Alfred Bester "adapted" this story from Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, then restaged it in the far future when most people have learned how to teleport. Gulliver Foyle, an uneducated brute, is left to die in a wrecked spaceship. Inspired to greatness by rage, he rescues himself, is put in prison, escapes, finds a treasure, remakes himself as a flamboyant aristocrat and stalks his enemies through a society transformed by the discovery of teleportation into something between Dickens' London and the Borgias' Rome.
Gully Foyle is one of the most wonderfully ruthless and tortured protagonists ever to be written. And the novel has no limits to its sense of depth and imagination; teleporting across Earth, Foyle's quest for revenge, the number of interesting and unique characters Bester created, as well as his wonderful experiments in elaborate prose manipulation.
