thinking it. This technology totally destroys the economic balance between the inner planets (Venus, Earth, Mars, and the Moon)and the outer planets (various moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune). It eventually starts a war between the two. This is an analogy to the Gutenberg printing press and the wars of The Reformation. Every so often a technology will come along that makes such drastic changes that it leads to war. In the case of the printing press, people now have access to information such as the Bible and formulated their on opinions about their religion. When The Church found that they sould no longer use the Bible as a means of population control they branded the new free thinkers as heretics which led to a split off of The Church. This led to war between the Catholics and Protestants. In the case of jaunteing, the outer planets bought 90% of their goods from the inner planets since the worlds were new and thriving. After the development of jaunteing, the outer planets began buying industrial equipment as manual labor became much easier and much more effective. the inner planets naturally began restricting the trade of industrial supplies to prevent the crash of their own economy. This triggered a war that would prove to be deadly.
The solar wars as you come to know them in the book are very similar to the wars of independence during the Imperial Age. The question arises "How far can you be away from the people and still govern them?" With the solar system split the way it is, Earth is not the central location and therefore it is difficult to govern the outer planets. As the outer planets shout, "Independence", the inner planets still believe that Earth should be a center for control. This is similar to the American Revolution when the American colonist didn't want to be ruled by a king that was across the ocean. The question the author asks is, "When it comes to solar colonization, how far is too far to govern?" this will a problem that mankind faces when it begins colonizing the solar system. The transition will go from multinational governments to a world government to solar colonies and eventually multisolar governments.
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