Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination: A Critical Companion

by D. Harlan Wilson

In this comprehensive study of The Stars My Destination, D. Harlan Wilson makes a case for the continued significance of Alfred Bester’s SF masterwork, exploring its distinctive style, influences, intertextuality, affect, and innovation as well as its extensive metafictional properties. In Stars, Bester established himself as a son of the pulp-SF and high-modernist writers that preceded him and a forefather to the New Wave and cyberpunk movements that followed his lead. Wilson’s study depicts Bester as an SF insider as much as an outlier, writing in the spirit of the genre but breaking with the fixation on hard science in favor of psychological interiority, literary experimentation, and adult themes. The book combines close-readings of the novel with broader concerns about contemporary media, technoculture, and the current state of SF itself. In Wilson’s view, SF is a moribund artform, and Stars foresaw the inevitable science fictionalization of our benighted world. With scholarly lucidity and precision, Wilson shows us that Stars pointed the way to what we have (un)become.

123 pages, Paperback

Published May 10, 2022

About the author

D. Harlan Wilson is an award-winning American novelist, literary critic, editor, playwright, and college professor. He is the author of over thirty book-length works of fiction and nonfiction, and hundreds of his stories, plays, essays, and reviews have been published across the world in more than ten languages. Wilson also serves as reviews editor for Extrapolation and editor-in-chief of Anti-Oedipus Press.

Reviews

[Darmok · Rating 2 out of 5]

Do not recommend.

Part of a series that's aimed at "undergraduate courses" and "fans of SFF," but too boring and esoteric to be useful to either.

Analzying Bester's influences, from James Joyce to Mary Shelley, Wilson seems to assume that readers are already familiar with them. If that were the case, why would we need to read this book?

And not to be too much of a prole, but Wilson's intellectualism is soooo annoying. He loves the The Stars My Destination, but hates nearly every other work in the genre's history, and most of modern culture at large, too. IMO, it also clashes with Stars closing, collective uplifting vision of human transcendence. I don't think Bester was writing solely for Wilson and his ilk.

I appreciated the biographical section on Bester, but even outside the underexplained connections to other novels, Wilson's analysis offers very little of interest, seesawing as it does between belabouring the surface level (i.g. presence of religious characters connotes a theme of religion) and making tenuous connections (Gully being pressed against a wall mirrors the Crucifixtion?).

[David Agranoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Instead of a review I did podcast interview(for Dickheads PKD podcast) with D Harland Wilson. Excellent look a piece of SF canon. Anyone interested in studying the genre and its history of it could benefit from reading it.

The Dickheads podcast with D. Harlan Wilson on this novel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mICV0...

https://soundcloud.com/dickheadspodca...