The Stars My Destination should be made as a film.
This is a hot, fast-moving book that I think should be an easy adapt, except for the complicated backgrounds that might need exposition. The novel teeters on the brink of chaos, but somehow he wrestles the whole into shape with structures within structures, interlocking shapes of story that you can only read and marvel at. I would write it for free if it helped it get made (though I can't imagine anything less likely to succeed than approaching a giant star and director and production company with - "here's the screenplay - it's by another hopeful dickhead you never heard of. You didn't read about it in the trades because it was free - it's literally worthless.").
Themes - why this is an important story for today:
1. Intellectual Property ascendant. The background is a world of very high technology and a very stratified society, where an aristocracy of intellectual property holders dominates the globalized society. If you think about how copyright is steadily being extended and patent law is more and more the ground on which inter-corporation wars are fought, this seems to be exactly somewhere we could get to.
2. Inequality. Everyone except the very rich is vulnerable to poverty, violence and crime.
3. Terrorism. The solar system is at war, but it's a fundamentally unequal war in which the tactics are terrifying, asymmetric - attacks on populations, exploitation and internment of refugees.
4. Globalization. The power of Earth national governments to regulate issues of citizenship is limited, because transport (jaunting - pretty much 'disapparating' from Harry Potter) is very cheap and very fast. The boundaries that now define 'nationalities' are found at spaceports and similar, and Earth has a government and secret police and military.
5. The body. Surgical intervention to augment and alter the body is available, but most heavily used by criminals, the military and social climbers.
6. Life. The foregoing sets up a lot of very recognizable vulnerability (and corresponding, prized invulnerability). The story mythos is how to live under this vulnerability.
Synopsis (spoilers - but the book is from the fifties, so for goodness sake):
Gully Foyle is an emotionally shut-down ambitionless lump of a spaceman. His ship is captured by Outer Satellites privateers, and he ends up in a small airtight locker on a ship drifting aimless out past the asteroid belt. He lasts about half a year by scavenging air and food and water in desperate adventures in a leaky space suit. When a ship appears, he thinks he will be rescued, but on seeing it is only him, SS Vorga doesn't stop. This awakens Gully emotionally and when he tries, he finds he can repair his ship and get the main engine started, although navigation is not possible. (There are a number of statistically very unlikely conjunctions in space in this story, but we'll just have to deal with it.)
Gully reaches Earth where he is rehabilitated and learns to jaunt and begins to be a criminal, plotting against the Vorga and sexually assaulting his jaunte instructor Robin to ensure her silence. Then he makes a stupid attempt at revenge which sees him locked up. At the same time, his story comes to the notice of Presteign of Presteign, a front rank aristocrat with basic patents on a lot of spacefaring. Gully is imprisoned in the Gouffre Martel, a perfectly dark underground prison, from which jaunting is impossible. There he meets Jizzbella McQueen, a beautiful and brilliant professional criminal. They become dependent on each other - he for her intelligence (and he learns to prize intelligence) and she for his absolutely implacable courage/rage. When Presteign attempts to interrogate him in prison, he escapes with Jizzbella. During his escape he sees the Burning Man, a grim apparition of a man on fire, for the first time.
Gully and Jizzbella work out that there was treasure on his ship, steal a sporty spaceship and try to salvage it. But Presteign turns up and Gully just barely escapes, by abandoning Jizzbella.
On Earth, he is soon fabulously rich and takes an identity as Geoffrey Fourmyle, a ludicrous spendthrift clown-entrepreneur. He travels with his Fourmyle circus, a sort of giant Carnivale / Burning Man Festival / royal court in which there are concealed a few terribly serious scientific investigations into the mysterious substance that came with the treasure. But he is really beginning in earnest his quest to find the captain and crew of the SS Vorga, and he recruits Robin to coach him in civilization. At the same time, Presteign wants to draw Fourmyle in, at first because of his wealth, and to keep his enemies close. And Gully falls in love (violently, as he does everything at this stage of moral development) with Olivia Presteign, Presteign's albino daughter, with eyes that see Infra Red.
Having identifed three former crewmen, Gully sets up an opportunity to interrogate them during a progressive New Years' Ball, in which he takes as an escort the partial telepath, Robin, who taught him to Jaunte. Each of the crewmen dies on trying to say the name of the director of the mission, but Gully gets a new facts: the name of crewman now working as a slave on the Moon's algae farms. The Burning Man appears at each killing, and the Burning Man is recognizable as Gully. He kidnaps him and hooks him up to life support before interrogating him. Even though the hypnotic kill switch activates and his heart stops, he stays alive long enough to reveal that Lindsey Joyce is in the Skoptsy colony on Mars, having renounced life.
Gully feels beaten. Skoptsies are religious who give themselves to total sensory deprivation. There seems no way to punish Joyce. But Gully is implacable - he steals a telepath and uses him to intrude on Lindsey Joyce. He terrifies the young telepath so much that everyone, including Joyce, is affected. Gully is absolutely disgusted by Joyce. Her detachment is absolute evil in his moral scheme.
Then Gully finds out the last name. The director of the voyage, who refused to pick him up was Olivia Presteign. And all the silence was because she was scuttling refugees - taking their money and belongings, then dumping them to die in space. Gully has the insight of a tragic hero - everything he's done to remake himself for revenge had made him too great to take revenge on her. He gets captured by Presteign.
Presteign explains that among the treasure was PyRE - a substance that is the primordial stuff that detonated in the big bang; and PyRE can be detonated any time, by Will and Idea. Robin is there, and her idea of detonation radiates out - Foyle's lab in the Fourmyle circus had a smudge of Pyre left behind and it explodes. Fortunately the main mass of PyRE is deeply secured below the lab, and cannot detonate. Gully negotiates with Presteign for Olivia; he expresses his outrage at the power of PyRE being under the control of just a few people - having mastered all his smallness while remaining himself, he is enraged by the narrow, dirty cheating of the wealthy and powerful. Although drugged, he escapes to Earth, and from there he heads to his laboratory to do something about PyRE.
