The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

1. This revenge story reminded me of The Count of Monte Cristo in a couple of ways: the revenge-driven main character, the pause in action while Gully gets rich and learnéd, fortuitous escape from the inescapable prison where he illicitly found a friend who began his education, disguise by notoriety in society, a period of self doubt, a love interest turned enemy—this list could keep going. But this is not a straight retelling: this lacks the complexity of character relations, the three enemies are instead three potential sources of information pointing towards the real "enemy", there are no back story interludes of length, there are less supporting cast members of importance, Gully differs from the Count significantly—this list could also continue. These differences are interesting because they show an intriguing path for retelling a story in a new way with different themes. This is not a copy-and-paste, this is inspiration. It keeps those actions, story characteristics, and events appropriate for Gully and the setting, not those that were appropriate to the Count.

2. I think Gully is a well-realized character. Bester does not give him motivations too complex: revenge, finding the truth, hiding the truth, survival, and a sense that anything is possible—all mated to an "at all costs" mentality that produces numerous tensions in the novel. Then, Bester puts this character into different situations: a cargo cult, a solitary existence in a storage locker on a wrecked ship, a gutter brawl on the Spanish steps, upper crust parties, jail, etc. By applying different pressures and keeping Gully's priorities shifting through plot elements, the character reveals himself as holistically consistent, and surprisingly nuanced. As Saul points out, everything goes Gully's way, but not as either Saul or Gully plan it to. It's surprising without being predictable. The range of situations allow Gully's range of reactions appropriateness and consistency.

3. This is a tight, well constructed narrative. Not only does each character matter in the story, but his foreshadowing is excellent. Jiz's white spacesuit and Gully's love for her is recalled through the albino Olivia later. The mystery of Gully's opening position is revealed and expanded at the end. The poetic intro becomes a part of Gully's physicality. Bester's foreshadowing deftly allows the reader moments to feel clever without giving away too much.

4. The pace of information keeps the plot moving while giving the reader what they need to know. Partly this is achieved through circling back: the cargo cult is visited thrice, the Nomad is visited twice, all the interrogations are seen twice, the offices of The Presteign of Presteign are seen a few times, etc. This circling back allows the author: to dispense with always introducing new areas, which keeps the plot rolling; to show the passage of time through small changes—like at the cargo cult—and large ones—like at Robin's apartment—which helps contextualize the action; reflects the tightness of the novel's construction, mirroring the characters who come back to new importance later; and it allows Gully's character arc to be driven home by his new association and status within those places. Through going back to places, and the places themselves, the information inherent in the world-building is allowed to be quick and lets the story also be quick: because the reader is not being constantly bombarded by mere place descriptions, the descriptions of the world are able to occur more often without losing legibility.

5. This is proto-cyberpunk! I'm happy to find the origins of such an influential movement in the world. Gully's body modifications; the world of freaks looked at with resignation rather than wonder; the Megacorporations of immense power; the scope of the earth and the solar system; the class division between super rich and mostly poor; the fantastic future technology bringing dystopia; the lone anti-hero; even space-Jaunteing as a sort of singularity—this book is clearly influential on cyberpunk.

6. The writing never mis-steps. It's tight, mostly efficient pulp fiction, allowed to expand into beautiful descriptions in a couple of places: the description of the bombing, and Gully's fight with death at the end.

“There's light all over the horizon. Quick clouds of it. Above, there's a sort of sparkling effect. Like Christmas lights twinkling.”
“Oh, you see so little with your eyes. See what I see! There's a dome in the sky, a rainbow dome. The colors run from deep tang to brilliant burn. That's what I've named the colors I see. What would that dome be?”
“The radar screen,” Foyle muttered.
“And then there are vast shafts of fire thrusting up and swaying, weaving, dancing, sweeping. What are they?”
“Interceptor beams. You're seeing the whole electronic defense system.”
“And I can see the bombs coming down too: quick streaks of what you call red. But not your red; mine. Why can I see them?”
“They're heated by air friction, but the inert lead casing doesn't show the color to us.”
“See how much better you're doing as Galileo than Galahad. Oh! There's one coming down in the east. Watch for it! It's coming, coming, coming, now!”
A flare of light on the eastern horizon proved it was not her imagination.
“There's another to the north. Very close. Very. Now!”
A shock tore down from the north.
“And the explosions, Fourmyle! They're not just clouds of light. They're fabrics, webs, tapestries of meshing colors. So beautiful. Like exquisite shrouds.”

This is poetic and both of the characters here have their own voice. Perfect. Even the later almost Deus ex Machina of Gully's rescue by Olivia makes sense with the characters and their motivations—she would rescue him, and the writing is the reason this makes sense: Bester's word choices and sentence structures quickly and efficiently communicate this, but they don't shy away from personality and poetic beauty.

7. All the actions make sense and feel logical and appropriate. They have weight and serve to explain both world and cast while progressing the plot. This double use of plot points wonderfully gives them import in the storytelling, and allows them to reinforce their own importance to the world. Like the places circling back, the plot points serve double purpose.

