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.
