Review: The Stars My Destination

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This one looked interesting enough to give a shot – and I needed the distraction of sci-fi while I was dealing with my mother’s final days, -- and then Neil Gaiman’s introduction got me intrigued. Gaiman argues that we should see this as a key text in the development of the genre, a story where a real character emerges within an invented world, one where the technology of the future reveals who we really are rather than who we imagine ourselves becoming.

It is, Gaiman insisted, a kind of sci-fi Count of Monte Cristo.

That should have been my warning, though. As it happens, I don’t like the terrestrial Count of Monte Cristo very much. When I gave it a shot five or six years ago, it seemed endless and contrived. So, if Dumas didn’t make it work for me, Bester certainly doesn’t.

There are a lot of intriguing inventions here, from the idea that humans are suddenly able to use their minds to move from place to place, to “jaunt,” that corporations have become the new feudal structures, and that there’s a vast interplanetary battle among the haves and the have-nots. In fact, I probably like many of the other ideas here, too, including the commercial use of telepaths, the notion of a substance that can power an army or explode with a carelessly directed thought, and the possibility of time travel, but eventually they come too quickly and too furiously.

This starts with a tight, careful plot – and I thought initially I’d see this as Gaiman prompted me to – but it unwinds in ways I can’t help but find careless. Bester not only breaks his narrative in two or three spots – usually when Gully either flees or gets returned to captivity – but he seems to reinvent his entire setting. At one point Gully undergoes an operation that makes him faster and stronger than other humans. I have to wonder, though, if such surgery is possible, why don’t the incredibly well-funded corporate titans outfit their personal armies the same way? (Eventually one does, but only after Gully gets dramatic utility out of having no real competition in the strength department.)

I could make the same complaint about jaunting. It works one way – the way it’s defined in the opening chapter – for about half the book, and then it starts to work somehow differently. Jaunters can go much farther than the original rules suggested, and they can do so more furtively than they could in the early chapters. Gaiman tells us not to overthink it, tells us to pay attention to the way Gully eventually realizes his mad quest for revenge has turned him into a kind of demon, but I find the one distracting and the other contrived.

I did see this one through the end, and I respect both its place in the genre’s history and its handful of striking inventions. As a novel that holds up, though, not so much.


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