Back to The Globe
Featured Thriller
The Jacket (the Star-Rover)
The Star Rover is a novel by American writer Jack London published in 1915 (published in the United Kingdom as The Jacket).
Your reading world on The Globe
Discover your next book. Keep the ones that matter.
Join The Globe for a free reader profile and discover books, writers and stories in one place.
About the book
About The Jacket (the Star-Rover)
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. 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. Odin's Library Classics is dedicated to bringing the world the best of humankind's literature from throughout the ages. Carefully selected, each work is unabridged from classic works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or drama.
Reader conversation
Discuss this book
Are you the author or publisher?
Claim this page to verify the book information, add an author profile, update purchase links or request removal.