Overview
In this chapter, I discuss issues related to class, gender, and race, focusing on (ab)uses of power and patriarchy. A distinct social division of classes typifies Bester’s imagined future, as does an egregious misogyny and underlying racism, even though “more than a century of jaunting had so mingled the many populations of the world that racial types were disappearing” (Bester, Stars 153). All three issues come to bear in the persona of Gully Foyle. Throughout the novel, he evolves and transcends these proverbial constructs of culture, which comment on the ethics of the SF genre and Bester’s own cultural construction. I will begin with some attention to how Freud impacted his authorship. To varying degrees, Bester’s ideas about psychological clockwork spilled into every other aspect of Stars and magnified his perception of literature, art, ideology, and identity.
The Science Fiction of Sigmund Freud
Freud’s sizable oeuvre is thoroughly science fictional. When I read his books, the experience is no different for me than reading an SF novel.
Most readers and scholars don’t think of Freud as an SF author, but his quasi-scientific, cognitively estranging, inner-spatial explorations reflect core SF values and objectives, and his theories about the nature of desire and the workings of the psyche remain influential SF touchstones. Philip K. Dick and Barry N. Malzberg, for example, both owe a debt to Freudian ego psychology and paranoia, with Malzberg even (re)making him into a character in The Remaking of Sigmund Freud (1985). The mind is still relatively unknown territory, and as Brian Stableford and David Langford point out, the “absence of convenient models of the mind (whether based on physical analogy or purely mathematical) means that [it] remains much more mercurial and mysterious than the atom or the Universe, in spite of the fact that introspection appears to be a simple and safe source of data.” We know as little about the far reaches of inner space as we do outer space. To this day, psychology is fertile ground for extrapolation. Freud in particular is an SF idea-machine.
The SF megatext would look different without Freud, who created the monster of psychoanalysis from the underdeveloped body parts of other clinicians, and whose original innovations outplay what most SF writers fail to accomplish themselves. Of course, Freud wasn’t trying to be an SF writer, let alone a mad scientist. He thought he was writing nonfiction even as he conjured one uncanny novum after another (including Das Unheimliche itself). He has been disparaged over the years because his extrapolations turned out not to hold water. Like the SF writer, however, his books and case studies are works of art, and many of them contain perfectly applicable techniques for negotiating the psychopathology of everyday life regardless of the bourgeois, patriarchal entitlement that often irradiates his tone, rhetoric, and overall persona. As feminist scholars have observed, texts like Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905) can be read as a comedy of errors in which a surrogate father tries and fails to control a young girl who won’t have it, resisting his attempts to compartmentalize and “fix” her desires. Freud was a product of his cultural context. At the same time, like Bester, he was more evolved than his contemporaries and made strides toward greater equality despite himself.
Bester’s love of Freud and psychoanalysis is no surprise. Both innovated their respective fields and put a premium on the power and application of the imagination. Bester’s Freudian impulse dates back to the first act of his career and was partly responsible for his second turn from the SF genre when he met John W. Campbell, Jr. for the first time to talk about the publication of “Oddy and Id” in Astounding. Enchanted by L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics (1950), Campbell made him excise the Freudian allusions from his story, convinced that Hubbard’s “modern science of mental health” was a superior alternative to psychology. Over lunch, he even asked Bester to read parts of Dianetics and encouraged him “to use the principles […] to purge his mental blocks and trace his emotional traumas back to the very womb, a request that left Bester somewhere between dismayed and bemused” (Smith 5). Bester wanted the sale, so he followed orders. The story was published as “The Devil’s Intention” in 1950. The following year, when it was reprinted in The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1951, Bester had carte blanche to do as he pleased, and he reverted to the original manuscript and title.
The encounter with Campbell didn’t do much to uplift Bester’s spirits, especially considering that he “had returned to SF in search of creative freedom, and the editor had greeted him with a heavy-handed attitude that reminded him of his discouraging experiences with radio and television producers” (79). He rallied and started selling stories elsewhere, adorning his work with psychological trimmings and fixings. A self-proclaimed “worshiper of Freud” (Bester, “Introduction” 243), his devoutness came to a head in The Demolished Man, which is scaffolded by Freudian psychology and hinges on the Oedipus complex. Charles Platt has said that this scaffolding falls flat, calling it “disappointingly glib and shallow” (215). I tend to agree. In Stars, Bester finds his stride, weaving Freud’s ideas into the novel with greater precision and a lighter touch.
Bester designs his characters from a Freudian perspective first, then applies other points of view as he shapes them. Gully is the paradigm—his identity is just that: an id-entity—but all of Foyle’s foils are cut from the same cloth. The “freaks, monsters, and grotesques” that run rampant through the novel emote from Freud’s concept of the id. “Bester champions man’s reason but often shows the id triumphant,” says Tim Blackmore. “This accounts for the dark, often desperate tone of his stories. […] Bester strives for a balance between rationality and unreason, between hate and love. [His] respect for the id’s forces doesn’t prevent him from generating mindscapes, incredible (rational) worlds created by the ego and superego” (102). But the ego and superego are marginalized by the dominance of the id, an assemblage of uncoordinated instincts that both defines freaks and implicates humans. “Bester thrives on the issue of what distinguished freaks from humans. Sensitive to the Freudian implications, [he] often suggests that it is the freak (the id) which makes man human. His playful language reveals a fascination with all the dangerous but wonderful powers man may possess” (103–104). Gully’s multivalent mask is an insignia of this dynamic, “a warning to humans about the beast within, the wild, unreasoning id” (116).
In Stars, psychological praxis isn’t simply a means of, say, developing greater self-awareness or combatting depression. It is embedded into the fabric of daily life. When Presteign hires Saul Dagenham to interrogate Gully for the location of Nomad, for instance, the former nuclear scientist tortures him with Nightmare Theater and Megal Mood. The first technique “had been an early attempt to shock schizophrenics back into the objective world by rendering the phantasy world into which they were withdrawing uninhabitable” (Bester, Stars 61). Nightmare Theater is a proto-cyberspatial realm in which prerecorded, macabre scenarios play out on the screen of Gully’s psyche as if they were his own while Dagenham grills him about Nomad. It’s one of many Hells that Gully must negotiate as he is “pursued, entrapped, precipitated from heights, burned, flayed, bowstringed, vermin-covered, devoured,” but he doesn’t break—he just keeps repeating his vengeful mantra, “Vorga” (ibid.).
