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.

I'm not done with the book yet, but I'm blown away by a BrainFi power move that Bester makes in the story. In a book deeply concerned with the experience of being alive — which resides in the brain — the protagonist gets confronted with a unique problem: How can he get revenge on a man whose body is alive but whose central nervous system has been switched entirely off? 

• 🤯

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