Book Review: The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

The other night I made the mistake of watching 2012. It was a dreadful movie*, of course, and although it's hard to pick the one thing that made it most unbearable, I think it was this: if I squinted hard enough at the screen, I could actually see the gears that made the plot go 'round.

When the answer to the question "Why did X just happen?" is "because the plot told it to," then you know you have a bad story on your hands. And for 2012, "because the plot said so" was the answer to every question. Every action of every character, every lurch of the plot, required a suspension of disbelief.

Generally speaking, you should not ask your viewers (or readers, since I'm trying to segue into a book review), to suspend their disbelief more than once or twice. In poetry they call it a conceit, but you get one, and you make it count by exploring it to its fullest. (Examples of conceits: poems written from the point of view of inanimate objects or animals. Or complex extended metaphors like John Donne's compass.)

In fantasy, this conceit is probably magic of some kind. In science fiction, the conceit is usually something like faster-than-light space travel or artificial intelligence or gobs of sentient species that we can actually communicate (and procreate) with (I'm looking at you, James Tiberius Kirk). And really, these three things are so commonplace in science fiction that unless you're writing the very hardest stuff, the kind that astrophysicists can read without screaming, then you can sometimes do all three without losing your reader. But if you're writing that kind of book (and there's nothing wrong with that kind of book, I love that kind of book) then you're probably not thinking too hard about the effect that all these conceits have on the world you're creating, other than to radically expand the dating pool. You just don't have the space.

But ideally--and I think this is observably true in most really good science fiction--you pick one crazy idea and you run with it. You chase it down every dark alley, you watch it play out over decades, you dissect it and put it under the microscope. If you can do this well--if you can really extrapolate the effects of, say, faster-than-light travel on society, in a way that feels honest and logical, then even the most scientifically-minded reader will probably forgive your liberties with physics. To my non-scientific mind, accurately recording the effects is far more important than manufacturing some pseudo-scientific explanation of the cause. Whatever it is, think it through.

And that is a long explanation of the best thing about Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. (In fact I think that was the only reason I kept reading this book, because the characters were uniformly unpleasant.) Alfred Bester thinks it through.

The conceit is teleportation, which in the world of his book is called jaunting. The "science" is foggy, but he makes up for that by being rigorous in the way he carries it out. There are rules: it is not possible to jaunte more than 5000 miles in one go (or is it...?). You cannot jaunte someplace you have never seen before (seen in person: a glimpse through a window might do, but a photograph will not). Nearly everyone can jaunte, although it must be taught, and it requires some concentration.

Simple enough, but what's fascinating is the way he follows it to all its logical conclusions. What would happen to the poor slobs who just can't jaunte? What would teleportation do to the economy? How would it affect class, race, and gender relations? The crime rate would skyrocket, obviously--how would society deal with that? How do you imprison people who can teleport? He comes up with some really interesting answers to these questions. (The description of the jaunte-proof prison is particularly chilling.) The story is not about teleportation, but it takes place in a world where teleportation is possible, so its existence underwrites virtually every action--exactly the way cars and airplanes underwrite most facets of our lives. From the perspective of a writing geek, it's fascinating.

Which is good, because as I mentioned above, the characters aren't that gripping. It's a revenge story, centered around an anti-hero--murderer, thief, rapist, the works. He eventually grows a conscience, a development that I didn't find convincing or redeeming. Also, the story's multiple threads get tied up in a "one big explanation" chapter, wherein everyone conveniently finds themselves in the same room and All Is Revealed. I hate that. Oh yeah, and the chapter in which the hero undergoes a "mind expansion" of sorts involved some seriously trippy typesetting that got old fast.

So: read it for the beautiful title. Read it as a great example of thinking things through. Probably don't read it for the characters.

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*Actually, I'm surprised that it scored as high as it did on Rotten Tomatoes.