My first read of ‘The Stars My Destination’ was a several years back and, it didn’t take.
I had forced myself to continue reading it, begrudgingly, and by the time I had finished I was at a loss.
I felt as if I had missed the things that so many others said made this a great piece of sci-fi.
I didn’t get it.
I was frustrated.

Sometime later I would read ‘The Demolished Man’.
Though I tracked a little better through Bester’s writing, there was still some dissonance between his word craft and my ability to visualize the story.
I simply concluded that I struggled with Bester and left it at that.

Bested by Bester.

During the first part of 2020 just as Covid was ramping up, we went to Albuquerque to do a book fair. This was March and things were just becoming tweaky with travel and events, ultimately the fair was cancelled because of it…an hour after we arrived in town.

Either on the way there or back, probably both, we listened to the audio book of Neil Gaiman’s ‘The View From The Cheap Seats’ read by Gaiman.
In his words the books is, in part “…a motley bunch of speeches and articles, introductions and essays.”
It’s quite excellent and I very much recommend it, especially the audio book.

In it Gaiman has included his introduction to the 1999 Science Fiction Masterworks edition of ‘The Stars My Destination’.
After listening to it I warmed up to the idea of giving the story another read…at some point.
Gaiman reading Gaiman is a compelling listen.

FF>> a few months.

I grabbed ‘The Stars My Destination’ almost as an after thought as we were packing to leave Colorado…forever?
There were so many books I could have grabbed but when it showed up in a box I was sorting I grabbed it thinking maybe now?
I’m certain that decision was based entirely on Gaiman’s introduction.

The other day, having finished Aldiss’s ‘Starship’ I went for another book to read and pulled ‘TSMD’ from the middle of a small stack.
I flipped the book to a page, Foyle’s Merchant Marine record stared back at me.

FOYLE, GULLIVER —— AS-128/127:006

EDUCATION: NONE
SKILLS: NONE
MERITS: NONE
RECOMMENDATIONS: NONE

(PERSONNEL COMMENTS)
A man of physical strength and intellectual
potential stunted by lack of ambition.
Energises at minimum.
The stereotype Common Man.
Some unexpected shock might possibly awaken him,
but Psych cannot find the key.
Not recommended for promotion.
Has reached dead end.

Something in that statement resonated with me, something familiar…something fatalistic.

And just like that I had begun ‘The Stars My Destination’ once again.

I am however taking to heart a couple things from Gaiman’s introduction.
The first, a play on Heraclitus:

“You can no more read the same book again then you can step into the same river.”

The second, a word of warning:

“The vintage of the book demands more work from the reader than he or she is used to.”

Indeed.

 So, what shall it be for Bester and me:
“Death’s my destination” or “The stars my destination”
?

I prefer the original UK title ‘Non-Stop’ to the American version shown here. Though both appropriate, ‘Non-Stop’ has a better feel in regards to a generational starship…imho.

This is my first venture into this sub-genre but one I’ve been interested in for some time. I’m fascinated by a journey that would take generations to complete. Complications, naturally, would arise between beginning and end of that journey.

There is a solid history to this sub-genre and I’ve decided to start the exploration here with Aldiss, and why not?
Just prior to leaving Colorado I had read this entry in
The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction by John Clute and was intrigued.

‘Brian Aldiss has been likened to his friend and colleague J. G. Ballard more often than either could probably care to recall. But Ballard writes dense, monomaniac books, attacking the same themes again and again, and his work cuts deep and narrow, while Aldiss has an exuberant, gregarious, far-seeking imagination, rarely repeats himself, and writes a great deal. He is harder, therefore, to pin down. In the end, however, he is almost certainly a more significant figure than his dark twin.’

I thought I had a copy of Starship in the boxes of Neutral Good books but I was mistaken. Fortunately I found a copy in Fargo last week and now I’m aboard ‘Ship’ and moving through ‘ponics towards ‘Forwards’.

Ellison was hired as a writer for Walt Disney Studios, but was fired on his first day after Roy O. Disney overheard him in the studio commissary joking about making a pornographic animated film featuring Disney characters.

Ellison on occasion used the pseudonym Cordwainer Bird to alert members of the public to situations in which he felt his creative contribution to a project had been mangled beyond repair by others, typically Hollywood producers or studios.
Ellison said, in interviews and in his writing, that his version of the pseudonym was meant to mean “a shoemaker for birds” or that it is of as much use as shoes to a bird.
 Stephen King once said he thought that it meant that Ellison was giving people who mangled his work a literary version of “the bird”. 

Book One of ‘A Case of Conscience’ (as I understand) is the original novella published in the September 1953 issue of
IF: Worlds of Science Fiction.
If the story had ended there I would have had plenty to think on, let alone to deal with that stunning end.
Fortunately there is a whole second book ahead of me as I devour this fantastic bit of ‘sci-fi’.

On and on the text ran, becoming more tangled, more evil, more insoluble with every word.

 Almost all knowledge, after all, fell into that category.
It was either perfectly simple once you understood it, or else it fell apart into fiction…
all knowledge goes through both stages, the annunciation out of the noise into fact, and the disintegration back into noise  again.
The process involved was the making of increasingly finer distinctions.
The outcome was an endless series of theoretical catastrophes.

 All that remained of it was a sensation, almost the taste of the words, but nothing of their substance.

 Belief and science aren’t mutually exclusive — quite the contrary.
But if you place scientific standards first, and exclude belief, admit nothing that’s not proven, then what you have is a series of empty gestures.

And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life — we went soft, we lost our edge.

Then, as the planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.

 Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection.
It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity.
In such perfection, all things move toward death.

 The differences in the ways he comprehended the universe haunted him — accuracy matched with inaccuracy.
He saw it in situ.
Yet, when it was born, when it came into the pressures of reality, the now had its own life and grew with its own subtle differences.

 How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.

UMMA:
One of the brotherhood of prophets. (A term of scorn in the Imperium, meaning any “wild” person given to fanatical prediction.)

“Do you have any idea who this Muad’Dib could be?” the Emperor asked.

“One of the Umma, surely,” the Baron said.
“A Fremen fanatic, a religious adventurer. They crop up regularly on the fringes of civilization.
Your Majesty knows this.”

The eye that looks ahead to the safe course is closed forever.

“I never knew the city man could be trusted completely,” Stilgar said.
“I was a city man myself once,” Paul said.

These city people have Fremen blood.
It’s just that they haven’t yet learned how to escape their bondage.
We’ll teach them.

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free.But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. 

The Fremen have a saying they credit to Shai-hulud, Old Father Eternity, ‘Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.’ 

And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning, ‘That path leads ever down into stagnation.’

Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

To stop, to rest…truly rest.
It occurred to her that mercy was the ability to stop,if only for a moment.
There was no mercy where there could be no stopping. 

I should’ve suspected trouble when the coffee failed to arrive.