Starman Jones
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 First Edition cover of Starman Jones |
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| Author | Robert A. Heinlein |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Clifford Geary |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Scribner's |
| Released | 1953 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| ISBN | NA |
| Preceded by | The Rolling Stones |
| Followed by | The Star Beast |
Starman Jones is a 1953 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein about a farm boy with an eidetic memory who wants to go to the stars. It was first published by Scribner's as part of the Heinlein juveniles.
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
After his father dies and his mother remarries a man Max Jones detests, he runs away from the family farm in the Ozark Mountains. Hitchhiking towards the capital, he finds a friendly face in hobo Sam Anderson, who later proves to be a deserter from the Imperial Marines.
Most occupations are tightly controlled by guilds, many with hereditary memberships. One such is the Astrogators' Guild. Since his uncle had been a member and had had no children, Max hopes that before he died, his uncle had named him his heir. He goes to Earthport to find out, hitching a ride with a friendly trucker. (The trucker who gives rides to down-and-out hitchhikers is a recurring element in Heinlein's books.) Once there, he is disappointed to find that he had not been nominated, but is given a refund of the large deposit his uncle had made to secure his astrogation books.
By chance, he runs into Sam, who had stolen the books and tried to turn them in first! Using Max's money, the older man is able to illegally get them jobs aboard a starship. Sam becomes the master-at-arms, while Max signs on as a steward's mate third class (drawing on his hasty memorization of a borrowed book).
By accident, Max is assigned work with which he is familiar: looking after animals on the bottom deck, including feeding the passengers' pets. Eldreth Coburn, who is Max's age and the owner of an alien, semi-intelligent 'spider puppy' he has befriended, learns that he can play 3-D chess and challenges him to a game (a champion player, she diplomatically lets him win).
When the ship's officers discover that his uncle had taught Max astrogation, he is promoted to the shorthanded control room, where under the tutelage of Chief Astrogator Hendrix and the warmer but equally tough training of Chief Computerman Kelly, he becomes a probationary apprentice astrogator. In a meeting with Hendrix, Max sheepishly admits to faking his record to get into space and is told off: "It's worse than wrong, it's undignified!" But, to his surprise, he is neither exposed nor punished. Hendrix needs Max's talent, and any day of reckoning must wait until the ship returns to Earth.
Before then, Hendrix dies, leaving a big hole in the astrogation department. The aging captain tries to take his place, plotting the course for the next interstellar transition. When Max detects an error in his real-time calculations, neither he nor Assistant Astrogator Simes believe him, and the ship winds up lost in uncharted space, with no known stars in sight.
They locate a nearby habitable world and the passengers turn into colonists. Meanwhile, the crew continues to try to figure out where they are and if they can get back. Unfortunately, it turns out the planet be already inhabited by intelligent centaurs, who capture Max and Ellie. Fortunately, Ellie's pet is able to guide Sam and a rescue party to them. They escape, but Sam is killed covering their retreat.
Vastly outnumbered, the humans are forced to leave, their only recourse to attempt a perilous return to known space by reversing the erroneous transition. Since Simes (who had been killed by Sam in self-defense when he tried to illegally assume command after the captain's death) had hidden or destroyed all the astrogation tables, they have to rely on Max's photographic memory, together with his skill, to get back safely. As the last remaining astrogator, however inexperienced, he is told he must take over as captain. He succeeds in piloting the ship; they return to known space.
The book ends where it begins, with Max reclining on an Arkansas hillside. Though heavily fined, the guild lets him remain an astrogator in view of his heroics, though he cannot remain on the ship he once temporarily commanded. He also loses any chance to win Elspeth; she returns home to be married to her boyfriend. Max accepts this with mixed feelings.
[edit] Literary significance & criticism
This book is notable among the Heinlein juveniles in being the first to be set outside the solar system, but more significantly for its attempt to fold in, in a subtle way, the political commentary and social speculation that had suffused his earlier pulp fiction. Labor unions, which had been treated negatively in "The Roads Must Roll", are here subjected to even more severe and categorical criticism, where a significant portion of the plot revolves around Max's attempts to enter the closed guild system of the spacelines' officers and crew. This is constantly contrasted against the virtuous and free life of the mythologized yeoman farmer: Max starts out as a farm boy, intends to jump ship along with Sam to find freedom as a farmer on a freshly colonized planet, and near the end of the book is part of an abortive attempt to settle a previously undiscovered planet.
As in much of the popular fiction that Heinlein would have been familiar with in his youth (e.g., Tarzan and The Virginian), the theme is that the wilderness acts as a magnifying glass to amplify the inherent differences between the best and the worst of the human race. Max triumphs not just because of his noble character but also because of his freak memory. The same theme is seen to a lesser extent in the other characters, some of whom reveal their flaws (Simes, the captain), and some of whom rise to the occasion (Sam, minor characters such as the rich Daiglers, and Ellie, who turns out to be highly intelligent).
The book has a strong feeling of verisimilitude because so much of it is based on Heinlein's real-life experiences. Heinlein, who intended as a young man to become an astronomer, describes Max as a boy who can tell time by looking at the position of the stars in the sky, and who becomes an astrogator. Heinlein had also been a naval officer.
Another outstanding quality of the book is its superior architecture. Heinlein's novels commonly are episodic, or have weak or rushed endings. Starman Jones has a smooth and logical progression as we watch Max grow from a hill-billy farmer through many stages to a mature young man.
The technology of the story reflects the era in which it was written. The book depicts a civilization that travels between star systems with the aid of electronic computers, but they have to be "programmed" on the spot, and elementary computing operations, such as calculating trigonometric functions and logarithms and converting between decimal and binary numbers, must be done by looking up values in books of tables. The binary numbers are input using switches, with the results showing as binary values using lights. Heinlein, writing in the days when computers were big, clunky, and rare, did not fully explore their potential in this story as he did in later stories.
The "transitions" that transport a ship from one star system to another are effected by accelerating the ship until it reaches precisely the right location and reappears at a "congruent" location that may be hundreds of light years away in ordinary space. The idea of "congruence", nicely explained by Max using a scarf, is sound mathematics (though it is not known physics).
[edit] Heinlein's Reply to Gulliver's Travels
The later part, taking place on the planet of the "centaurs"—intelligent, horselike carnivores who dominate all other fauna on the planet including deformed human-like creatures—is evidently intended as Heinlein's commentary on and antithesis to the fourth part of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
In the original, Gulliver is stranded in a country dominated by civilised horses, the Houyhnhnms, finds them much superior to humans, and identifies European humans with the degenerate "Yahoos" which the Houyhnhnms in his view justifiably dominate. The experience leaves him permanently misanthopic, even on his return to England feeling a yearning for the civilised Houyhnhnms and having nothing but contempt and loathing for the uncouth "yahoos" around him (including himself).
Heinlein, to the contrary, has little good to say of the cruel "centaurs", who not only butcher and eat their "yahoos" (and would like to add the Earth variety to their menu) but also practice systematic euthanasia towards old and weak members of their own species. While the planet's local humans are just as degenerate and subservient as Swift's yahoos, which they strongly resemble, Max and his fellow Earth humans are brave and resourceful, at their best in fighting the centaurs.
Clearly, Swift's idea of having another species domesticate mankind was anathema to Heinlein (who did not hesitate to point out weaknesses of both human and alien characters in his works), and this part of the book expresses his vociferous rebuttal.
[edit] External links
- Starman Jones publication history at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
