"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.