Megal Mood stems from an early therapeutic initiative “for establishing and plotting the particular course of megalomania” (62). Foreshadowing the mnemonic holidays of Dick’s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966) and Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990), this technique attempts to convince Gully that he is not Gully but Geoffrey Fourmyle of Ceres, the id-entity he unconsciously adopts as his alter-ego in the second part of the novel. Posing as “Dr. Regan,” an actor tells Gully that his memory of himself as a low-grade spaceman is false. It’s not an implant. Rather, he fell into alcoholism and lost his sense of self. “You became convinced you were not the famous Jeff Fourmyle,” says Regan. “An infantile attempt to escape responsibility. You imagined you were a common spaceman named Foyle” (64). Gully doesn’t believe it. In order to “recapture the true memory,” he must “discharge the old. All this glorious reality is yours, if we can help you discard the dream of the spaceman” (ibid.). Regan wants Gully to reconstruct “this false memory,” beginning with his escape from Nomad (ibid.). For a moment, he bends, but again, he doesn’t break. He’s too tough, too resolute, more id- than egocentric.
Nightmare Theater and Megal Mood are interesting but superfluous Freudian refrains. In their absence, little would change: they mainly convey Gully’s mental stamina. Jaunting, on the other hand, is a psychological aberration that defines Stars’s interplanetary, war-torn, hypertechnologized society.
In and of itself, jaunting is a ridiculous idea that aligns Bester with pulp SF more than any other facet of the novel. It requires concerted suspension of disbelief. Perceived through the lens of Freudian SF, however, jaunting qualifies as a viable novum.
Originator Charles Fort Jaunte gets his forenames from early twentieth-century American writer Charles Fort, who coined the term teleportation. Jaunte is a scientist, but his “discovery” of teleportation does not result from some kind of experiment gone wrong, as in so many mad-scientist narratives. It results from the fear of burning to death. Countless people who existed prior to Jaunte have harbored this acute stress response on similar and heightened levels, dating back to early humans running away from hungry leopards and hyenas. For some inexplicable reason, it makes Jaunte teleport. In the prologue, Bester maps out an ambiguous history, hinting that this “natural aptitude of almost every human organism” is an evolutionary leap, an effect of tapping into the deeper, unused hollows of the brain (10). It probably has something to do with advanced technologies, too. Bester makes use of other, unreliable media to recount the history, such as a “most unsatisfactory explanation” by a Jaunte School publicity representative, who explains: “When people teleport, they also teleport the clothes they wear and whatever they are strong enough to carry” (ibid.). This convenient “perk” may be more ridiculous than jaunting itself, but it simplifies things for the author. Assuming jaunting were possible, it would make more sense that only people’s organic matter would teleport—like Kyle Reese traveling through time in The Terminator (1984)—but then Bester would have to account for characters putting on new clothes every time they did it.
in the way one must never begin a science fiction novel: with a lecture on the book’s main Nifty New Thing, a form of teleportation called jaunting. He gets away with it (at least with me) partly because his unnamed omniscient narrator is as much fun to listen to as Lorenzo Smythe [Robert Heinlein’s first-person protagonist in Double Star (1956)]. The whole book is like that: a tightrope walk over many pitfalls with the author simultaneously racing and pirouetting and never completely falling off. Randall Jarrell famously remarked that a novel is a lengthy work of fiction that has something wrong with it, but Bester abuses the privilege.
Fair enough, but Hlavaty fails to recognize the prologue’s self-awareness. A literal and symbolic flight of fancy, jaunting is a metafictional jab at the silly artifices of pulp SF. And it’s not a passing or glossed jab. Bester effectively sustains the artifice from the prologue to the final chapter while he calls attention to the absurdity of Nifty New Things that preceded it in other SF texts.
Fear gives birth to jaunting. Over time, users learn to control the stimulus, psychokinetically relocating themselves from point A to point B through the vehicle of blind faith so long as they possess foreknowledge of their destination and don’t try to teleport off-planet. The dawn of the Jaunte Age sets the stage for the social, cultural, and ontological landscape of Stars as well as for Bester’s extrapolation of psychological tenets into a diegesis that is concerned as much with inner space as outer space. He takes most of his cue from Freudian SF, but he also draws from other sources. Hipolito and McNelly propose that Jung is the key to understanding both Stars and Demolished even though “Bester has never set out to write a novel which would embody Jungian principles” (90), and in his monograph on Bester, Smith discusses the spiritual psychology that informs Stars, citing Ali Nomad’s Cosmic Consciousness: The Man-God Whom We Await (1913) and P. D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum (1912), the latter of which divides consciousness into four forms that chart Gully’s development. In broader terms, Fiona Kelleghan states: “A majority of Bester’s stories are concerned with the themes of captivity and release, and a great many of his characters spend time in prisons or psychiatric wards. […] His reliance on such related themes as darkness and the threat of madness reveals his interest in prisons as the site of psychological catalysis, and he dramatizes the psychology of escape and the results of release, which may be epiphanic or disastrous” (351).
Gully’s physical imprisonment in Gouffre Martel after he fails to destroy Vorga complements the various cognitive and symbolic imprisonments that define his character as a slave to the Freudian death-drive. His desire to return to the womb is palpable, ubiquitous. In fact, Bester depicts Gully as a womb addict, born from the womb of Nomad where he returns in the end after passing through a multi-uterine labyrinth. His external mask emblematizes his inner womb-monger, as Neil Gaiman divulges: “The tiger tattoos force him to learn control. His emotional state is no longer written in his face—it forces him to move beyond predation, beyond rage, back to the womb, as it were. (And what a sequence of wombs the book gives us: the coffin, the Nomad, the Goufre Martel, St. Pat’s, and finally the Nomad again.) It gives us more than that. It gives us: Birth. Symmetry. Hate” (x). All of this inner-spatial architecture not only lays the groundwork for Bester’s superheroic, superpyschotic antihero but for the power dynamics that distinguish his civilization, at once a throwback to the Victorian era and a projection of mid-twentieth-century ideological apparatuses into the future.
