Paramount may acquire the rights to classic sci-fi novel The Stars My Destination

According to Deadline, Paramount Pictures is in talks to acquire the feature film rights to The Stars My Destination, a science fiction novel that originally appeared as a four-part serial in Galaxy magazine during the ’50s. Written by Alfred Bester, it’s set in the 25th century, a time when human beings have learned to teleport—or “jaunte,” in the parlance of the book—long distances just by thinking, a development that has uprooted the social and economic balance of the solar system.

In the midst of this conflict, an unskilled, unambitious man named Gulliver Foyle is stranded in outer space after the merchant ship he’s traveling on is attacked. Unable to jaunte through space, Foyle is finally able to send a distress signal to a passing spaceship, but it ignores him. Enraged, Foyle fixes the wreck, picks up some crazy facial tattoos, and dedicates himself to interplanetary vengeance.

The Stars My Destination has been influential among sci-fi authors; in his introduction to a 1999 edition of the book, for example, Neil Gaiman credited it with inspiring the cyberpunk genre, citing the presence of “multinational corporate intrigue; a dangerous, mysterious, hyperscientific MacGuffin,” and “an amoral hero.” Various people have taken stabs at adapting it for the screen over the past 20 years, including Richard Gere, Paul W.S. Anderson, and Bernd Eichinger, but it never took. Hopefully, Paramount will be needlessly splitting it into two or three movies before too long.