Steven Gould, Jumper: Griffin's Story [Library of Babel]

Steven Gould's 1992 YA novel Jumper is one of my favorites in the category, a story about an abused teen who discovers that he has the ability to teleport, and how he uses that power to make a better life for himself. It's very much in the tradition of the famous Heinlein juveniles, though with much more realistic characterization and darker subject matter.

It took until 2005 for a sequel, Reflex to appear, so I was very surprised to walk into Borders a week or so ago and see Jumper: Griffin's Story prominently displayed. Even more puzzling was the cover note: "Based on the film Jumper, soon to be a major motion picture."

(As an aside, is "major motion picture" a term of art with a specific meaning? The way it's used here suggests a difference between a mere "film" and a "major motion picture," but I'm not sure whether that's intentional.)

A little Googling does, indeed, turn up signs of a forthcoming Jumper movie, both on IMDB and Wikipedia. On the good side, it's a movie treatment of a book I enjoyed very much. On the bad side, they cast Hayden Christensen as the lead. Actually, he replaced some other actor, leaving you to wonder just how bad their first choice could possibly have been...

The cast lists also put the book in better context, and make it make more sense.

The jacket copy explains that this is the story of a kid named Griffin who has the ability to teleport, and whose parents are killed by sinister men stalking him when he's nine. I was initially worried that this was a sequel to Reflex, and Gould had killed off his original characters, which would've been really annoying. The movie pages make it clear, though, that the film is a reworked version of the original story about Davey Rice, and that Griffin, the lead from this book, is another character. This book, is, as the title very clearly puts it, Griffin's story. Or, rather, Griffin's backstory, from the perspective of the movie.

Given that the movie doesn't exist yet, though, the really important question is: how does the book stand on its own? The answer is "pretty well." It reads a little bit like Jumper Redux, in that it's the origin story of a teleporting teenager, and some of the events are rather similar to things that happen in the original Jumper. There are enough differences, though, particularly in the tone, for it to remain clearly separate from the other books.

As with Gould's other books, this is solidly in the subgenre that I think of as "competence fiction." Griffin is in an impossible situation, but he's smart and highly competent, and manages to make a better situation for himself by being smart and logical and very good at what he does.

It should be noted that, contrary to the impression created by the ecstatic cover image, this is a very dark book-- the plot puts Griffin through some pretty unpleasant stuff, and while it doesn't end badly, it's not exactly a happy and uplifting ending, either. It's somewhere between Jumper and Reflex in terms of the overall contents-- the unpleasant stuff isn't as gruesome as in Reflex, but the ending isn't as upbeat as the original.

As a matter of marketing and publicity, it's an interesting move. I don't know that I've seen this done before-- releasing a backstory novel for a movie that isn't out yet. It certainly did pique my interest about the movie (though Hayden Christensen dampens that a little). I hope it works out-- I've enjoyed Gould's novels a great deal, and I think he deserves a bit more attention than he's gotten.