From the Abyss to the Mountaintop: Class Relations
Class divisions and capitalist morality configure the society of Stars, marginalizing the masses and privileging an upper echelon of stereotypical patriarchs and salon-hopping bourgeois socialites. Gully the prole occupies the bottom of the barrel. Presteign the artistocratic Neo-Victorian roosts on the tightly sealed lid. Everybody else exists within the bookends of their social statuses. In these terms, the novel sees Gully actuate a Marxist-like uprising where he vies against his bourgeois superiors. By the end, he has transcended capitalist notions of good and evil after a concerted attempt to set humanity on a new, would-be utopian path where everybody gets along, works together, shares responsibilities, and so on. This is another SF artifice, objectively impractical but metafictionally practical. SF stems from the utopian tradition in its “impulse toward change” (Vint 19), but with few exceptions—Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge (1995) may be one—the concept of utopia has become as silly as jaunting beyond its allegorical implications and its capacity to make social commentary. In Bester’s hands, the utopian initiative satirizes heavy-handed representations of this silliness by offering a potential “happy ending” to the dystopia that harrows Gully and his twenty-fifth-century peers. Additionally, the gesture toward utopia completes Gully’s Nietzschean climb from the abyss to the mountaintop of the social order. And when the sleeper awakens, he will have leapt off the mountaintop, soared into the ether, and escaped the system—a final Freudian wish-fulfillment fantasy.
Bester appears to have patterned twenty-fifth-century society after a mid-twentieth-century English model where class divisions were more pronounced than in America. This model preoccupied J. G. Ballard throughout his career and climaxed in High-Rise (1975). The novel depicts a literal and figurative uprising of stratified English aristocrats, professionals, and workers who live together in a near-future tower-block building. Rather than a gesture toward utopia, it ends in a way Ballard felt was more realistic: in chaos, with the residents who survive regressing to survival mode (including cannibalism). Ballard’s high-rise can be viewed as a microcosm for Bester’s dystopia without the culminating agential meta-fantasy and the pedantic moralization about the human condition.
In High-Rise, dormant tensions between classes swim to the surface and lead to warfare. In Stars, warfare is part of society from the outset of the Jaunte Age, which ruined the tenuous but stable socioeconomic system. “Until the Jaunte Age dawned,” says the prologue’s narrator, “the three Inner Planets (and the Moon) had lived in delicate economic balance with the seven inhabited Outer Satellites: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto of Jupiter; Thea and Titan of Saturn; and Lassell of Neptune. The United Outer Satellites supplied raw materials for the Inner Planets’ manufactories, and a market for their finished goods. Within a decade this balance was destroyed by jaunting” (Bester, Stars 13). Trade exchange collapses, and the “economic war […] degenerate[s] into a shooting war” between the Inner and Outer Planets (14). The war exacerbates default class divisions and perpetuates “the marriage of pinnacle freaks” oblivious to “the cold fact of evolution […] that progress stems from the clashing and merger of antagonist extremes” (ibid.). Against this backdrop, Bester introduces Gully, the prole to end all proles.
Bester tempers the narrator’s sturm-und-drang tone as he transitions from the prologue to the first chapter. Stranded on the incapacitated spaceship Nomad between Mars and Jupiter, Gully struggles to maintain sanity and questions why the “goddamn gods” have forsaken him (15). The first sentence equates him with Jesus on the cross: “He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead” (ibid.). Nomad is Gully’s cross, the name of which he will soon bear on his flesh when the Scientific People tattoo it onto his forehead. The chapter is a character sketch that establishes Gully’s motive for vengeance and defines the contours of his working-class status, emotional disposition, and messianic potential. I talk about religious connotations in my last chapter. For now, it suffices to say that Jesus was also a prole victimized by his proto-bourgeois masters for his socialist doctrines. Some political and theological historians claim Jesus was the first communist.
The narrator enumerates Gully’s defining characteristics as follows: “Mechanic’s Mate 3rd Class, thirty years old, big boned and rough[,] the oiler, wiper, bunker man; too easy for trouble, too slow for fun, too empty for friendship, too lazy for love” (16). His official Merchant Marine record indicates that he has no education, no skills, no merits, and no recommendations. Comments from the personnel department further indicate that he is a “man of physical strength and intellectual potential stunted by lack of ambition. Energizes 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 a dead end” (ibid.). Bester foreshadows Gully’s awakening through the administrative apparatus of “personnel,” consumer-capitalism’s all-seeing watchdog. From the start, he contextualizes Gully in economic terms, solarizing this context with a religious corona that references the protagonist’s embryonic godliness and the capitalist system’s godlike stranglehold on mankind.
When Vorga passes by Nomad, his response is visceral, feverish, primal. In the lower-class gutter tongue, he gripes: “You leave me rot like a dog. You leave me die, Vorga. […] I get out of here, me. I follow you, Vorga. I find you, Vorga. I pay you back, me. I rot you. I kill you, Vorga. I kill you filthy” (22–23). For Gully, Vorga’s negligence is an upper-class snub, something he has encountered his entire life, but now his life is on the line, and the snub “precipitat[es] a chain of reactions that would make an infernal machine” out of him (23).
Much of the plot involves Gully’s vengeful quest for Vorga and the parties responsible for giving the order to abandon him. The ship belongs to Presteign, whose mononymous name looks like “prestige” and symbolizes his class status while functioning as a stand-alone badge of honor. The “g” in Presteign is silent, though, so phonetically the name sounds like “pristine,” indicating the corruption of something once pure and good (for the clan leader as well as his daughter). When a representative from the Internal Revenue Department calls him “Mr. Presteign,” he corrects the mistake: “There are thousands of Presteigns […] All are addressed as Mister. I am Presteign of Presteign, head of house and sept, first of the family, chieftain of the clan. I am addressed as Presteign. Not ‘Mister’ Presteign. Prestiegn” (46). Bier adds that the name is a “cover riddle,” a “composite for the fantasied reign of a Prestone, first of equals among the ‘Colas’ and ‘Buicks’ and ‘Kodaks’ in that frigid plutocratic future” (605). As I mentioned in my first chapter, many clansmans’ monikers affiliate them with commodities. These “brand names” deepen their affectation and entrenchment in a class system that elevates and pathologizes them.
The clan/class consciousness of Stars is a throwback to the Victorian era that upholds bourgeois codes of patriarchy and manners. This is one of several cultural reversions effectuated by jaunting, a McLuhanesque amplification that goes hand-in-hand with amputation. Another amputation produced by the Jaunte Age is the dissolution of communication systems, as “it was far easier to jaunte directly to a man’s office for a discussion than to telephone or telegraph” (Bester, Stars 42). We mainly learn about the dynamics of clan life through Presteign, who reifies his power with amputations like “an antique telephone switchboard” because society is “[d]evoted to the principle of conspicuous waste” (ibid.), which is to say, the detritus of history marks him as an upper-class subject. And the more detritus one has, the more powerful one’s image becomes. Hoarding is a form of cultural currency.
