The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (3.5 stars)

An absolutely astounding novel for 1956, for 2013 it's appeal is mainly as a piece of Sci-Fi history, although definitely enjoyable. This book laid a foundation for cyberpunk and features an anti-hero, something that was probably quite ground-breaking at the time. I liked the description of teleporting (jaunting) and using mazes to defend against jaunting intruders, and the idea of Gouffre Martel: a jaunte-proof prison. The opening sequence of Gully living breath-to-breath in a 'coffin' in space is absolutely brilliant.

I found a few flaws particularly grating. The escape from Gouffre Martel was particularly silly, where deus-ex-sledgehammer happens to open an entrance to convenient caverns, where stumbling around on an underground glacier and swimming underwater in the glacier-melt river doesn't give you hypothermia, capped off with a sex scene outside immediately after getting out of the freezing water. Right.

Inside the prison, with a few lessons via the contrived 'whisper-line', Gully is transformed from gutter-speaking idiot to evil genius, going on to construct an elaborate highly-successful circus team purely for the purpose of providing some cover for traveling around on his revenge quest. And a minor niggle: his facial tattoo re-appears when his blood gets pumping, but never the whopping great "NOMAD" that was plastered across his forehead by the same needle.

But, I still enjoyed it, and felt some echoes of ideas in other Sci-Fi novels that probably originated in this one. Kudos to Bester for being so radical.

3.5 stars

PS. For reasons unknown to me, the Canberra region features in the novel on at least two occasions. Fourmyle appears at a ball in Government House and later, in a series of teleports as the burning man, one of them is to "Jervis beach on the Australian coast", by which I think he means Jervis Bay.