"Originally serialized in Galaxy magazine in four parts beginning with the October 1956 issue, it first appeared in book form in the United Kingdom as Tiger! Tiger! – after William Blake's poem "The Tyger", the first verse of which is printed as the first page of the novel – and the book remains widely known under that title in markets where this edition was circulated. A working title for the novel was Hell's My Destination, and it was also associated with the name The Burning Spear." (wiki)
Lets go over the plot. So the book starts off explaining this universe that Bester has created. Its the far future, people can teleport through their minds but not through space, and people have inhabited other planets and moons. Gully Foyle (an uneducated, unskilled, unambitious man), a monster (for many reasons, which will be explained) of a spaceman is trapped, stranded on a spaceship (the Nomad) for six months, subsisting on rations but pretty much starving and left to die.
All of a sudden he sees another spaceship (the Vorga). He sends out a distress signal and he knows the ship sees it. The ship passes him by and leaves him to die. His rage consumes him. He vows to kill whoever was on that ship, whoever gave the order to leave him there. This becomes his reason to live.
He eventually fixes the ship but gets captured by a cargo cult in the Asteroid belt. They tattoo an ugly mask of a tiger on his face, using needles etched into his face. Foyle eventually makes it back to Terra (Earth) where he makes an attempt to blow up Vorga using explosives. He fails and is captured by Presteign, a rich leader in government. Unknown to Foyle, the Nomad was carring PyrE, a substance that can make the difference between winning or losing in a war with the Outer Satellites.
Foyle goes to a juante proof (teleporting is called juanting) prison and here he meets Jisbella McQueen, and she teaches him to think clearly, and she also tells him that he needs to find out who gave the order to leave him to die, not just kill the people who were aboard the ship (Foyle's not too bright).
Together they escape the prison. Jisbella gets Foyle's tattoos removed but not completely. When Foyle gets emotional the tattoo appears. They return to the Nomad, where they take the PyrE (which is a weapon controlled by thought) and also a fortune in platinum.
Later Foyle returns as a man named "Geoffrey Fourmyle" (Foyle's alias was implanted in his subconscious mind during Dagenham's interrogation, Dagenham is a government worker), a rich dandy who is sort of silly to the other rich people. Through yoga he's learned to control his emotions and keep his tattoo from showing. He meets up with Robin Wednesbury, a one-way telepath, whom he raped earlier in the novel. He persuades her to help him charm his way through high society. The rape in the book brings to mind a problem that has existed for a long time. The rape isn't explicit but it is implied to the utmost degree. It was quite troubling and makes you sort of hate Foyle, but in the end you don't have to like Foyle or any of the characters to enjoy the story for what it is, a grand space opera, true cyberpunk. But I digress.
Foyle ends up tracking down the guys who were on the Vorga when it passed his ship but all of them were implanted with a death-reflex and die when questioned. Every time, Foyle is haunted by the image of "The Burning Man", an image of himself on fire but the fire turns out to be real and sometimes his clothes are actually burning.
At a high society party Foyle becomes smitten with Presteign's daughter Olivia. During a nuclear attack by the Outer Satellites Foyle goes to save Olivia and she says that if he is to have her he has to be as cruel and ruthless as she is. Robin is traumatized by the attack and wants out of this whole operation, so she gives Foyle information (on Vorga, on his whole mission) in exchange for her freedom and leaving this whole thing behind. Foyle takes the information then doesn't allow her to leave. Robin responds by going to Central Intelligence and betraying him.
Foyle learns that the captain of the Vorga joined a cult on Mars and had all her sensory nerves disabled, making her immune to traditional torture so Foyle kidnaps a telepath (a little kid) who interrogates the captain. From this he learns that Vorga didn't pick him up because instead it was picking up refugees, taking their belongings, and tossing them out into space. He also learns that this was all controlled by Olivia Presteign. Commandos come to arrest Foyle on Mars but Olivia ends up saving him, because she sees in him someone who can match her "hatred and need to destroy".
Foyle becomes stricken with grief and wants to turn himself in for all the evil he's done in the universe. He gets captured by Presteign's lawyer Regis Sheffield, who turns out to be a spy for the Outer Satellites (Terra's enemy).
"Sheffield tells Foyle that when the Nomad was attacked, Foyle was taken off the ship, transported 600,000 miles away, and set adrift in a spacesuit to be a decoy to attract ships to be ambushed. Instead, Foyle space-jaunted—a previously unknown possibility—back to the Nomad. Now, the Outer Satellites not only want PyrE, they want Foyle as well, to learn the secret of space-jaunting." (wiki)
Presteign reveals that PyrE is activated by telepaths and tells Robin to trigger it to bring out Foyle. Destruction is caused around the world but mainly at St. Patrick's Cathedral (where Sheffield brought Foyle) and it traps Foyle, leaving him unconscious.
"Suffering from synesthesia brought on by the explosion affecting his neurological implants, Foyle jauntes through space and time as The Burning Man. Finally he lands in the future, where Robin telepathically tells him how to escape from the collapsing cathedral." (wiki)
Back in the present Foyle is pressured to hand over the PyrE and teach the world how to space-juante. He asks a robot what he should do and decides for himself. He juantes throughout Terra and throws a little bit of PyrE out to people, telling them if they want to learn how to space-jaunte they should follow him. "Either destroy yourselves or follow me into space".
Foyle realizes the key to space-jaunting is faith. He juantes from star-to-star finding places for colonization, but only reachable if he shares the secret of space-jaunting. The book ends with him back at the cargo cult, where the cultists await the holy man's revelation.
Wow, what a story! Now I'd like to go over the space opera & cyberpunk elements of this great piece of art and end with my thoughts on the work.
This book was very influential on the cyberpunk movement that would come later in the 1980's, particularly with William Gibson's Neuromancer. The ideas of the megacorporations, cybernetic enhancement (Foyle gets modded in the story, making him a killing machine), juanting (teleporting), telepathy (but limited), poetry (its partially inspired by a poem), and speculative science are all quite related to the space opera genre.
The literary style is quite stylized. In fact, once I started reading the book I couldn't put it down. The writing itself isn't complicated or highly detailed but it has a sort of "I must read more" prose. I read it at work on all my breaks. I wanted to find out more and more until I finished it, its that good. Here's a writer who is stylized, makes the reading exciting, and writes a great story in only two-hundred and thirty pages. This is quite a difference from what I usually read, third wave science fiction writers (I'm right now reading through Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer). This book is more interesting than that, more exciting, not necessarily more detailed, but better in the long run because of that. I learned a lot about writing from this book. You don't have to write a thousand pages to get your point across, because instead you can do it in two-hundred.
All that being said, this would be a great novel to come back to in a couple months or years. Twenty or thirty years from now I could read it and either get something new out of its ideas or revel in its literary and cyberpunk style. Either way, its still a fascinating book.
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