Presteign is a stock villain, a clichéd Rich White Guy with a stiff upper lip whose image and superfluities matter as much as the size of his bank account. In a movie adaptation, he would likely have an affected posh English accent to complement his thoroughly colonial mindset. “Iron gray, handsome, powerful, impeccably dressed and mannered in the old-fashioned style, Presteign of Presteign was the epitome of the socially elect, for he was so exalted in the station that he employed coachmen, grooms, hostlers, stableboys, and horses to perform a function for him which ordinary mortals performed by jaunting” (45). He also owns “carriages, cars, yachts, planes, and trains” (46), an anomaly in the Jaunte Age where on-planet transportation technologies have become outmoded. Presteign does not jaunte—it’s beneath him. He hasn’t jaunted in forty years, and he frowns upon everybody who does it. Eschewing this amplification is a way for social climbers to exhibit their success. “As men climbed the social ladder, they displayed their position by their refusal to jaunte. The newly adopted into a great commercial clan rode an expensive bicycle. A rising clansman drove a small sports car. The captain of a sept was transported in a chauffeur-driven antique from the old days, a vintage Bentley or Cadillac or a towering Lagonda. An heir presumptive in direct line of succession to the clan chieftainship staffed a yacht or a plane” (45).
The hundreds of Mr. Prestos that Presteign owns further reifies his affluence. Mr. Prestos are identical androids surgically tailored after the “kindly, honest” Abraham Lincoln to “instantly inspire affection and trust” in people who shop at the retail stores that they manage (47). Like Bester and Dr. Baker, Presteign is a mad scientist, but he’s not interested in art or invention; social and economic standing dictates the flows of his creative desires. Bester doesn’t dwell on Mr. Prestos or bind them to the plot. As an allusion to the emotionally conditioned automatons of Huxley’s Brave New World, they function as plugs into the SF megatext while developing Presteign’s character. Ultimately, they are more detritus, but unlike Presteign’s telephone, they implicate futurity rather than history.
Credits are the mode of currency in Stars, another pulp SF cliché that more or less reflects the dollar, pound, euro, etc. Edward Bellamy may have been the first author to use credits in Looking Backward, but it became more common in pulp SF of the 1930s and 1940s, with the 1934–1935 serialization of Campbell’s The Mightiest Machine in Astounding being a progenitor. The focal currency for the novel’s plot, however, is a load of platinum bullion worth approximately twenty million credits. Unbeknownst to Gully, Nomad had been transporting this load to a Mars Bank on Presteign’s behalf to settle a debt. Presteign, Dagenham, and Y’ang-Yeovil use the bullion as an excuse to try to extract the whereabouts of Nomad from Gully. What they’re really looking for is PyrE, another piece of cargo on Nomad that Gully doesn’t realize was there until much later. Once he discovers who Presteign is, an inborn class resentment fuels Gully’s vengeance and prompts him to create a new identity that rivals his enemy’s resources and persona.
To Presteign, Gully Foyle is a “common sailor. Dirt. Dregs. Gutter scum” (47), and he resents the fact that this lowlife stands between him, his money, and his apocalyptic warhead. Gully’s existence in itself insults his Neo-Victorian dignity. Geoffrey Fourmyle of Ceres, however, is super rich and puts Gully on Presteign’s socioeconomic pedestal. As the ringleader of the “grotesque entourage” Four Mile Circus and an overblown Shakespearean clown, he breaks Presteign’s rules of etiquette, but his wealthy upstart status trumps his bad behavior.
Gully builds Geoffrey’s assets on the foundation of the bullion he retrieves from Nomad on the Sargasso Asteroid at the end of the first part of Stars. In other words, he builds his alter-ego on the foundation of Presteign’s capital and image, embodying the ancient adage that to know your enemy, you must become your enemy. On the surface, Gully’s vengeance is emotional. Beneath the surface, it’s a matter of overcoming his proletariat construction. “I teach you the superman,” Nietzsche crows in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883). “Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” (41). Gully responds to this question first by becoming somebody else, then by molting the skin of all of his identities, transcending construction and incarnating the übermensch. He beats Presteign by deconstructing Presteign, reconstructing himself, and calling attention to the illusory nature of the capitalist powers that created both of them as social, cultural, and economic subjects. The womb of the tool locker that he returns to in the final chapter is a version of the womb-cave that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra exits at the end of his book-length sermon, which concludes with this line: “Thus spoke Zarathustra and left his cave, glowing and strong, like a morning sun emerging from behind dark mountains” (336). This is the state we leave Gully in as J♂seph and M♀ira watchfully await his awakening, a rebirth that will allegedly see him “glowing and strong,” free from the class consciousness that incited such anxiety, insecurity, and blind aggression in the id-entity that he has overcome.
Foyle’s Female Foils: Gender Relations
In my first chapter, I talked about the resonance of Gully’s surname and some of the literary foils denoted by “Foyle.” The complexity of this pun extends to the four female characters that contribute to the protagonist’s development and accentuate the nuances of his evolving identity: M♀ira, Robin Wednesbury, Olivia Presteign, and Jisbella “Jiz” McQueen. All of these names signify their personas directly or indirectly. In this section, I discuss the relationship between Gully, these women, and dominant power structures. First I’ll say a few words about the overall treatment of gender in Stars.
Whereas Bester’s outlooks on gender relations were more progressive than the majority of his SF contemporaries, there are problems with the way he represents those relations and has articulated them in interviews and articles. Consider this excerpt from “Science Fiction and the Renaissance Man”: “[W]omen, as a rule, are not fond of science fiction. The reason for this is obvious … at least to me. Women are basically realists; men are the romantics. The hard core of realism in women usually stifles the Cloud Nine condition necessary for the enjoyment of science fiction. When a woman dreams, she extrapolates reality; her fantasies are always based on fact. […] And the writers who appeal to them are those writers whose inwardness reflects an attitude about love, marriage and the home that is attractive to women” (418–19). As if these silly generalizations aren’t enough, he goes on to make distinctions between the nature of male and female desire: “Unlike women, [men] can’t find perpetual pleasure in the day-to-day details of living. A woman can come home ecstatic because she bought a three-dollar item reduced to two-eighty-seven, but a man needs more. […] Life is enough for most women; most thinking men must ask why and whither. In England men have the pub for this. […] Here in the States the thinking man has nothing” (421). Such distinctions were not uncommon in Bester’s era, and he didn’t catch any flak for making them. It was a man’s world, and until the New Wave, SF was written almost exclusively by male authors for male readers. Needless to say, such views would not go over well in the twenty-first century (or, incidentally, the twenty-fifth century).
