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Blake's dictum, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that "Without Contraries [there] is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence." Such a "marriage" of opposites does not result, either for Blake or for Bester, in Classical balance and reconciliation, but in the dynamic tension of the Romantic myth. Thus it is a mistake to expect, say, the polished ironies of a Jane Austen novel from an author like Bester, whose vision leads him to something closer to the cruder yet more powerful ironies of Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights. Similarly, if we find it difficult to evaluate Gully Foyle at the end of the novel, it is because Bester's concept of irony here is so thoroughly Romantic that we can arrive only at a paradox: to the extent that Foyle is a figure of redemption, we owe that redemption not to his virtues but to his viciousness. Thus his ultimate insight into the nature of social responsibility is made possible only by the complete selfishness and egocentrism of his life, qualities that have forced him deeply enough into himself to enable him to see other people for the first time. |
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The difficulty in arriving at a moral judgment may be even greater here than in Frankenstein, the grandfather of all SF novels about Promethean figures. Like other types of Prometheus, Foyle is both destroyer and redeemer, Satan and Christnot alternately but at the same time. His decision to distribute PyrE across the world and to force upon everyone the responsibility for using it safely will of course be interpreted by many readers as something like a decision to give every man his own hydrogen bomb. There is no evading the charge that, in the end, the decision is supremely irresponsible or so it seems when considered in isolation. In the context of the novel, however, Foyle is telling us that we cannot have the keys to heaven (spacejaunting) without the keys to hell (PyrE). And if PyrE is deadlyit is "Pronounced 'pyre' as in 'funeral pyre,'" and Gully Foyle himself calls it "the road to hell"it is also potentially creative, for it is believed to be "the equivalent of the primordial protomatter which exploded into the Universe.'' Walking a tightrope between the poles of destruction and resurrection, both of which are implicit in visions of the apocalypse, Bester's conclusion is ironic in its refusal to resolve the book's paradoxes. |
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Patrick A. McCarthy, "Science Fiction as Creative Revisionism: The Example of Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination," Science-Fiction Studies 10, No. 1 (March 1983): 6667 |
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