8. There's some deeply experimental writing at the end—and it works well. The repetition of letters and gibberish attempts to communicate Gully's mind and physical abnormalities—as well as his deep synesthesia. And it works. The fractured writing is offset by the factual straight narrative interludes to keep the whole legible. This tactic of interspersing experimental writing from Gully's point of view with the narrator's straight prose is brilliantly effective.

9. This seems like pulp fiction at first, but dives into literature through deep examination of human motives, rumination on the costs of science and power and their appropriate uses, and an unwillingness to brush off the implications and results of actions without first studying them and drawing important conclusions from them. The novel's conclusion isn't some Death Star explosion or a rescue of the princess after killing the monster, it's a subtle reflection on the logical conclusions of the plot thus far.

"Stop treating them like children and they'll stop behaving like children. Who the hell are you to play monitor?"

"Who the hell are we to make decisions for the world just because we're compulsive?"

"That's all of us. We prattle about free will, but we're nothing but response... Mechanical reaction in prescribed grooves. Press the button and I'll jump."

Bester deeply contemplates the results of his plot, world, and characters. Through reflective passages like these, he encourages the same in his reader. This is truly good stuff.

10. But the writing is not wholly satisfying. I want more beauty in the prose, more alliteration and internal rhyme. Like in the sentence quoted above, why doesn't it say, "Who the hell are you to play hall monitor?" Simple, little alliterations and internal rhymes to make the whole sound a bit more beautiful. Or at least more poetic. These little, simple techniques add up in the passage quoted in point 6 above, and I wanted more of that.

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov

Read this short story for free online here, or hear Isaac Asimov read it to you here on youtube.

1. This is a nine page series of seven flash fiction episodes that are repeated cyclical events. Each is different enough to stay interesting and the whole is short enough to not get repetitively boring. This formulaic, episodic repetition is well done and each episode gives merely a glimpse of the surrounding context. But each glimpse is a meaningful, important one, packed with ideas of future human evolution that allows the story to expand in the reader's imagination outside of the words on the page.

2. Like in "Nightfall", Asimov starts with the familiar, but then walks off through stages into theoretical post-matter humans and finally to the fantastic realization of a creative god. But this end is still tinged with familiarity from Biblical creation. This is a large chunk of time and evolutionary change to bite off in one short story, or seven flash-fictions, but Asimov pulls it off through this structure. It's courageous of Asimov to take a nine page short story and further fragment it into seven connected shorter stories over this much time and change. That he was successful clearly shows his immense skill as a storyteller. It's astoundingly well crafted throughout.

3. Because I think this is so well constructed, I'm going to list all seven episodes and the scene, plot, and revelation about future humanity. One: familiar humans are confined to their own solar system when two computer techs get drunk on a night-watch. Two: a human family emigrating to another star in the Milky Way arrives at their destination planet. Three: humans can now harness sun power and they have almost overpopulated the Milky Way, while two people try to assemble a political report to a committee. Four: humans are still tied down to matter via bodies in immortal stasis, but their consciousnesses roam the almost overpopulated universe free of their body, as two explorers seeking newness only for their own pleasure run into each other and converse philosophically. Five: Man is now a unified consciousness, floating outside of the bodies in stasis, still unable to solve the repeating ultimate question, and realizing it as an imminent whole for the first time. Six: Man's minds fuse with the computer, transfer their consciousnesses as the galaxies end, in stasis bodies die off of heat-death. Seven: the computer starts the process all over again after solving the question. The episodes are given variety through their uniqueness, but theme and connection through the repeated question and answer. This is great structure, both communicating the inevitability of that first drunken bet, and seeing it through to the end.

4. The writing is okay, again. Tight, explanatory narrative only—which he is skillful at here. The writing's directness helps the whole stay focused appropriately. I think that first line is good, especially in relation to the story to come. Overall there is nothing great, nothing terrible. But really, what is possible in flash-fiction other than efficiency and maybe one witty thought? Well here he has three witty thoughts spread across seven episodes, one of which is repeated in six episodes, and that's not bad. The characters, as in most flash fiction, are necessarily two dimensional to keep everything so tightly focused.

5. It might be a plot hole that humanity is a single mind in episode five, but then multiple again in six.

6. I think there are three themes: that humanity doesn't know the side effects of what it creates, that humanity never focuses its efforts on something until it's too late, and that history is cyclical. Here, the perpetually self-improving computer eventually allows people to focus solely on personal pleasure while the computer's improvement seems to pass out of the understanding of the humans in the story; then it unexpectedly restarts all of universal history, giving humans another cycle. Humanity meanwhile, for all its physical changes, doesn't really change that much mentally and is still eminently capable of ignoring the onrushing train. The third theme is created directly from the story structure, the repetition of the question and answer, and the computer's action and words at the end.

7. The lack of tangential discourse, the cyclical repetition, and the two dimensional characters allow the short story to stay incredibly focused and tight. But melded to that is information about human development that answers just enough questions to give the story import: some of the necessities for these large changes are briefly and logically explained as overpopulation. The more fantastic changes are simply explained as facts—and they're familiar to science fiction, so they're not too big of imagination stretchers. But by exploring them through these varied episodes—all short and direct enough to stay engaging—they are shot through with uniqueness enough to make the whole story memorable and believably familiar.