Gender relations in Bester’s fiction are not as simplistic, embarrassing, or ripe for standup observational comedy as the author’s personal attitudes, although they are strictly binary and heteronormative. Rape is a recurrent theme. Sometimes it’s mentioned in passing, as in “Fondly Fahrenheit,” when Vandaleur speculates that his psychotic android may have raped a child. Sometimes it’s in our faces, as in the novel Tender Loving Rape, which Bester wrote in 1959 and wasn’t published until over thirty years later as Tender Loving Rage after Charles Platt suggested a title change (Smith 164). Gully is the most hostile, reprehensible rapist of all. He rapes Robin to gain power and control over her, and he almost rapes M♀ira trying to escape the Sargasso Asteroid, tearing off her nightgown, then binding and gagging her with it. Nearly every encounter he has with women ends badly. As an Unleashed Id, Gully owns this behavior, and Bester doesn’t condone it explicitly or implicitly. On the contrary, Gully’s actions refer back to Bester’s interest in Freudian masculinity and aggression.
The Besterman quivers with a violent urge that’s waiting to snap like a bear trap. “Bester’s characters, though they become aware of themselves precisely because of it, see no gap between the desired and the possible. Put them next to one another, straight away they begin to whisper, ‘Together we could rape the universe!’” (Harrison 27). Ironically, the Besterman does not truly become himself until he has demolished himself. For Gully, rape is a tool of the prole that must be overcome. Zarathustra summons his powers from inner space, from the intellectual and imaginative “free spirit” within him, not by externalizing his aggression; the übermensch has surpassed the demands of the body. Still, there is something deeply disturbing about the recurrence of rape in Bester’s oeuvre and in Stars. It may be a sign of his times, but it’s no less troublesome, and scholarship on his work has collectively glossed over the issue.
Bester is aware of his relative lack of empathy for his female characters (who are almost always beautiful, unthinkingly dedicated to the male hero, and altogether delightfully ineffectual). He says he is principally interested in writing about male characters, and ‘I don’t believe in love as a motivation at all. I dislike love stories intensely.’ Hence the simplification and codification of most of the love relationships in his work. It is probably his greatest weakness although, of course, it is a weakness shared with almost every other science fiction writer working in the 1950s and before. (219)
Wendell concurs, saying that Bester’s women “often are stereotypical females clinging to their men” (17), but stronger types start to emerge in Stars. Jiz, for example, is not an objectified pulp bimbo, but a tough, streetwise roughneck whose “attraction to Gully is not schoolgirl romanticism but adult lust” (ibid.). Wendell concludes that the “difference between the women of earlier works (the 1950s) and those of the later (the 1970s) may well result from the time frame itself and its effects on Bester’s perception and awareness. In fact, Bester seems far less the male chauvinist than his contemporaries of the 1950s who produced a literature that did not stereotype the female because it did not often include her” (ibid.).
As with rape, Bester criticizes male chauvinism (among other antagonistic behaviors) via representation. An exemplary case in point is how clanswomen must be kept in purdah to “protect” them from rogue jaunters who may steal their virtue. In Muslim and Hindu societies, purdah is a religious and social practice that compels women to live in various states of seclusion and cover their bodies so as not to incite male desire. The practice enables men to control women. “You don’t know what jaunting’s done to women,” Jiz tells Gully in Gouffre Martel. “It’s locked us up, sent us back to the seraglio,” an Italian term for the segregated domestic quarters of wives and concubines in an Ottoman household (Bester, Stars 74). Jiz describes seraglio as a “harem. A place where women are kept on ice. After a thousand years of civilization […] we’re still property. Jaunting’s such a danger to our virtue, our value, our mint condition, that we’re locked up like gold plate in a safe” (ibid.). She laments that there’s nothing women bound to the unevolved laws of men can do. They can’t work, and they have no autonomy.
While Jiz, Robin, and Olivia find some kind of agency from their patriarchal overlords, M♀ira does not. This is ironic in that the Scientific People, who have their own laws and beliefs, perceive themselves as more advanced than the interplanetary freakshow from which they have isolated themselves, and yet M♀ira’s shackles outweigh her female peers. Her name says something about this irony. It’s an anagram for Māori, but it also references the biblical Mary, setting her up for the conclusive nativity scene where she and J♂seph loom watchfully over baby Jesus/Gully in his manger/locker. M♀ira is not Gully’s mother, though. The Scientific People marry her to him after they recover Gully from Nomad in the second chapter, and when he returns to the Sargasso Asteroid in the last chapter, she delights that her husband has come home to her. All male Scientific People “must marry every month and beget many children” (30). The contours of their New Age culture are nebulous at best; all we learn is that they have combined religious and pseudoscientific principles, namely the opposing forces of Christianity and Darwinism. The “science” of the Scientific People is really just patriarchy in disguise, and M♀ira is more enchained than Gully’s three other would-be helpmeats, with the female symbol that extends from the o in her name reifying her subjection. If she has any agency at all, it relies on Gully’s transcendence (i.e., if her man becomes Zarathustra and breaks the chains of social construction, maybe she can hitch her wagon to his star).
As a foil, M♀ira shows us how Gully’s psychological and emotional disposition moves from one polar coordinate to another. He begins a violent tiger; he ends a mindful starchild. M♀ira is the least developed female character, but his brief encounters with her frame this transition.
Jiz is a much rounder character, and Gully is her Eliza Doolittle, an empty vessel that she fills with the power of knowledge. They become lovers until he abandons her on the Sargasso Asteroid after retrieving the safe from Nomad with the PyrE and bullion in it, but she mainly functions as a life tutor for him. Her agency from patriarchy is criminality, which is why she ends up incarcerated in Gouffre Martel. Jiz fled her home and became a master robber, carving out her freedom and individuality with every new heist. Gully can read and write, but he’s still a gutter-product of his lower-class upbringing. The daughter of an architect, Jiz received a formal education and knows intimate details about the prison. With an eye to breaking out, she teaches him what she knows as well as how to speak, think, and act properly so that he can find the Vorga crew. “No more bombs,” she says, “brains instead” (75).
