Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination

The post-apocalyptic society of our future world that Alfred Bester creates in The Stars My Destination is captivatingly violent and complex. The concept of teleportation is popular in our world and is a common answer to the question: "If you had one superpower what would it be?". The ability to disappear and materialize in another location in a matter of seconds seems nearly impossible, yet we are so fascinated by it that popular culture is full of variations of the concept. Multiple examples can be pulled from the Harry Potter series alone as wizards and witches can teleport using a spell to apparate, a fire place with floo powder, or a portkey.

What I have yet to see in popular culture until this point is a world that is entirely built on teleportation. The Stars My Destination illustrates an alternate reality of our world where humans began to learn how to teleport - or jaunte. Bester immediately creates interest in jaunting by opening the story with an explanation of its origins and describing the progressive chaos that the world was subjected to as a result of this phenomenon. Jaunting is an incredibly integral part of the story and affects the lives of all who inhabit the society of The Stars My Destination.

In the beginning, Jaunting was limited to only a small portion of the population. Like any new skill, the government will try to capitalize on it and make it purchasable. As a result, schools were created to properly teach people to harness the power of jaunting in relatively safe ways (the original way to activate the power was by having a near death experience). As jaunting spread across the galaxy, it became a competition for who could jaunte the farthest. Resumes had a whole section dedicated to your jaunting status and how many miles you could travel in one jaunte. These scores were used to determine one's employability and overall usefulness in society. Using a singular factor to determine one's worthiness has never been a good idea (race, religion, gender, etc.) and ultimately results in social class conflicts.

In a relatively short amount of time, the entire world's social structure is dismantled and turned into chaos. Criminals abuse jaunting to commit crimes, the poor take over government land, and men use the newfound power to control women. The economy of the galaxy is destroyed too as the different planets go to war over the jaunting crisis. Biological warfare spreads across the land as people infect foreign countries with invasive species and diseases. The entire balance of the universe is thrown off by society's obsession with teleportation.

Bester's skill at creating believable, imagined worlds immediately draws you into the narrative. Building on the lore of teleportation, Bester paints a realistic image of what a post-apocalyptic world would look like if billions of people had the power to manipulate time/space by using real world problems that have repeated throughout history (such as the competition between the sexes for power and autonomy). I never imagined teleportation would cause such a chaotic future before and now I will forever look at the power from a different perspective.