Space Opera, The Stars My Destination Alfred Bester

In a way, stories transform and evolve into different versions from time to time. The setting is often what changes. From old westerns, to deep sea adventures, the realm of science fiction suddenly turned its eye towards the sky in the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s, giving rise to the ‘Space Opera’. Since this was the beginning of the exploration of a whole new and infinitely large territory, it makes sense that the plots for these works were set in times way far into the future, where galactic empires and new groups and colonies were all over the place. You could look at it as a new immeasurable canvas that was begun to be painted back in the twenties and thirties by the pioneers of what we now know as the science fiction of today. Through establishing settings that contained groups of beings and hierarchies that continued to sub-divide themselves, these authors created an atmosphere where the blank space was filled limited only by our imagination.

This week’s reading The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, published in 1956, brought a cool plot and twist of things to what is a sort of epic story inspired by the 19^th century novel The Count of Monte Cristo. Gully Foyle, the main character in the novel, is the only survivor of in the Nomad, a spaceship that was attacked, due to a war going on between the ‘Inner Planets’ and ‘Outer Satellites’, and left for the dead floating through space. After being refused help by a passing ship called the Vorga, Foyle becomes enraged and spends the rest of the story journeying on a struggle to find revenge. Through the course of the book we become fully aware we’re not dealing with our regular hero. Foyle is about one of the most anti-hero main characters you could find. After hitting rock bottom, Foyle finds a treasure in his old wreckage which permits him to go under the radar for a while and reemerge with a new identity and crew. Later, Foyle finds himself in a position where he had to decide whether to doom mankind by not alerting them to the nuclear explosive PyrE, or give up his space jaunting secrets in order for humanity to follow him into deep space exploration.

In a sort of enlightening way, the anti-hero character of Gully Foyle, is later transformed into an almost enlightened being, who sees the error of his ways and chooses to redeem himself. This is similar to other stories that are a part of the ‘Space Opera’ theme, like Star Wars, when the villain Darth Vader sees the error of his ways and attempts to come back to the side of good in the end.