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=                           The_Star_Rover                           =
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                            Introduction
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'The Star Rover' is a novel by American writer Jack London published
in 1915 (published in the United Kingdom as 'The Jacket'). It is
science fiction, and involves both mysticism and reincarnation.


                            Plot summary
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A framing story is told in the first person by Darrell Standing, a
university professor serving life imprisonment in San Quentin State
Prison for murder. Prison officials try to break his spirit by means
of a torture device called "the jacket," a canvas jacket which can be
tightly laced so as to compress the whole body, inducing angina.
Standing discovers how to withstand the torture by entering a kind of
trance state, in which he walks among the stars and experiences
portions of past lives.

: I trod interstellar space, exalted by the knowledge that I was bound
on vast adventure, where, at the end, I would find all the cosmic
formulae and have made clear to me the ultimate secret of the
universe. In my hand I carried a long glass wand. It was borne in upon
me that with the tip of this wand I must touch each star in passing.
And I knew, in all absoluteness, that did I but miss one star I should
be precipitated into some unplummeted abyss of unthinkable and eternal
punishment and guilt.


                             Background
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The accounts of these past lives form the body of the work. They are a
series of powerfully written, but disconnected and unresolved,
vignettes set in different ages and cultures. According to Kevin
Starr, London planned a historical novel about the American West and
used some of this material in 'The Star Rover.'

The jacket was actually used at San Quentin at the time; Jack London's
descriptions of it were based on interviews with a former convict
named Ed Morrell, which London used as a name for a character in the
novel. For his role in the Sontag and Evans gang which robbed the
Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1890s, Morrell spent fourteen years
in California prisons (1894-1908), five of them in solitary
confinement. London championed his pardon. After his release, Morrell
was a frequent guest at London's Beauty Ranch.


                               Legacy
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A silent film based on 'The Star Rover' was released in 1920, starring
Courtenay Foote, a well-known stage and screen actor of the time, as
Dr. Hugh Standing.

The 2005 movie 'The Jacket' has a story credited to Marc Rocco and Tom
Bleecker. Jack London is not mentioned. However, the director has said
that the film is "loosely based on a true story that became a Jack
London story."

H. P. Lovecraft owned a copy of 'The Star Rover', and Edward Guimont
has proposed that it was an influence on his and E. Hoffmann Price's
1933 story "Through the Gates of the Silver Key".

Figures heavily in Andrew Mayne's 2025 novel "Mr. Whisper".

"The Star Rover" served as inspiration for Robert E. Howard's
character James Allison.


                          Further reading
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* 'A Pictorial Biography of Jack London', Russ Kingman, 1979;
"Published for Jack London Research Center by David Rejl, California:"
"Abrupt change in London's literary style"
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Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Rover