His lab is on fire. His great strength and augmented reflexes and courage lead him to try to go to the PyRE, but he gets stuck in a burning loom of wire, tangled and flailing. He tries to jaunte, but being drugged is making it difficult to resolve a destination, and then he starts flashing to significant places - the air-tight locker, the cell, the scenes of the deaths of the spacemen, the present, and then the future. In that future, Robin tells him how to get free. In doing so he discovers the secret to space-jaunting - thinking through time - he space-jauntes to Arcturus' blue fire, to his old coffin and back to earth. Presteign helps him. The fire is coming under control, and Gully recovers and sits up. He lectures Presteign on living, then distributes PyRE across the world and directs everyone to start living, right now.
Story Structure(s) - why this is a (very) filmable story
Neal Gaiman wrote an introduction to the story that highlighted the sequence of wombs, out of each of which, Gully is reborn more powerful: the air-tight locker; the Gouffre Martel cell and several others, culminating in the burning wire cage. Each of these forms a sequence with goals, stakes, urgency of their own. The sequences are basically the seven and a half paragraphs in the synopsis. A lot of detail has been lost to synopsising, but in every sequences, Gully grows and becomes more powerful, and more morally conscious, although he remains cruel and remorseless, beginning with neglect of even himself, through a blunt and aimless cruelty, to a razor-edge relentless predator ranging the solar system. But you can't grow so much as a person without starting to have your shit together morally speaking. Gully is genuinely sorry for raping Robin by the middle of the film, and does her only good once he recruits her. By the conclusion of the film, Gully has transcended everything that made him, as has Robin.
Second, the morality. There are two layers of morality operating in the story. The more familiar is the conventional morality in which its wrong to hurt the weak, to be unfair. The less familiar is straightforwardly Nietzschean 'yes to everything' morality, in which letting other people make you is a regrettable weakness, but evil is refusing life - refusing to make big choices and take big chances. Lindsey Joyce and all the other crew of the Vorga allowed Olivia Presteign to make them, and crushed by guilt, gave up on life. This is their evil, the evil of weakness dwelling in and clinging to its weakness. Its what Gully overcame when Vorga abandoned him.
Third, the characters all partake of both moralities, but strongly represent one or the other. Presteign represents Nietzschean power, but in the end Gully judges him to have taken too much on himself, which is wrong even as a Nietzschean because it preserves his power that should exist by contending, not by secrecy and declining to compete. Dagenham, Jizzbella and other minor characters operate on skill power - Presteign, though, is most skilled at holding on to his inherited power. Robin operates entirely without Nietzschean power, and yet by the mid point Gully is begging for her help, and by the end depends on her to save his life. He is moved into conventional morality by this. Robin has lived to overcome his assault, to become too great to hold it against him. Olivia is a pure Nietzschean, willing to do anything to sate her Presteign passions for blood and money - yet she expresses a desire to be overcome to Gully. Gully was shut down to life until he nearly lost it - perhaps he was trapped in conventional morality, just going along, conforming, until the people really living life showed how little that meant to them.
Everyone has a story - indeed its bewildering how much story is in this short book.
Challenges
- Nietzschean 'yes to everything' morality freaks people out ('Yes Man' notwithstanding):
- The protagonist is extraordinarily imperious, relentless and cruel - and those are the qualities his character develops.
- The protagonist rapes a lovely woman who helps him, and then gets her to help him achieve his dreams. I can't imagine that going over well with women and people who care about them - I would expect protests from feminists. (I would argue that this is treated as seriously as anything in the story, but I doubt any writer could make it serious enough.)
- Olivia Presteign is the worst mass murderer I can think of in fiction - defrauding and killing the most vulnerable people she can, including Robin's family. And her punishment is that Gully marries her. It has a certain logic, but its to see audiences feeling satisfied.
- The protagonist may not be very sympathetic in the opening of the film. Just getting pushed around and being unwilling to push back is not universally sympathetic.
- The amount that would need to be explained is large. Jaunting, PyRE, the solar system's warring sides, the existence of telepathy, Gully's progressive identity shifts (Geoffrey Fourmyle, souped up Commando), and the complex webs of relationships, inferences, games and tricks that motivate all the participants.
Come on, guys! Make this film!
* Neal Adams thinks that all seismic and geological evidence is best explained by his idea that Earth (and other planets) is steadily growing in size. ? ??? ?????
I think Gully could be played by a woman
ReplyDeleteInteresting idea. Played (like Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan in 'I'm not there'), or the story recast with a female lead?
ReplyDeleteThere are some ways the story could really use some adjustment in its extremely traditional gender roles. The introduction tries to suggest this is due to a confluence of the nature of property and inheritance, the nature of a jaunte-able universe and the nature of women. Bester seems to me to have invested heavily in the gender roles thing - 'Who He?' has some nasty homophobia, for example.
But, although I'd be interested to see it tried, I wouldn't try it myself. I think the 'traditional' gender roles have sources of power beyond 'mere' tradition, and while a woman can certainly be as rageful, vengeful, clever, ruthless and tenacious as Gully, I think the relationship with the opposite sex (raping Robin, rescuing but ultimately abandoning Jizzbella, idolising and forgiving Olivia) will be too unintelligible for large audiences to emotionally connect with, unless Gull is male and plays to traditional gender types.
But my very best wishes to any Stars My Destination project. If you do something with that idea, keep me posted!