The Stars My Destination is the science fiction story of revenge-driven escaped prisoner Gully Foyle, an analogue to Alexander Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo. Foyle remakes himself to seek revenge on a former employer, a powerful corporation which ignored him after the wreck of his cargo ship. The plot also deals with how jaunting, the ability to teleport matter through space, has destabilized human society throughout the galaxy and on Earth, now called Terra.
Tennyson's Poems as a whole often deal with the ideas of adventure, myth, and mysticism. From relating the story of the Lotos-Eaters-who come upon an island filled with a tempting food that creates a soul-killing lethargy-to a reimagining of the hero Odysseus as an old man setting out on one final courageous journey into the unknown, Tennyson's poems explore the themes of heroism, despair, and the necessity of human action rather than idleness and wasted potential.
The Land is a children's novel that follows the life of Paul-Edward Logan, the son of a white man and a black woman, as he grows from a child to a young man. Paul must endure the harsh realities for a black boy living in the aftermath of the Civil War, but finds a close friend in his neighbor Mitchell. Together the two grow up to work as lumberjacks and eventually are given to opportunity to own their own piece of land, but must overcome many obstacles in order to keep it.