Where the main characters in The Demolished Man (1953) largely were from the upper strata of society, many of those in The Stars My Destination are the opposite, representing the lower social classes. Gulliver Foyle, the protagonist, is an uneducated, unskilled Mechanic's Mate 3rd Class on the twenty-fourth-century spaceship, Nomad. As in the earlier novel, events are put into motion in a business context, and they result in an overpowering desire for revenge. The outcome is that an individual again is goaded into a special awareness of himself and forced to develop supranormal powers in order to survive. The character's social awareness begins to develop next, and through extraordinary events the individual makes an evolutionary leap.

Gully begins as an insensitive egoist and ends up as a representative of the next development in the human race.

He has become a superman in the sense...