Overall: 5 out of 5 stars
Performance: 5 out of 5 stars
Story: 5 out of 5 stars
Published in 1956 (as Tiger! Tiger! in the UK, after the Blake poem) and still more inventive than most sci-fi I've read in the last few years. It's loosely a reworking of The Count of Monte Cristo set in the 24th century, when humans have colonised the solar system and learned to teleport.
Gully Foyle, the lead, is an uneducated spaceship survivor left stranded when the Vorga spots his distress signal and chooses not to pick him up. The revenge that follows turns him into something vengeful, brutal, and often a complete bastard. Bester makes him work anyway. You don't root for him exactly, you just can't look away. He starts the book marooned in space and ends it as something much stranger.
There's a rape scene, we can't shy from that. The book cuts before showing it, but doesn't sanitise the aftermath. The damage Foyle does to Robin Wednesbury stays visible across the rest of the story.
The jaunting premise, teleportation across visual range capped at around a thousand miles, is the other star of the book. Bester actually does the homework on it: how economies adapt, what happens to prisons, what it does to cities, what it does to a war between the Inner Planets and the Outer Satellites. The kind of "what if" most sci-fi waves off in a paragraph, and Bester sits with for a whole novel.
It's short, around 250 pages, and there's no fat on it. The final act swerves into typographic experimentation, with fonts changing mid-page to evoke synesthesia and language growing more sophisticated as Foyle does. By the time you hit it, the swerve feels earned rather than indulgent.
If you've never read it, the audiobook is a good entry point. Neil Gaiman called it "the perfect cyberpunk novel" decades before cyberpunk was a thing, and it's held up better than it has any right to.
