Four Mile Circus: The Evolution of Science Fiction

Four Mile Circus

This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying . . . but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice . . . but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks . . . but nobody loved it.

Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination

In Alfred Bester's classic 1956 science fiction novel Tiger, Tiger (published for the less than literate masses of North America as The Stars My Destination) protagonist Gully Foyle masquerades as Jeffrey Fourmyle, wealthy buffon who owns and operates a traveling freak show known as the Four Mile Circus. The circus was a prop that allowed Foyle to travel among the social elite as he sought information on the Vorga, a ship that had left him for dead on the wreckage of the spaceship Nomad. Driven by revenge, Foyle would transcend his common origins to alter the course of human history.

The old year soured as pestilence poisoned the planets. The war gained momentum and grew from a distant affair of romantic raids and skirmishes in space to a holocaust in the making. It had become evident that the last of the World Wars was done and the first of the Solar Wars had begun....An ominous foreboding paralyzed every home from Baffin Island to the Falklands. The dying year was enlivened only by the advent of the Four Mile Circus.

Alfred Bester, Chapter Eight, The Stars My Destination

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Sunday, July 22, 2018

The Evolution of Science Fiction

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