The novel was both widely criticized and praised when it first appeared, but now is appreciated as a classic work in its own right, and as a prescient forerunner of the cyberpunk literary genre.

Gully Foyle of the Presteign-owned merchant spaceship Nomad—an uneducated, unskilled, unambitious man whose life is at a dead end—is marooned in space when the ship is attacked.

After six months of waiting, a passing spaceship, the Vorga, also owned by the powerful Presteign industrial clan, ignores his signal and abandons him.

Foyle repairs the ship and barely survives but is found and adopted by a cargo cult in the Asteroid Belt who tattoo a hideous mask of a tiger on his face.

Foyle tracks down the crew of the Vorga to learn the identity of the ship's captain but each person he finds has been implanted with a death-reflex and dies when questioned.

Foyle learns that the captain of the Vorga has joined a cult on Mars and has had all her sensory nerves disabled, making her immune to conventional torture.

Foyle kidnaps a telepath to interrogate the captain and learns that the ship did not rescue him because it was picking up refugees, taking their belongings and ejecting them into space.

Back in the present, Foyle is pressured by Presteign, Y'ang-Yeovil, and Dagenham to surrender the rest of his cache of PyrE, which had been protected from exploding by its Inert Lead Isotope container, and to teach mankind how to space-jaunte.

He had drifted un-rescued in the Atlantic for a world record 133 days, because passing ships thought he was a lure to bring them within torpedo range of a hidden submarine.

From there grew the story of the antihero Gully Foyle, seeking revenge for his abandonment and causing havoc all about him: a future-set retelling of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo.

Like Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo, Foyle is thrown into prison, in this case the supposedly jaunte-proof Gouffre Martel located in caverns.

He establishes a clandestine connection to another prisoner, Jisbella McQueen, and through her he is educated to the point where he can conceive a plan to escape and exact his revenge.

Bester may have come across his title expression in the writings of John Whiteside Parsons, one of the fathers of modern rocketry, who was also a science fiction fan and occultist.

As a result, many of the characters are named after British or Irish towns or other features:[3] Gulliver Foyle (and his pseudonym, Fourmyle of Ceres), Robin Wednesbury, the Presteign clan, Regis Sheffield, Y'ang-Yeovil, Saul Dagenham, Sam Quatt, Rodger Kempsey, the Bo'ness and Uig ship underwriters.

Women of the upper classes are locked away in jaunte-proof rooms "for their protection", the treatment of criminals of necessity goes back to the Victorian "separate system", and freaks and monsters abound.

The well-regarded science fiction writer and critic Damon Knight, in In Search of Wonder (1956), wrote of the novel's "bad taste, inconsistency, irrationality, and downright factual errors", but called the ending of the book "grotesquely moving".

[14] In a profile of Bester for Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature (2005), critic Steven H. Gale cited the novel as a reflection of the author's maturation, addressing as it does "the continued evolution of humankind as a species", a grander theme than those treated with in his earlier work.

Gale declared the novel to be Bester's most stylistically ambitious work, citing the use of disparate fonts to evoke synesthesia, the progressively intelligent language accorded to the maturing protagonist, and the framing of the narrative between the variations on Blake's quatrain.

[3] Neil Gaiman wrote in the introduction to a 1999 edition of the book: "The Stars My Destination is, after all, the perfect cyberpunk novel: it contains such cheerfully protocyber elements as multinational corporate intrigue; a dangerous, mysterious, hyperscientific MacGuffin (PyrE); an amoral hero; a supercool thief-woman..."[3] James Lovegrove called it "the very best of Bester",[16] and Thomas M. Disch identified it as "one of the great sf novels of the 1950s".

[16] Joe Haldeman wrote: "Our field has produced only a few works of actual genius, and this is one of them",[16] who also added that he reads the novel "every two or three years and it still evokes a sense of wonder".

[19] In a 2011 survey asking leading science fiction writers to name their favorite work of the genre, The Stars My Destination was the choice of William Gibson and Moorcock.

Gibson remarked that the book was "perfectly surefooted, elegantly pulpy", and "dizzying in its pace and sweep", and a "talisman" for him when undertaking his first novel.

Moorcock hailed Bester's novel as a reminder of "why the best science fiction still contains, as in Ballard, vivid imagery and powerful prose coupled to a strong moral vision".

Alun Armstrong played Gully Foyle, Miranda Richardson was Olivia, Siobhan Redmond was Robin Wednesbury and Lesley Manville was Jisbella McQueen.

The copyright holders' refusal to allow an adaptation led the director, Mahiro Maeda, to instead use The Count of Monte Cristo, which had inspired Bester's story.

According to David Hughes' Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, Richard Gere owned the rights to, and wanted to star in, the adaptation following the success of Pretty Woman.