The Stars my Destination
3.0 Stars
1-1-2015

An enjoyable book, but one that is still very much a product of its times and doesn't have that much useful to say 50 years later on. Kind of a disco fever type of thing. The story starts with a brutish man stranded in space by an intra-stellar war. A passing merchant ship notices him and stops, but ultimately decides to continue on and leave him to die. The rest of the story is about his quest to track down and revenge himself on that ship. Along the way he changes, grows, rapes, murders, etc. Generally the book is clever, creative, violent, and fast moving. It also reads very much as a 1960's book, which is unfortunate. There are psychic powers, telepathy, LSD-like synthesia, a 2001 type full-of-stars journey through the universe, time travel, etc. The tech is also very outdated, e.g. the starships use simple chemical thrusters, they signal each other with flares, they transfer gold bullion from planetary bank to planetary bank, etc. So it's not really a novel that engages with physical facts much, and it doesn't really have any deep psychological modeling, or at least not any that I can parse.