The Stars My Destination - Softcover

Samuel R. Delany wrote that this is "considered by many...to be the greatest single SF novel." It tells the story of Gully Foyle, a below-average, nondescript spacehand whose life at 30 is "too easy for trouble, too slow for fun, too empty for friendship and too lazy for love." Then Gully is marooned in space for 170 days, trapped in the equipment locker of a shattered spaceship. When a passing vessel investigates the wreckage and, unthinkably, leaves Gully to die, his life takes on new meaning, setting off a search for vengeance that will alter the world.

Alfred Bester (1913-87) was born in New York and educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia. He was a scriptwriter and journalist by profession but he set the science fiction world alight with The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination and his extraordinary short stories in the 1950s, and blazed a trail for the sf New Wave of the 1960s and the cyberpunk writers of the 1980s.