Jumper by Steven C. Gould

I had grabbed this from the public library in a moment of caprice. Seeing the title, I had thought, Wait, wasn’t there a film adaptation that I had decided was a rental on the basis of the trailer—and then never bothered renting? Turns out there had been. I’m still not going to rent it, stream it, or bootleg it.

Fortunately, the original novel is actually worth reading. Yes, Occasional Reader, I’m reading a YA novel and not heaping contempt on it for a change. There’s a reason for that. I actually enjoyed the novel. I think it would have made a good John Carpenter movie, though somewhere between Starman and Christine rather than The Thing or Prince of Darkness.

It helped that I could relate to the protagonist, David Rice, from the start. Like him, the public library was a safe place for me, too. I wasn’t being physically abused at home, merely emotionally neglected. The physical abuse I faced happened at school.

And, yes, I would have loved to be able to take a single step and be elsewhere. But I had first encountered fiction involving teleportation while reading Brian Lumley’s Necroscope and Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. Gould, to his credit, has his protagonist acknowledge Bester in his narration.

In addition, I found the challenges Davy faced once he made the decision to leave home and make a life for himself in New York City profoundly relatable:

I remember what that was like: trying to do things the right way, the way you were told to do them, only to be foiled at every turn for lacking a prerequisite nobody thought to tell you about. So I could certainly understand him taking nearly a million dollars from a big corporate bank. John Dillinger certainly would have approved. Of course, a million bucks went a lot farther back then, even in NYC, than it does today.

Some might argue that Millie, the love interest, is almost too perfect, as if she was written to be just the sort of girlfriend David needed. All I’ll say is that I had also experienced that sense of safety with a woman that David had experienced in the novel. Oddly enough, Madam Catastrophy had been a psychology major, too. And, yes, Occasional Reader, I married her twenty-two years ago.

I might not be a teleport, but I know when I’ve got a good thing going.

Others might argue that the death of David’s mother so soon after their reunion is a fridging, and that’s valid. However, I think Gould handles it better than many authors might. At no point is her murder at the hands of Islamic terrorists treated as anything but a senseless atrocity. Nor is it the spur for David to use his powers as a ‘jumper’, somebody who can teleport, to help others. He was already doing that in lower-stakes situations.

One thing I had noticed about Jumper is that while David Rice is economical with the truth—which is understandable given his position—and has no trouble justifying his burglary of a bank, his willingness to use violence generally stops well short of killing. Another is that David is explicitly told by a US State Department official that he knows because the official had been tasked with repatriating his mother’s remains for burial, is that terrorism is not part of Arab or Muslim culture. It feels like something too many Americans never learned, or had forgotten, after September 11, 2001 and the all-but-incessant propaganda used to manufacture consent for a Global War on Terrorism.

Jumper is full of little touches like these that seem perfectly sensible and humane to me, and might even have seemed progressive back in the early 1990s. It was apparently part of why the novel was one of the American Library Association’s top 100 most challenged books in the 1990s. Not to mention the mentions of Al-Anon, and the implication that David seeks therapy to deal with the abuse he faced at the hands of his alcoholic father after the events of the novel.

If Jumper came out today (with current cultural and technological references) I suspect certain people would call the book ‘woke’. And there does seem a fair amount of wish-fulfillment in the novel despite the fact that even before the plot gets rolling, David Rice has seen some shit. Regardless, had a librarian pointed this out back in 1992, I might have given it a shot then. I might even have put it next to Clive Barker’s Cabal and Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat as a teen survival read.

Just don’t bother watching the movie. It deviates from the novel fairly early, and the changes made do not improve upon the text.