Saturday, October 20, 2012

The Stars My Destination


The Stars My Destination has long been one of my favorite all-time novels. It's the basic plot of Counte of Monte Cristo set in a future world, but other than that it's oh-so-unique--especially the clipped, frenetic writing style...I'm not sure anyone has ever even approximated it. Bester wrote this, The Demolished Man (also great), and a bunch of short stories in the 50s, and then he found himself adrift in the drug-addled sixties and wrote some weird stuff that wasn't nearly as good. But this novel is as golden as golden-age gets!

The graphic version of the novel (pictured) is out of print and very hard to find. Howard Chaykin's art is a great complement to the classic text. This is one of my prize possessions...I re-read it every year or so, and am producing my own homage to Bester and Chaykin's "kaleidoscopic" style in the novel I'm writing right now, which is called Kaleidocide and is a sequel to Silhouette.

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