Starman Jones

Typical Heinlein juvenile - but I love them!

Another typical (great!) Heinlein YA novel about a farm boy who makes good. The main characters in this book aren't angels. They break the law - bad ones mostly - for reasons they think are sufficient (I always thought so) & reap the consequences afterward, but still come out ahead.

Max is a hillbilly & has an impossible situation at home. He runs away, gets fake ID with the help of a rough, but kind stranger. He gets a job on a space ship cleaning pet cages. Menial, but honest work that he knows & does to the best of his ability. Then he gets a break & the adventure takes off.

The moral message running through this book; do the right thing & do it as best you can. Think for yourself. Great book for middle school through adult.

The seventh book in the loosely related Heinlein Juveniles series, Starman Jones is probably the most adult of this young adult series up until now. The titular Jones comes from a home of abuse where he escapes to live as a kind of hobo before he gets on a spaceship with fake documents.

For the first time in the series we have interplanetary travel, or even intergalactic travel, we don't really know as the ship gets lost through a kind of wormholey travel system, they might even have ended up in a parallel universe, theoretically speaking. 

Or hero is a hero because he has eidetic memory, after the ship gets lost and the astrogation tables are also lost, Jones is the only one who can navigate having memorized all of the numerical tables. This is a very 1950s concept of space travel and information input, there are mathematic tables of astrogation numbers that have to be converted into binary and inserted into the ship's computer through  a binary switch... yeah.  I'm sure there's an app for that. That being said it's a fun novel, the characters of Jones, Sam and Ellie are great, with an actually interesting role for a young woman in a Heinlein novel! Two juveniles in a row with interesting women in them... you're getting better Heinlein (but don't worry, we would get much worse later in life). The worlds explored, the relationship dynamics and vivid character make this a great read, even with the woefully outdated tech. Probably one of the funnest novels in the series up until now and a definite recommend.

This Heinlein guy was pretty good at telling a story.

Max Jones is a young farmer, working hard to support his unlovable stepmother after his father's death, but he dreams of the life his Uncle Chet lived, as a member of the Astrogators' Guild. Chet had promised him that he'd nominate him for membership, but died while Max was still too young to join, and then Max's father, before he died also, made him promise to take care of his stepmother.

But when his stepmother remarries and she and her new husband sell the farm out from under him, he runs away, taking his uncle's astrogation books with him. The books get stolen from him by a deceitfully helpful conman, and then he discovers that his uncle had died before nominating him for the guild, and all his dreams seem crushed forever. But then he meets that charming conman again, who decides that they can help each other get what they both really want—a berth on a starship. For Max, it's a berth as a steward's mate, and he's tending farm animals again, but he's on a starship, and he's a plucky, resourceful, just plain likable young Heinlein hero, who makes you buy into every improbable plot twist along the way to his dream.

Once again, great fun.

Update, May 2017: Rereading this decades after originally reading this is interesting. It's still a fun story, with the plucky, young Heinlein hero who makes you buy into all the improbable plot twists. It is, of course, very dated in a number of ways. The improbability of star travel depending on a set of printed books of numbers and equations has often been commented on. The social dynamics of Heinlein's world has been the subject of lots of commentary and discussion, most particularly the often quite rigid gender roles, especially in the "juveniles," i.e., Heinlein's young adult novels. It's worth noting that he often (but far from always) subverts those roles somewhat. For instance, in this book, Ellie rather testily points out to Max that women are dealing with the reality of the rules they live with. Another woman, an appallingly predatory creature, sheds that behavior when the ship hits a real crisis and there are more important things to do than play social games.

And yet Heinlein never really questions those basic social roles, even as later in his career his expectations of what jobs women can hold expands considerably.

No, what really struck me this time is Heinlein's unquestioning assumption that starships and hyperspeed trains will exist side by side with dirt farmers relying on mule traction, cooking over an open fire is a mundane necessity for poorer farmers, and the hobos who would have been regularly encountered during the days of Heinlein's early adulthood.

It's a world largely unchanged, not from the 1950s, but to a great extent from the 1930s.

However, another thing that caught my attention this time is the way characters, major or minor, may be described in terms revealing that they are ethnic or racial minorities, with the fact having zero plot significance. Dark skin or an epicanthic fold are treated merely as mundane items of physical description, part of the normal range of humanity, just like brown hair or green eyes. There's a loud, tiny segment of contemporary sf readership that claims to revere Heinlein and yet thinks this is controversial when today's writers do it.

It's still great fun to read--at least for someone who first read it in the early 1960s. No guarantees for Gen Y or millennials, who grew up in an entirely different world than I did! Because pretty much everything I just mentioned as anachronisms were still real things that people knew about when I was a kid, even though less common than when Heinlein was.

