I have been very restless for a few days now, not sure what to do with the little free time I have. Deep down, I want to just be able to jaunt from place to place. No, I do not mean that want to take a short trip. I want to be able to emulate Gulliver Foyle.
Confused? One of my favourite sci-fi stories is "The Stars My Destination", by Alfred Bester. The book introduced a mode of transportation known as jaunting (named for the scientist Charles Fort Jaunte who discovered/invented it) whereby humans travel from place to place on earth simply by teleporting (akin to apparating in the Harry Potter series).
Gulliver "Gully" Foyle, the main protagonist, is described as "A man of physical strength and intellectual potential stunted by lack of ambition.....He had reached a dead end. He had been content to drift from moment to moment of existence for thrity years like some heavily armoured creature, sluggish and indifferent.....but now he was adrift in space for one hundred and seventy days, and the key to his awakening was in the lock."
The story is about this man and what he does when he realizes what he is fully capable of. Gully Foyle's moment of awakening is a paragraph that always raises the hair on the back of my neck when I read the story. Here is the description.....
After thirty years of existence and six months of torture, Gully Foyle, the stereotype Common Man, was no more. The key turned in the lock of his soul and the door opened. What emerged expunged the Common Man forever.....The acid of fury ran through him, eating away at the brute patience and sluggishness that had made a cipher of Gully Foyle, precipitating a chain of reactions that would make an infernal machine of Gully Foyle. He was dedicated.
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