Idea Ripper // ArchiveCards: 1555 [Live] | Updated: 2026-10-14
Card #c778IR // #c778Synthesis

We say: Cogito ergo jaunteo. I think, therefore I jaunte.

— In our words · Source: The Stars My Destination (Alfred Bester)

[Use when]

You need a one-line operating principle for a world where willpower is literally power; or a slogan that fuses a philosophy reference with a speculative mechanism so the reader grasps both at once.

[Why it matters]

Bester's jaunting is teleportation stripped of technology and reduced to pure will: to think is to move. This reframes the entire novel's physics as a property of mind rather than machinery, which is why no institution can control it and no one can contain it. Every other mechanism in the book (Pyr E, space-jaunting) is a variation on this thesis that thought is the only real force.

More from The Stars My Destination

#c776HE WAS ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY DAYS DYING and not yet dead.You need an opening line that establishes a protagonist by endurance rather than virtue; or a character arc… #c777So, in five seconds, he was born, he lived, and he died.You want a single sentence that marks a character's irreversible transformation; or you need to show a… #c779There were land riots as the jaunting poor deserted slums to squat in plains and forests, raiding the livestock and wildlife.You need to depict the second-order consequences of a new capability: how one breakthrough in movement,…