'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman
Hugo and Nebula winner, and one of the most reprinted SF stories ever written — the genre's definitive fable of civil disobedience.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is The Stars My Destination about?
Gully Foyle, the least promising man alive, survives six months in the wrecked spaceship Nomad; when the liner Vorga passes him by, the rage of it remakes him. Across a 25th-century where everyone can teleport ('jaunte') and the gutter has gone interplanetary, Foyle claws upward — brute, fraud, gentleman, monster — pursuing Vorga and being pursued for the cargo he doesn't know he carries. The Count of Monte Cristo rebuilt as proto-cyberpunk pyrotechnics, ending in synaesthetic typography and one of SF's great gestures of dangerous hope: handing the fire to the people. Published in the UK as Tiger! Tiger!
Why it matters
Perennially voted among the greatest SF novels ever; Gibson, Moorcock and Delany all cite it as ground zero. Gully Foyle is the genre's definitive anti-hero.