"The Stars My Destination"

"He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead. He fought for survival with the passion of a beast in a trap. He was delirious and rotting, but occasionally his primitive mind emerged from the burning nightmare of survival into something resembling sanity. Then he lifted his mute face to Eternity and muttered: `What's a matter, me? Help, you Heels. Help, is all.'

Blasphemy came easily to him; it was half his speech, all his life. He had been raised in the gutter school of the twenty-fourth century and spoke nothing but the gutter tongue. Of all brutes in the world he was least valuable alive and most likely to live...

He was Gulliver Foyle, Mechanic's Mate 3rd Class, thirty years old, big boned and rough.. . and one hundred and seventy days adrift in space. He was Gully Foyle, the oiler, wiper, bunkerman; too easy for trouble, too slow for fun, too empty for friendship, too lazy for love. The lethargic outlines of his character even showed in the official Merchant Marine records... 

Education: none.  Skills: none.  Merits: none...

"A man of physical strength and intellectual potential stunted by lack of ambition. Energizes at minimum. The stereotype Common Man. Some unexpected shock might possibly awaken him, but Psych cannot find the key. Do not recommend for further promotion. Foyle has reached a dead end."

The spaceship Nomad drifted half-way between Mars and Jupiter. Whatever war catastrophe had wrecked it had taken a sleek steel rocket, one hundred yards long and one hundred feet broad, and mangled it into a skeleton on which was mounted the remains of cabins, holds, decks and bulkheads. Great rents in the hull were blazes of light on the sunside and frosty blotches of stars on the darkside. The S.S. Nomad was a weightless emptiness of blinding sun and jet shadow, frozen and silent...

He lived in the only air-tight room left intact in the wreck, a tool locker of the main-deck corridor. The locker was four feet wide, four feet deep and nine feet high. It was the size of a giant's coffin. Six hundred years before, it had been judged the most exquisite Oriental torture to imprison a man in a cage that size for a few weeks. Yet Foyle had existed in that lightless cage for five months, twenty days and four hours."

A memorable excerpt from The Stars My Destination (Tiger Tiger in the U.K.) by Alfred Bester, a work generally regarded as one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written.  I first encountered it as a teenager in the 1960s, reread it as an adult, and then set it aside for a final read in the"future" (which arrived this past week).  

It amazes me that this book has not been made into a major motion picture (or better yet a prolonged miniseries).  I do have one suggestion for the scriptwriters who adapt the 1956 text into a screenplay:  when you describe the 24th-century megacorporations that dominate human commerce on multiple planets and moons, choose ones other than Kodak and Montgomery Ward...