For my fellow Boomers, you'll wince at some of the datedness, but for my mileage, it hasn't had a serious visit from the Suck Fairy.

Really enjoyed this one. Since I became an adult, most Heinlein seems to suffer from one or more of overambitious world saving or being a medium for touting his militaristic libertarian ideology. Starman Jones is much more modest in its scope - choosing to focus on the adventures of a single genius child breaking into the world of space travel and exploration. I don’t object to the union politics as it’s more background to the story and less of an preachy diatribe. And the characters don’t dwell on what’s wrong with the system but rather on how to work within it. Overall fun, modest scifi exploring the galaxy. Also, it’s shocking how long ago this was written and how natural most of it still feels. The only thing that feels hilariously dated to me is the idea of coding in binary. I would think that it would have been possible for Heinlein to have discovered the concept of programming languages had he researched early computer programming sufficiently, but that’s a relatively minor nitpick. Overall loved the story.

A solid and enjoyable Heinlein entry. The edition I read had a foreward that talks about how this is one of Heinlein's efforts to write a science fiction Horatio Alger story. I don't think I would have seen it myself, but it's clearly there. The main character ends up having some delightfully good luck to match his wits and skill. As Heinlein points out, it's actually modeled after a real story, but that doesn't mean it's real believable ;) Just focus on the entertainment value; you won't get your plausibility fix here.

The last third of the story takes a couple of turns I didn't love, but it's just a personal preference and I'm not the writer. The story is good and worth a read, especially if you are partial to Heinlein and aren't looking for something too heavy.

The book itself is a piece of history; a glimpse into the mindset of a bygone age which was flexing its creative muscles through the exercise of looking forward into the starship era. The novel is as much a time machine, or time capsule, as any film about 1940 made in 1940 (rather than a film set in that era made by people from a different world. Us).

I first read Starman Jones in the early 1970s. It was a good read then, and it's a good read now. Robert Heinlein wrote it in 1953 for a largely YA readership, but the narrative is rich enough to be rewarding to adult readers at the same time as not being too heavy for younger chilluns. A well-written story often stands the test of time, even if not quite in the way the author might have imagined...

Heinlein might possibly have written the ultimate Steampunk without ever knowing it.

Think about this: in a world where electro-mechanical “computers” were the cutting edge of technology, he had to figure a way to navigate a starship.

Not to power the ship, mind you, because there was nothing to be done, way back when, other than call the engines “the so-and-so drive,” and then get on with the story. Faster than light travel is still a mystery 60 years later; it'll probably remain a mystery in another 60 years. But –

How to navigate a starship from planet to planet via a series of natural space-warps caused by the gravity fields of nearby stars … and how to do this without recourse to computers as we understand them. Now, that's the question. And a very pretty pickle it is. Arthur C. Clark managed to get a spacecraft home from the Saturn (or was it Jupiter??) system with abacus calculation, but piloting a ship between stars, at optic velocity is a whole 'nother beast.

Ten years after Heinlein devised a system of calculus performed by a team of mathematicians using telescopic sightings of doppler-shifted stars, from the astrodome of a ship moving almost at the speed of light, the best computer in the world was the size of a house and had to be “programmed” by a team of people who literally set innumerable dipswitches before the “Go!” button was pushed. The “computer” made the calculation all of a piece, in an instant; the answer to the calculation flashed up in binary (light on, light off) which was translated back into numbers.

So Heinlein devised a system of calculus using the living brains of a team of humans who are fed data by technicians manning telescopes and stereo cameras. It's actually brilliant. The fact it's utterly redundant now, in the age of computers, is irrelevant. By 1965, just 12 years after Heinlein nutted out a computerless solution, Star Trek had already left behind the whole problem and driven on. Today, many phones have the processor power to handle the math for these calculations; but that's not the point.
The point is, Heinlein devised a way to navigate a starship in 1953 … and it would probably have worked just fine.

Here's how Wikipedia defines Steampunk:

“Steampunk is a subgenre of science fiction or science fantasy that incorporates technology and aesthetic designs inspired by 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery.”

The tech, such as it is, in Starman Jones was almost certainly inspired by the electro-mechanical genius behind battleship gun sighting “computers” in the 1940s. It's very, very close to the spirit of Steampunk, though the starship Asgard surely isn't powered by steam!

As for the story itself: young boy runs away from home to see if he can follow his uncle into the Astrogators Guild, winds up having to join the service under false pretenses and, after disaster strikes the ship, quite literally saves the day due to his eidetic memory. It's a good, tight plot and once I'd have said it was ideally suited to younger readers and especially boys around ten … so long as today's lads can set aside their pooh-poohing of computerless astrogation, when they know for a fact how the Enterprise is navigated. Or the Nostromo. Can ten-year-olds do that? Well … probably not.

