Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination: A Critical Companion (Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon)

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 th e 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.