Starman Jones

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Image:Starmanjones.jpgStarman 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.

Contents

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Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

After his father dies and his stepmother remarries, Max Jones runs away from the family farm. Following the ring road to a hobo camp, he finds a friendly face in Sam Anderson, a former Imperial Marine. Most occupations are controlled by guilds, and many are only open to hereditary membership. One of these is the Astrogator's Guild, and his uncle had been a member. Max hopes that before he died, his uncle had nominated him for hereditary membership, since his uncle had no children. He makes his way to Earthport in the hopes of becoming a starship astrogator, hitching a ride with a friendly trucker. Once there he is disappointed to find that his uncle never nominated him, but that his uncle's astrogation books could be returned to the guild for a refund of the large deposit his uncle had made to obtain them. (The friendly trucker who gives rides to down-and-out hitchhikers is a recurring theme in Heinlein's books.)

With the money from his books, Max and Sam (who had stolen the books and tried to turn them in first!) get together and scheme to join the crew of a starship. Sam becomes a master-at-arms, and Max becomes a steward's mate third class (drawing on his hasty memorization of a borrowed book) after having his appearance aged somewhat by a cold-fingered matron in the back of a bar where beautiful young ladies serve colored water.

On board the starship, Max is assigned by accident to work he understands: cleaning up after animals on the bottom deck, including feeding passengers' pets. Eldreth Coburn, owner of a spider monkey Max had befriended, discovers that Max can play 3-D chess and challenges him to a game (she lets him win, but we don't discover that until much later). Impressed with his ability, and perhaps somewhat romantically interested in him, she arranges for him to get a promotion to the ship's control room, where under the stern tutelage of Chief Astrogator Hendricks and the warmer but equally tough training of computerman Kelly, he becomes an Assistant Astrogator.

In a confrontation with Hendricks, Max sheepishly admits to faking his record to get into space and is told off (but, to his surprise, not exposed or punished) by Hendricks. "It's worse than wrong, it's undignified!"

When the aging captain sides with assistant astrogator Simes against Max (who found an error in the programming) and the ship turns up in uncharted space, the ship must land on a nearby planet. Admittedly lost, the ship is all but decommissioned and most of the crew help the passengers colonize their lovely new planet. But watch out for the centaurs and their throwing ropes!

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Discussion

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, the entire plot of the book revolving 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 because of his genetically determined 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 have been hiding her own high intelligence).

The book has a strong feeling of versimilitude 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 book is somewhat notable, and open to question. The book depicts a civilization which can travel between star systems--but which has not advanced enough for a pocket calculator. The "transitions" between star systems must be calculated using books of tables, translated into binary values, and programmed into machines using switches, with the results showing as binary values using lights.

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Heinlein's Commnetary on Gulliver's Travels

The later part, taking place on the planet of the "centaurs" - horselike though carnivorous creatures, 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 most 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 admitting the superiority of another species to mankind was total anathema to Heinlein, and this part of the book expresses his vocieferous opposition and rebuttal.

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Editions

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