"The Stars My Destination" by Alfred Bester

Gully Foyle, Mechanic's Mate 3rd Class aboard the spacecraft "Nomad", an uneducated man with no ambitions, has been floating inside a coffin-sized piece of wreckage of his vessel for the last one hundred and seventy days. When the spacecraft "Vorga" passes by to inspect the wreckage and upon hearing his distress call ignores him and continues on it's way, something inside Foyle snaps. Swearing a murderous revenge on the Vorga and her crew, he finds the motivation to repair and launch the scraps of the Nomad, where he is eventually rescued by a strange cult living a secluded life amongst a scrapyard of derelict space vessels in the asteroid belt. The members of the cult tattoo his face and adopt him into their clan. Driven by his quest for revenge, Foyle hijacks a working vessel and returns to Earth, killing several clan members in the launch.

Gully Foyle lives in a twenty-fourth century future where people can "jaunte", a form of self-teleportation using one's mind over distances of up to one thousand kilometers. Other methods of transport have become redundant (excepting inter-planetary spaceships which travel across distance too far for jaunting). The rich and powerful lock themselves up in jaunte-proof mazes inside their mansions and a state of war exists between the inner and outer planets and moons of the solar system. The Vorga is owned by the Presteign Industrial Clan, a powerful corporation with political ambitions; when Foyle attempts to destroy the ship, he is captured and interrogated about his knowledge of "PyrE", a mysterious and powerful substance that could turn the tide of the war, and was being transported by the spacecraft Nomad when the vessel was attacked and destroyed. He is thrown into a jaunte-proof underground prison when he meets fellow-inmate Jisbella McQueen, with whom he escapes and is taught to channel his rage into more productive plans for revenge. Returning to the wreckage of the Nomad, the pair recover a quantity of PyrE and a large fortune in platinum, but soldiers hired under the Presteign clan interrupt the salvage operation and Jisbella is left behind as Foyle flies off into the sunset. Using his discovered fortune, Foyle assumes the identity of a rich socialite, undergoes surgery to receive implants that provide him with commando-like killing abilities and ultra-fast movement and starts to hunt down the crew of the Vorga. His killing spree eventually leads him to Olivia Presteign, daughter of the head of the Presteign-clan, who was responsible for the decision to abandon him and the Nomad; he is smitten by her and her sadistic hatred for the world, and struggles with reconciling these feelings with the desire for revenge. Upon further research by the Presteign group, acting independently of Olivia, it is discovered that during his time in the wreckage of the Nomad, Foyle had sub-consciously jaunted over six hundred thousand kilometers, a feat never before achieved. Eventually Foyle is wrapped up in the race to recover PyrE (when turns out to be a highly powerful, planet-destroying explosive) where he is knocked unconscious during an explosion, trigged by a telepath hired by the Presteign group. Foyle suffers synesthesia, bringing on more powerful latent jaunting capabilities that allow him to jaunte through inter-stellar space and time. Discovering other worlds that humankind could colonise, he returns to Earth, shares his discovered secrets of inter-stellar jaunting and invites the rest of humanity to abandon the war and join him amongst the stars.

"The Stars My Destination" seems to be fairly highly regarded in reviews of the last twenty years or so, and is mentioned frequently in "top-ten sf novel" lists. It is exciting and frenetically-paced, with a fantastically loveable (and hate-able) anti-hero Gully Foyle, and must have been quite exceptional for it's time (I find it so hard to believe this was written in the 1950s!). It introduced so many concepts that would be taken up as main-stream by the "cyber-punk" genre that really only kicked-in in the 1980s (the combination of the amoral-hero, evil mega-corporations, ultra-violence, nihilistic attitude to human life, radical change/breakdown in social order (in this case after the discovery of jaunting) etc.). On reflection there is also a bit in common here with Samuel Delany's "Babel-17", although I think with a slightly less optimistic tone. Overall, I enjoyed the book, but there is a lot going on, and it sometimes felt that too many threads were opened up all at the one time and not all of them resolved. I feel like it was an enjoyable read, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't make my top ten .. perhaps there's something here that speaks to other readers that I don't quite get. In any case, recommended for sf fans or those exploring the genre.

"Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert Heinlein

Michael Valentine Smith was born aboard the spacecraft "Envoy", during the first manned-mission to Mars. After landing, all radio contact was lost between the Envoy and Earth and when the remains of the spacecraft are discovered twenty five years later during the second mission to Mars, Michael Smith is also found alive and well, raised by Martians for the majority of his life. Smith returns to Earth and is an instant celebrity, and owner of a great fortune, owing to his parent's heritage and his claim to being the first human alive on Mars. Due to his Martian upbringing, Smith has a fair degree of difficulty in understanding human behaviour; he has never seen a women, has trouble understanding clothing, money and religion, amongst other things that don't exist in the Martian culture. To "protect" him from Earth-culture he is isolated in hospital and kept under guard. Nurse Gillian Boardman, sneaking into his private room, inadvertently becomes his first "water brother" by sharing a glass of water with him, a sacred act in Martian culture. Eventually she helps him escape, with the aid of reporter Ben Caxton to the mansion of Jubal Harshaw, famous author, lawyer and doctor who seeing Mike initially as naive, assumes the role of protecting him legally from the outside world. Mike exhibits telekinetic powers and the ability make things instantly and permanently disappear if he considers a "wrongness" in them, which he does when government agents try to arrest him and his friends. Eventually he is secured legal rights against those who try to exploit his situation, and leaves the care of Jubal to explore the world. Studying religion through his interactions with members of the fictional "Fosterite Church of the New Revelation", Mike starts his own "Church of all Worlds", inspired by Martian culture and elements of Human religion, where members learn the Martian language and associated psychic and telekinetic abilities. His new church creates a scandal with it's liberal ideas on monogamy and the afterlife and is eventually labelled as blasphemous, and burnt down by an angry mob of Fosterites and Mike is arrested by the police. After saving his followers and assuring his fortune will be bequested to the continuance of the church, Mike preaches to an angry mob and is beaten and killed.

Overall the concept of the book was an interesting one; we see Human society from the eyes of an outsider (i.e. Mike) providing a mechanism by which to analyse and criticise institutions such as marriage and the Church. The problem is that as the book was written in the 1950's the treatment of the issues feels very dated. One of the big ideas explored in the book is that of free-love vs. monogamy. Although, through Mike's philosophy, Heinlein advocates freedom of sexual expression, overall the text is still very sexist with too many fixed ideas about gender roles in love/sex. The book is fairly constrained in the notion of "free-love"; the definition here really only covers heterosexual relationships and where the woman's role is passive. Perhaps going any further might not have been accepted by the audience of the time. As in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (and as I hear in other Heinlein novels) there's a fair bit "preaching" in the conversations between his characters (i.e. characters go on rants about their firm political or philosophical ideas, quite possibly thinly veiled versions of the author's own beliefs).

All that said, the book is still an interesting read; Heinlein's writing is well-paced and easy to read and he keeps the action moving along well. Although the "preaching" can get a bit much, at least it's mostly written in an engaging fashion, so even though I found myself cringing sometimes, I wasn't really too bored with it. Based on what I found in the second-hand bookstore, I picked-up a 1991 re-published version of the book based on Heinlein's original manuscript (about 650 pages) which differed from the version published in 1961 that had been cut down significantly (for excessive length and to remove more controversial elements). I kind of wish I had read the original print because they were right about it being too long.