At Goodreads you'll see many readers/reviewers giving the novel three stars; not for being a poor book, but for using outdated tech. This is actually a weak reason to mark down a book so old, it's a piece of history itself. A better reason would be to point up the seeming sexism with which the female characters are written … but then you must remind yourself that in a 1953 YA book aimed at boys, it's a wonder there were any female characters at all, much less a properly developed one who's a social rebel and turns out to have (!) a brain --

And one point made me, in 2016, curiously uncomfortable: the utter revulsion with which the central characters view alien species. Today, post-Avatar and so on, we relish the difference between species. The Ood leap to mind: so ugly and so heart-wrenchingly beautiful, at one time. It was quite astonishing to read of characters being revolted by alien forms, as recently as 1954; but … it's sixty years. People change; the zeitgeist changes; it should; it must.

So who'll get the most from Starman Jones today? Kids, for whom it was written? Unlikely. Try fans of Steampunk who're fascinated by the meld of outdated, outmoded tech and the age of starships.

For myself, I enjoyed it a lot, at the same time remembering to make the allowances one must, and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it; unless you think your kid will line the budgie cage with it in disgust when he reaches the Steampunk navigation part. Or perhaps you worry he'll get hopelessly confused and wonder if it's somehow impossible to use computers on starships. But just a second, Mister Spock said …!

Starman Jones was copyrighted in 1953 by Robert A. Heinlein and published that same year by Charles Scribner’s Sons of New York. The sixth of the Heinlein Juveniles, it is the last one to be fully illustrated by Clifford Geary.

It is also the first of his juveniles to postulate interstellar travel. All of the earlier books confined travel within the solar system. The protagonist, Maximilian Jones, or Max as he is known, comes from unspecified hill country, possibly the Ozarks, where he is living with his widowed stepmother. When she remarries, Max leaves and through a series of misadventures, during which he meets and eventually teams up with a hobo named Sam, Max signs on as an ordinary crewman aboard the starship Asgard. Because he possesses a unique ability and through a series of unlikely events that only Heinlein could make believable, Max lands a job as a ship’s officer serving on the bridge. His adventures aboard the Asgard constitute the main body of the story and I’ll allow the reader to enjoy them.

As a novel, Starman Jones works on several levels. First it can be read as a simple adventure story and it works quite well as just that. The book can also be read as a coming of age story: Max starts out a boy and finishes as a man. And it can be read for the deeper human and sometimes political themes underlying the story. For example, the Asgard encounters an alien civilization organized along totalitarian lines. The ruthless brutality and exploitative character of the alien system is, I believe, an allegory for the communist and fascist societies of the 20th century during which Heinlein was writing.

This is one of the of the juveniles that fully develops a strong female character. Eldreth Coburn is the well to do daughter of a planetary governor and a passenger aboard the Asgard. During the course of the voyage, Max and Ellie become good friends and there is a hint of romance, at least on her part. A very intelligent and strong willed young woman, she does a skillful job of concealing those traits in the male dominated society set forth in the story. For example, she allows Max to teach her how to play chess. He wins all of their matches until late in the book when he discovers that she is a master chess player and could take him anytime and every time if she chose to do so. When Max and Ellie are captured by hostile natives on a planet misnamed Charity, Ellie proves both courageous and resourceful. Nearly all of Heinlein’s later juveniles as well as his adult books have such strong and likeable female characters. Prescient as he was about future technological innovation, he also foresaw women taking a more equal role in future society.

Starman Jones is also the last book to be fully illustrated. As in the previous books, Clifford Geary’s cover art and white on black interior drawings appear deceptively simple. However, the illustrations have a hidden complexity that conveys very subtly the sense that we are visiting a world very different than our own. Geary was a great talent and a fine artist, but I know of only one other book, a children’s book, that he illustrated. About this time, young adult fiction followed the already established pattern of adult fiction: that of not being illustrated. No doubt the intellectual rationale was that by not having suggestive pictures the narrative would better stimulate young imaginations. But I also have no doubt that there was an economic motive: at that time, illustrations significantly increased the cost of producing books. Hence, there were no more pictures. This is a trend I would like to see reversed and I am doing just that with my own stories.

This is a great book and while longer than Heinlein’s previous juveniles, it is a page turner and a fast read. The action flows naturally and carries the reader along with it. Although the science is farther afield than that of his earlier books, the space-time anomalies that allow for interstellar travel are analogous to the wormholes that are currently postulated; and those are based on conjectures put forth by Albert Einstein. Written with scientific rigor as well as universal human themes such as love, envy, jealousy and self-sacrifice, this book is all Heinlein all the time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FGyOw...