u/Canvas_57Rover

I am not a dirty person. My apartment is clean, my dishes are clean, I do laundry regularly. The machine itself just never occurred to me as something that needed cleaning. It's the thing that cleans things. The logic felt airtight.

Then a few weeks ago my towels started smelling musty right out of the dryer and I went down a rabbit hole trying to figure out why. Rewashed them, same smell. Added more detergent, slightly worse actually. Eventually I found a thread that described exactly what I was experiencing and every single reply said the same thing: clean your machine, it's probably full of mold and detergent buildup and you've been washing your clothes in essentially a bacteria soup for however long it's been since you last cleaned it. I had never cleaned it. I did not want to look inside the drum seal.

I looked inside the drum seal. I won't describe it in detail because this is a family subreddit but I will say that what I found in that rubber gasket had no business existing in a household appliance. I used a full bottle of white vinegar, a box of baking soda, an old toothbrush, and about forty minutes of genuine personal reckoning. Ran two hot cleaning cycles back to back. The water that came out during the first cycle was a color I don't have a name for. By the second cycle it ran mostly clear and I felt like I had acomplished something meaningful with my life.

Washed a load of towels after. They came out smelling like nothing, which is exactly what clean laundry is supposed to smell like and which I had apparantly not experienced in quite some time without realizing it. If you have never cleaned your machine I am not judging you becuase I was you three weeks ago, but please do it this weekend.

I want to talk about what this book actually does with its central premise because I think it gets undersold as "Count of Monte Cristo in space" in a way that makes it sound like a fun genre exercise when it is doing something genuinely stranger and more uncomfortable than that. Gully Foyle starts as close to a non-character as a protagonist can be. Unskilled, unremarkable, described in the opening pages as exactly the kind of person who drifts through life defined entirely by circumstance. Bester is deliberate about this. You are not supposed to find him interesting yet.

What the book is actually tracking is what happens when you take a person with no interiority whatsoever and inject pure obsessive purpose into them. Foyle doesn't become admirable. He becomes effective, and the book is very careful not to confuse those two things. Every skill he acquires, every connection he makes, every transformation he undergoes is in service of something that the reader is also not entirely sure deserves to succeed. And then the ending asks you to sit with what it means that this hollow man, running entirely on the fuel of a single grievance, ends up accidentally becoming the hinge point for something that affects all of humanity. He doesn't earn it in any conventional sense. Bester doesn't let him earn it. That's the whole point I think.

I've read books where the revenge plot is satisfying and books where it's critiqued and books where it's complicated, but this is the only one I've read where the revenge plot is almost beside the point by the end and the book has quietly replaced it with a question about agency and potential that it never quite answers directy. It's doing a lot more than the premise suggests and I think it deserves more conversation than it gets.