Jumper

Jumper, by Steven Gould, is among my favorite SF books. It’s a simple story based on a simple premise: a teenager discovers that he has the power to teleport. The book is both a bildungsroman and a revenge story, as he uses his power to strike back at his enemies (thanks to the one outrageous coincidence permitted to every story, he has some nasty enemies). He reacts plausibly to his power, the characters around him react plausibly, the government gets involved. The book doesn’t hit any false notes, and it’s not too long.

Gould’s second book, Wildside, was also good, though not as good. It was also based on a single simple premise, in this case a doorway to another world, an Earth without humans.

His subsequent books were by-and-large completely forgettable, alas. He did write a sequel to Jumper, Reflex, which was OK. It lost a lot of the charm by introducing another fantastic element, an evil conspiracy which was not really spelled out and led to an ending to the book which I found quite implausible.

Jumper is now being turned into a movie, being released this weekend. It’s always fun but scary to see a favorite book turned into a movie. Unfortunately, based on the previews I’ve seen, this one is going to be a lot more scary than fun. In the movie Davy is not the only person who can teleport. There are fight scenes between teleporters. There seems some to be some kind of organization which works against teleporters. This might all be good fun, if it weren’t for the fact that none of this is in the book, and that it ruins the basic idea which made the book good. The book as written would be filmable; it has good characters and plenty of action and conflict both between and within characters. I guess it just wouldn’t be a spectacular special effects event movie, though.

Who knows? Maybe the movie will be good after all. And presumably Gould will get a small pile of money out of it, not to mention more book sales.