A nice mental jaunt: BrainFi Gets in Your Head

BrainFi Gets in Your Head

Here's something I wish I understood: Before the pandemic, I was lightly interested in science-fiction. I grew up on superhero comic books, which are like science-fiction. So I was interested in science-fiction as a genre of literature related to the content of comic books. 

But I wasn't particularly interested in sci-fi itself. I read a lot of Robert Heinlein in high school, for reasons maybe I will go into another time. I read a lot of fantasy in middle school. But other than Kurt Vonnegut, I didn't much care about sci-fi.

But something changed in the pandemic, and I can't quite retrace my steps now. 

I got interested in aliens. I got interested in psychic phenomena. I wanted to read the people who had done the best job speculating about these things in a way that I hadn't cared to before. If I really reach, I can find inklings of this interest beginning. I listened to a lot of episodes of Last Podcast on the Left before 2020, for example. I could kind of describe to you theories about how what it meant for an extraterrestrial to appear "real" got a bit murky.

But something really kicked in after 2020. It became a fixation.

Even still, until I buckled down and got curious about BrainFi, I had not encountered the name Alfred Bester. Which is too bad! I had for sure heard the title of this book, The Stars My Destination, because it is such a romantic title. But I didn't have any curiosity about it. 

What's really unfortunate about my failure to discover it is that Bester's book is so close to my teenage interests in superheros. This is a universe where people have powers. Almost everyone can teleport themselves around the world. Some people are a little bit psychic. A very few people are fully telepathic. 

But what I love about it now is that it points to a future where the next wave of human potential will arrive not from something we build, but through a latent potential we fulfill. 

• The novel imagines a frontier we've not seriously contemplated: our access to consciousness. 

Who knows if our brains have anything like the power that Bester imagines here, but I like to think that there's more to unlock, if only someone could figure out the right way to try.

Postscript 1: The book isn't just a nice concept, but it has a great central character in Gulliver Foyle, that unutterable prick. The book is a romp. 

Postscript 2: I'm not done with listening to the audiobook yet. I'll update this when I am, though I expect what I will want to say is something pretty much along these lines. 

—Brady Dale
October 18, 2026