Like M♀ira, Jiz’s name references a biblical figure, Jezebel, the biblical queen and wife of King Ahab. Strong and serpentine, Jezebel undergirds Jiz, who has an erratic, push-and-pull relationship with Gully. One moment, she rebukes Gully and puts him in his place; the next, she melts into his arms. Their interactions are “always passionate, a mixture of fury and retaliation that generally ends in sex” (Wendell 32). Later, she and Dagenham fall in love, but her role as a foil is over. Gully is the nucleus of the gendered code that animates Stars. Interpellated by that code, Jiz becomes superfluous after she edifies Gully and he discards her. With Gully, she is a subject—subjected by patriarchy at large, subjected by Gully himself. Post-Gully, she is pure object, with nothing left to offer this bildungsroman novel about the development of one man’s self-awareness.
Robin is the yin to Jiz’s yang, innately good-natured, not virulent. Her name invokes Robin Redbreast, the “bird” (British slang for girl) that tried to help Jesus by plucking a thorn from his temple during his crucifixion in the post-biblical folktale. Wendell says she “serves as both victim of the tiger and teacher to the student. Without doubt, Robin is the most innocent and vulnerable of [Gully’s] women, the defenseless bird pounced on by the vicious tiger” (30). Her psychic powers compliment her intelligence and cultural savvy, only these powers handicap her. “[S]he was a telesend, a one-way telepath. She could broadcast her thoughts to the world, but could receive nothing. This was a disadvantage that barred her from more glamorous careers, yet suited her for teaching. Despite her volatile temperament, Robin Wednesbury was a thorough and methodical Jaunte instructor” (Bester, Stars 35). As with Jiz and Gully, she might benefit from some therapy for anger management, but almost every character in Stars, male or female, has a tiger inside of them and exists on the razor’s edge of anxiety: it’s the nature of their monstrous, wartime civilization. The title Tiger! Tiger! doesn’t just point at the protagonist. It incriminates his world and everybody in it.
Robin is a teacher by profession, and her reeducation of Gully in the second part of the novel expedites what Jiz started in the first part. Gully blackmails Robin into being his guide through the Dantesque circles of upper-class society on his quest for revenge. He uses her as a ventriloquist, navigating social situations with her telepathic instructions. For example, when Geoffrey Fourmyle makes his debut at a New Year’s Eve ball, Robin helps him intermingle with fellow party-goers who speculate about him. As is often the case with representations of telepathy or thought-processes in fiction, Bester uses italics to denote her mental utterances.
And so on. Jiz teaches Gully language; Robin enables him to use language. Bester objectifies both women by intermittently describing their physical beauty, but unlike Jiz, Robin maintains valence until close to the end when she pulls Gully out of his synesthesial delirium, a penultimate stage in his transformation. Moreover, “Robin’s desire for vengeance, her determination to destroy Gully [for raping and blackmailing her], leads to her own salvation and redemption—love and mercy for the enemy” (Wendell 31). Just as Bester makes SF New, so does Gully make himself New. Neither Robin nor Jiz do it for him. They give him the know-how he needs to accomplish newness. At times, they both foil (i.e., frustrate) his plans, but ultimately, they foil (i.e., facilitate) the growth of his character.
If M♀ira frames Gully’s transformation, Jiz initiates it, Robin expedites it—and Olivia completes it. Latin for “olive tree,” her first name suggests peace and harmony. It’s a hoax. Olivia belies her good-willed signature.
The idea that monsters are made and not born readily applies to Gully, whose tattooed cyborg body reflects the social and cultural forces that made him into a technologized tiger. Olivia is forged by social and cultural forces, too, but from the opposite end of the class spectrum, from the context of the aristocratic elite rather than the proletariat deleted. Nonetheless, her anger and resentment rival Gully’s, and she is born a monster, “a glorious albino. Her hair was white silk, her skin was white satin, her nails, her lips, and her eyes were coral. She was beautiful and blind in a wonderful way, for she could see the infrared only, from 7,500 angstroms to one millimeter wavelengths. She saw heat waves, magnetic fields, radio waves, radar, sonar, and electromagnetic fields” (Bester, Stars 44). Olivia is the classic blind seer with an enhanced capacity for (in)sight. Coupled with her aberrant yet enticing physicality, Gully wants her more than anybody else. She’s a freak like him, a tiger like him, angry at the world because of her disability. Her whole life, she felt cheated and helpless. “They should have killed me when I was born,” she tells Gully. “Do you know what it’s like to be blind … to receive life secondhand? To be dependent, begging, crippled?” (210). She likes the interplanetary war because she finds beauty in other people’s suffering. Her yearning for revenge is as strong (if not stronger) than Gully’s. This “pair of monsters” is a match made in Hell (ibid.).
Olivia makes more famous villains pale by comparison. […] [S]he is described each time in imagery that emphasizes her hardness, her lack of humanity: a “statue of marble and coral” (chapter 3); “a Snow Maiden, an Ice Princess with coral eyes and coral lips” (chapter 11); “a marble statue … the statue of exaltation” (chapter 11). Always, she is cold, hard, unyielding. Her appearance and her handicap have isolated her from humanity until she has become a monster (her father’s excessive protection of her has no doubt added to the situation). Her statuelike appearance suggests her marble heart; her blindness may be symbolic as well as literal: she simply does not see other people in her own “private life” (chapter 14), as she calls it. Olivia and Gully’s meeting in the garden reveals their mutually inhuman passions. He starts to rescue Jiz, then Robin, but chooses, finally, to look for Olivia. […] Olivia provides the mirror for Gully Foyle: she is blind, but he sees himself in her, and the horror of that vision recreates the man. (33, 34)
Gully falls in love with Olivia because he sees himself in her as much as he sees someone entirely removed from himself. They’re both Unleashed Ids, full of piss and vinegar, but they’re from different worlds, with different life experiences, and Olivia is his diametric opposite in terms of image (as an albino), sex (as a woman), and class (as an aristocrat).
