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.

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.

According to Kevin Starr, London planned a historical novel about the American West and used some of this material in The Star Rover.

For his role in the Sontag and Evans gang which robbed the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1890s, Morrell spent fourteen years in California prisons (1894–1908), five of them in solitary confinement.

"[3] H. P. Lovecraft owned a copy of The Star Rover, and Edward Guimont has proposed that it was an influence on his and E. Hoffmann Price's 1933 story "Through the Gates of the Silver Key".