Not inexplicably, though, as the narration mentions they're all given extensive cosmetic surgery to look identical. Unknown to Foyle, the Nomad was carrying "PyrE", a new material which could make the difference between victory and defeat in the war.

In this pulse-quickening novel, Alfred Bester imagines a future in which people "jaunte" a thousand miles with a single thought, where the rich barricade themselves in labyrinths and protect themselves with radioactive hitmen—and where an inarticulate outcast is the most valuable and dangerous man alive. And all the things that are good about this novel are embodied in its hero—Caliban and Hamlet, Satan and Samson, Cain and Prometheus combined—the brute-genius Gully Foyle. At a later point, NeverEnding Story producer Bernd Eichinger had the rights and hired notable comic book artist Neal Adams to produce concept art. In 2012, the novel was included in the Library of America two-volume boxed set American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, edited by Gary K. When the friendly ship Vorga knowingly passes him by, he becomes consumed by the desire for revenge.

It tells the story of an unambitious and directionless man named Gulliver Foyle who is abandoned in a damaged spaceship and, through his own rage and a series of mishaps, remakes himself as an aristocrat in a society wrecked by the invention of teleportation to stalk the people who did him wrong.

Suffering from synesthesia brought on by the explosion affecting his neurological implants, Foyle jauntes through space and time as "The Burning Man". Stranded on another merchant spaceship Nomad in space and surviving on his animal and human cunning to survive within a large locker, Gully plots his revenge: Get off the wrecked ship, find Vorga (a ship that did not rescue him), and blow it up. According to David Hughes' Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, Richard Gere owned the rights to, and wanted to star in, the adaptation following the success Pretty Woman. Synopsis: When a passing spaceship refuses to rescue the lone survivor from the drifting wreck of another ship, he dedicates his life to discovering who made that decision and exacting his revenge, in the process altering human history and his own character. But like Edmond Dante, he turns from an uneducated sailor into a wealthy, refined gentleman who uses his immense wealth to train and equip himself and become a superhuman vengeance machine, while capering beneath the noses of his objects of vengeance without them realizing who he is.Cold-Blooded Torture: Foyle inflicts this on the people connected to the Vorga, and it's especially grisly when he realizes that they are implanted with an Involuntary Suicide Mechanism. Along the way, jaunting was discovered which involves personal teleportation over distances up to 1000 miles. Mega-Corp: Corporations have evolved into a sort of neo-nobility, and hold just as much influence as the royalty of old. The Stars My Destination is a classic of technological prophecy and timeless narrative enchantment by an acknowledged master of science fiction.

Ultimately, Gulliver realizes that the best thing he can do with the PyrE and his newfound skill for space-jaunting is to give it to all mankind, and he teleports and throws the PyrE out into crowds of people, urging them to either destroy themselves or follow him into the great void of space. While it begins with a plotline that’s kind of like The Count of Monte Cristo in outer space, it branches out into a lot of direction, some of which would never make the cut in a modern day film adaptation (for example, the protagonist, Gully Foyle, rapes a woman at one point). Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex: After Jisbella reveals to Foyle that she's in a relationship with Dagenham, he tries to ask how that could be possible, given that Dagenham is a Walking Wasteland. Other classic sci-fi books (journey to the center of the earth, 20,000 leagues, inter alia) which are even older remain highly enjoyable today (partly due to the rich language more commonly used) but 'The Stars my Destination' falls victim to being less than stellar in almost all of its aspects.A film adaptation of The Stars My Destination has been in development for decades, but no filmmaker has managed to crack Alfred Bester’s influential 1957 sci-fi novel.