Reviews with content warning for Ableism - The Stars My Destination

Reviews tagging 'Ableism'

The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester

4 reviews

mychekhov's review against another edition

adventurous fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? N/A
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Gee whiz! Yet another vitriolic testament to how feral 1950s sci-fi turns me!

Propel yourself hundreds of years into the future (jaunt, if you will, Burning Man-style) to calendar year coordinates 2436 and you will find everything has changed (yay!) yet the worst of our social pretences remain the same (oh no!). ...Your sighs converse sympathy, so I must ask, Reader... why should you care? You might be Man, after all, which means from the minute of your birth until the hour of your death the theatre that is your life shall be staged within the margins of society's most important, stentorian texts, so to those loitering on the outside, to those who can only be seated in the orchestra or the balcony or the littered aisles betwixt every paragraph or page, what are they but the peanut gallery? Irrelevant, fodder, filler... an illusion, it must be! Conjured by the magician known as Writer penning these bountiful "classics"—the appellation bespeaks a quality of timelessness, yet still it remains a product of its time! Friend, Bester, Mr Writer, sir, what you are suggesting here in your fantastical fictional speculation (pullulated by bouts of evolutionary psychokinesis among other strange cosmogenic compounds both of the mystical and chemical properties), that is, what you have laid down the blueprints to; postulates the 25th century as no more than a futuristic Stonehenge, sociologically uninspired. And that, quite frankly, infuriates me. Like gutterboy Gully, I feel like swinging.

The most unseemly displays of Writer inaptitude are detailed as follows:

Robin, subjected to Man-Writing-Woman syndrome, (Robin moreso, since she is Black, which must mean her only fortune in life is to be raped. Or something!)
Olivia, a detestable daddy's princess, who equates being designated blind-at-birth to being a monster. (Admit to pitying an actual blind-since-birth person living in the real world, and friend, you will be stabbed, mind yourself.)
Never matter the fact that organised religion has been abolished, outlawed, obsoleted, its remnant followers skirted and persecuted run underground like c.h.u.d.s et cetera, yet lesbians and 'catamites' are sneered at as floundering the boundaries of the respectable. Women still kept in 'purdah' as a common mores, the notion of undertaking the same positions of power her counterparts have monopolised for so long still unfathomable to the everyman in this groovy telekinetic future, I see! You'll be drawing in the constellations here, friend, because these dots are just not connecting.

But perhaps this is all just nitpicking! Nobody ever minds, see, especially not so much once you've separated the exciting space adventure out of the antiquated conjecturing stifling it. It simply cannot be helped. (Nobody can help the 1950s.) That title alone, "The Stars My Destination" manages to be one of the most romantic assemblages of words I've ever encountered, after all! imprinted on a revenge story that begs for anything but. And Gully's dysphoric lullaby, even in its original fatalistic phrasing, has a way of making one yearn hard for the future nostalgia.

Speaking of. I close off with my own little lullaby, the sentiment of which I attribute to Robin, a bird I believe would fly higher and far better were she wholly incapable of that silly thing called forgiveness.

F you, Gulliver Foyle

I hate your whole four mile circus.
I hate your synthetic Commando suit.
I hate the stripes you hide.
I hate that fake noveau riche pride.
I hate Vorga and her sister Nomad.
I hate that blind white b*tch too.
And most of all, I hate you!!!

Jaunt off. That's what we'll be saying in the future, get it? Jaunt off.

Content Warnings