Some scholars have explored gender dynamics in Stars in theoretical terms. Hipolito and McNelly read Jiz, Robin, and Olivia through the filter of Jungian psychoanalysis, hypothesizing that, symbolically, “each woman character in Tiger! Tiger! represents versions of the anima which in Foyle […] has been utterly overshadowed by the dominant animus-tiger; Foyle’s improving response to the women in his life symbolises his improving relationship to the anima within himself. As William Blake expresses it in ‘The Tyger,’ […] the Tiger is balanced by the Lamb” (81). In her monograph on Bester’s oeuvre, however, Wendell offers the best overall commentary on the tiger’s “lambs” of any scholarship I have read, but I think she lets Bester off the hook too easily. It’s true that Jiz, Robin, and Olivia are stronger and more nuanced than most other SF female characters that predate them, but their value hinges on their association with Gully. Like dutiful housewives, their ability to make Gully a better man is what counts. In the house of Bester, once they have accomplished this goal, they have nothing left to offer.
We don’t know what will happen once the reborn Gully sheds his tiger stripes for phoenix feathers. This is the case with all Bestermen: they arrive at the threshold of awakening, but they never go all the way. To go all the way would be another story, and that story wouldn’t involve a Besterman, who is a becoming-man, not a newborn or completed man. A harem of enablers authorize Gully’s becoming; the purdah that afflicts the twenty-fifth century of Stars also afflicts the development of the novel’s protagonist. We could read this scenario as Bester meta-referentially suggesting how such a fraternity of gender relations needs to be overcome in literature. More likely, he’s catering to a male readership, who might appreciate complex representations of women, but who, like Bester, are chiefly interested in the world, ways, and primacy of men.
Toward a Vanishing Point: Race Relations
As with class and gender, Bester underlines issues of race in Stars. He foregrounds Robin’s blackness, and during Gully’s hunt for his enemies, we learn that, as I mentioned earlier, “[m]ore than a century of jaunting had so mingled the many populations of the world that racial types were disappearing” (Bester, Stars 153). On our approach to the Vanishing Point, white privilege, entitlement, and patriarchy still live large, with the Presteign clan evoking the Ku Klux Klan, but Stars demonstrates more racial diversity and recognition than the SF novels and stories of Bester’s generation. According to the entry on “Race and SF” in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, “[i]n the 1950s and early 1960s the mere appearance of an ethnic-minority character in a positive role was faintly unusual, with the exception that Native American ancestry was remarkably common in spacemen and other sf heroes” (Langford). As one can imagine, prior to the 1950s, non-white and ethnic-minority characters were comprehensively marginalized and portrayed in a negative light, and if we go back to foundational SF texts by, say, H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, the whiteness is blinding. Along these lines, reading Frankenstein is like staring at the sun.
Bester’s efforts toward a representation of positive race relations are more successful than his efforts toward gender relations, even if that positivity is largely an effect of miscegenation and there being less differences in skin color and general appearances between people in the twenty-fifth century. The subtext here is that, in order to move beyond racial prejudice and accomplish acceptance (and ideally apathy), we must get rid of physical variance altogether. History proves again and again that “civilized” human beings hate difference among themselves and will kill each other to nullify it. But if everybody’s different (i.e., if everybody is a freak, a monster, and a grotesque) does that hatred abate or cancel itself out? Or does it become more pronounced and emphatic? In Stars, the former seems to be the case. Bester does not volubly comment on or satirize race relations, but he does construct an allegory that puts white privilege in question by encoding his characters.
Race, gender, and class only exist because we authorize the illusion of their actuality. They are extremities of the monster of culture, and we are their collective creator, yet another iteration of the mad scientist who can’t stop making and remaking and manipulating them. The most powerful of these extremities is class. Race and gender have wreaked unspeakable havoc over the course of human history. The havoc wreaked by class, however, casts a shadow on all of the suffering that has been induced by any other material ideology or cultural construction. Stars suggests that what outlives the past cannot defeat the future. Class dominates the status quo, and gender and race (in order of affect) operate under its umbrella. In the latter case, both the social order and the art of narrative overlay this power structure, as Samuel R. Delany notes in “The Mirror of Afrofuturism”: “[T]he social and biological barriers to communication are overcome by the ability to learn new social codes that blur racial ones, even as those barriers are reduced to purely aesthetic enrichment during the course of the condensation of its epic plot” (184). Bester’s attention to style and story pushes his ideas about race in the direction of disposable pulp SF novums that are more for ornamentation than meaningful orchestration. Nevertheless, Bester’s attention to racial codes has more clout than mere glitz and gadgetry.
In his article, Delany implies that Bester encrypts Jiz, Robin, and Olivia with color. “Jisbella McQueen, an underworld thief […], is a fellow prisoner with Gully in Gouffre Martel and helps him break free. Her color is red. Robin Wednesbury is a black woman teacher who is a one-way telepath, who can only project her thoughts rather than read someone else’s. […] Olivia Presteign is the albino daughter of a far-future billionaire […] who is blind to ordinary light but sees the world through infrared illumination alone” (175). Jiz’s redness presumably signifies her fiery temperament and has nothing to do with race. I wouldn’t put it past Bester to code her as red for being Native American—recall that The Computer Connection was serialized as The Indian Giver in the mid-1970s—but she isn’t; she’s white. Robin and Olivia, on the other hand, are distinguished by their skin color, but Delany doesn’t say what their pigmentation connotes. We can read Olivia’s whiteness as a reflection of her class status, allying her with her father’s brand of white Neo-Victorian patriarchy, which is innately pathological and choleric; in her case, race points to class, and vice versa. The purpose and function of Robin’s blackness is not so clear and deserves a bit more thought.
Delany does not critique Bester or Stars. He critiques the SF category of Afrofuturism, arguing that it is essentially anything anybody wants it to be and not a real category at all. In his eyes, the only thing needed to invoke an Afrofuturist narrative “is black characters in the future, whatever the race of the writer” (173). Therefore, Robin is an indisputable Afrofuturist character and a precursor to the “newest new-wave trajectory” of feminist black science fiction that Marleen Barr delimits in Afro-Future Females (2008), a definitive anthology of criticism and stories (xii). But so what? Theoretically, what is gained by making her black? Is it simply a gesture toward diversity of characterization? Bester gives a major role to a black woman. That’s an innovation for the 1950s, but it seems like her blackness should do more, even in its historical context.
Delany is too reductive and dismissive; he’s from an older SF guard, and it shows in his article. In Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (2013), Ytasha L. Womack submits a more compelling, accommodating viewpoint. She defines Afrofuturism as “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation” (9). Citing a talk by art curator and Afrofuturist Ingrid LaFleur, she adds: “Afrofuturism [is] a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens, […] a way to encourage experimentation, reimagine identities, and activate liberation” (ibid.). Robin can be regarded in these terms. In many ways, her experience reminisces the African-American slave oppressed by white authority—none more than Gully, a white man who abuses her physically and psychologically while coercing her into (telepathic) slave labor on his behalf. Ironically, Gully’s slave, who becomes his upper-class mouthpiece, is smarter and better educated than him. Moreover, despite his abuse and the enmity it causes her, Robin helps her master to the very end, saving him from himself.
Robin suffers from something like Stockholm syndrome, a term coined in the 1970s for how abductees come to revere their abductors as a means of psychological and emotional agency from oppression. In his autobiographies, Frederick Douglass alludes to this condition when he discusses how slaves brag about their masters to other slaves. “When Colonel Lloyd’s slaves met the slaves of Jacob Jepson,” he writes in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), “they seldom parted without a quarrel about their masters; Colonel Lloyd’s slaves contending that he was the richest, and Mr. Jepson’s slaves that he was the smartest, and most of a man. Colonel Lloyd’s slaves would boast his ability to buy and sell Jacob Jepson. Mr. Jepson’s slaves would boast his ability to whip Colonel Lloyd. These quarrels would almost always end in a fight between the parties, and those that whipped were supposed to have gained the point at issue. They seemed to think that the greatness of their masters was transferable to themselves” (23).
I equate this variety of Stockholm syndrome with the Freudian ego-defense mechanism, a form of hysteria induced by overwhelming circumstances. As such, Robin’s subservience to Gully facilitates the overcoming of his old, degraded self and the becoming of a new, transcendent overman. She shows us that Gully must not only transcend the limits of being a violent prole and misogynist, but an entitled white patriarch. She also shows us how strong her character is. No matter how many times this white man beats down this black woman, she always gets up. Not only that, she teaches her white oppressor how not to be a victim of his whiteness. Under these auspices, Robin is an incarnation of Frederick Douglass himself.
The Civil Rights movement officially began two years before the publication of Stars in 1954 with the passing of Brown vs. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Bester probably wasn’t thinking about Gully and Robin in terms of a power-relation between master and slave. In all likelihood, his inclusion of a black main character is meant to demonstrate how, 500 years in the future, race doesn’t matter as much as it used to. But he was surely aware of Civil Rights and the plight of African-Americans, and I’d say he was as sympathetic to these causes as a privileged white man of his era could be. As with many of Bester’s aesthetic choices, his depiction of Robin is both flawed and fruitful, a throwback and a leap forward, regressive and progressive—just like the freakified culture and community of Stars as a whole.
At a more systematic level, Stars doesn’t explain what “racial types disappearing” entails. What the landscape might look like on the other side of the Vanishing Point is even more difficult to picture. Not much is said about racial types beyond this statement. Kellegan declares that Stars “features a black woman and Chinese man as major characters; race relations are healthy in Bester’s future” (1273). Are they healthy, though? What does Kellegan mean by healthy? Everybody’s angry and antagonistic about something in this book. Is it simply that race has taken a back seat to more incendiary, provocative issues? People haven’t figured out how to get along in this future. Bester’s twenty-fifth-century society hates itself just as much as (if not more than) his own twentieth-century society, which, in the early 1950s, was still raw and reeling from World War II.
The Chinese man that Kellegan mentions is Central Intelligence Captain Peter Y’ang-Yeovil, “a lineal descendant of the learned Mencius [who] belonged to the Intelligence Tong of the Inner Planets Armed Forces. For two hundred years the IPAF had entrusted its intelligence work to the Chinese who, with a five thousand-year history of cultivated subtlety behind them, had achieved wonders. Captain Y’ang-Yeovil was a member of the dreaded Society of Paper Men, an adept of the Tientsin Image Makers, a Master of Superstition, and fluent in the Secret Speech. He did not look Chinese” (Bester, Stars 54). Y’ang-Yeovil’s Chinese roots do not extend to his appearance. He “looks” Native American, as we learn when he assumes the identity of Vorga’s chef assistant Angelo Poggi, one of Gully’s leads: “He had put on forty pounds weight with glandular shots. He had darkened his complexion with diet manipulation. His features, never of an Oriental cast but cut more along the hawklike lines of the Ancient American Indian, easily fell into an unreliable pattern with a little muscular control” (158).
Y’ang-Yeovil is a shapeshifter whose identity can’t be pinned down. Enabled by technology, he literally transforms into another man. In and of himself, Bester quantifies him as unquantifiable—he is at once Chinese and not Chinese. This is related to the “cultivated subtlety” of his cryptic ancestry, personal history, and life experience, with Bester capitalizing on stereotypes of mysterious Asian characters and Eastern mysticism. And yet Bester undermines that stereotype by simultaneously dislocating Y’ang-Yeovil from it, refusing to fully orientalize him. To some degree, he is de-orientalized. The fluidity of Y’ang-Yeovil’s identity—physically and culturally—may be Bester’s most successful gesture toward the Vanishing Point in the novel.
Overall, though, most of the characters in Stars are white. Stripped of the future, Gully and Presteign could just as easily serve as the protagonist and antagonist in a Dickens novel. Even the Scientific People, “the only savages of the twenty-fifth century,” seem to be white (27). This brings me back to the question of racial types. By “types,” I don’t get the sense that Bester is referring to constructedness (i.e., racial categories as illusory). He means physical difference. Hence the other side of the Vanishing Point would look like … an Aryan utopia? That’s harsh, and Bester wasn’t a Nazi, of course, but given the clues and bread crumbs he leaves us, it’s not totally illogical that, if nothing else, the way he perceived a futuristic, fully miscegenated society would be more white than anything else.
Then again, Bester is a master satirist, and it’s not inconceivable that he’s making fun of the idea of an all-white space-age cast by lampooning the ideals of Victorian culture and literature—not only with respect to race, but class and gender as well. Gully and Presteign are caricatures of white, male, socioeconomic types. Everybody in the novel is a caricature, exaggerated for pyrotechnical effect. Stars is a product of Bester’s comic-book roots, after all. And whereas Bester is a product of his own culture, confined by architectures of psyche, power, and patriarchy, he is also an escape artist who draws lines of flight from the real-life Freak Factory that bore him.