Starman Jones

infobox Book |
name = Starman Jones
title_orig =


image_caption = First Edition cover of "Starman Jones"
author = Robert A. Heinlein
illustrator =
cover_artist = Clifford Geary
country = United States
language = English
series = Heinlein juveniles
genre = Science fiction novel
publisher = Scribner's
release_date = 1953
media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
pages =
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 (photographic memory) who wants to go to the stars. It was first published by Charles Scribner's Sons as part of the Heinlein juveniles series.

Plot summary

Max Jones works the family farm in the Ozark Mountains. With his father dead and his stepmother remarrying a man Max detests, Max runs away from home, taking the only possessions he truly cares about, his uncle's astrogation manuals.

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 begins hitchhiking towards Earthport to find out. (The trucker who gives rides to down-and-out hitchhikers is a recurring element in Heinlein's books.) Along the way, he finds a friendly face in hobo Sam Anderson, who later alludes to being a deserter from the Imperial Marines. Sam feeds Max and offers advice, though he steals his astrogation manuals.

At the guild's headquarters, Max is disappointed to find that he had not been names as an heir, but he is returned his uncle's substantial security deposit for his manuals. Max learns that Sam had tried to claim the deposit for himself.

By chance, he runs into an apologetic Sam. With Max's money, Sam is able to finagle them jobs aboard a starship. Max signs on as a steward's mate third class, and then with his photographic memory, he absorbs the contents of the Stewards' Guild manual. Among his duties is caring for several animals, including passengers' pets -- work with which he is comfortable. When Eldreth Coburn visits her pet, an alien, semi-intelligent "spider puppy" that Max has befriended, she learns that he can play three-dimensional chess, and she challenges him to a game. (A champion player, she diplomatically lets him win). Meanwhile, Sam manages to rise to the position of master-at-arms on the spaceship.

When, through Eldreth's machinations, the ship's officers discover that Max had learned astrogation from his uncle, Max is given a promotion to the command deck. Under the tutelage of Chief Astrogator Hendrix and Chief Computerman Kelly, he becomes a probationary apprentice chartsman, shortly before the ship reaches Theta Centauri. After leaving Garson's Planet, the planet, where the human settlement is a domed city, Max is promoted to a probationary astrogator.In a meeting with Chief Astrogator Hendrix, Max reluctantly admits to faking his record to get into space and is told off: "It's worse than wrong, it's undignified!" Hendrix values Max's talents and defers pursuing the matter until they return to Earth. The Asagard then departs for Halcyon, a human colony planet orbiting Nu Pegasi.

When Chief Astrogator Hendrix dies, while the ship is orbiting Halcyon, the astrogation department is left dangerously shorthanded. The aging Captain tries to take his place, plotting the course for the next interstellar transition to Nova Terra, an unspoiled planet orbiting Beta Aquarii, but but is not up to the task. When Max detects an error in his real-time calculations, neither the Captain nor Assistant Astrogator Simes believe him, and the ship winds up lost in space.

They locate a nearby habitable world that they name "Charity", and the passengers turn into colonists. Meanwhile, the crew continues to try to figure out where they are, and if they can get back to the Earth. Unfortunately, it turns out the planet is already inhabited by intelligent centaurs, who capture Max and Ellie. Ellie's pet is able to guide Sam and a rescue party to them. They escape, but Sam is killed covering their retreat.

Upon his return, Max is informed that the Captain has died. Then Simes was killed by Sam when he tried to illegally take command, leaving Max as the only remaining astrogator. To make matters worse, Simes had hidden or destroyed the astrogation manuals.

Vastly outnumbered by the hostile natives, the humans are forced to attempt a perilous return to known space by reversing the erroneous transition. Max must not only pilot the ship, he must rely on his photographic memory for the missing data tables. To add to his burdens, the remaining officers inform Max that to go into space legally, he must assume the captaincy. The pressure is immense, but Max succeeds and the ship returns to known space.

Max pays heavy fines for breaking guild regulations, but he becomes a member of the Astrogators Guild. However, he loses any chance with Eldreth: she returns home to marry her boyfriend. Max accepts this with mixed feelings, but looks forward to his new career.

Literary significance and 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 mainly because of his noble character. 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 proves not only highly intelligent, but resourceful and fiercely independent).

Max's photographic memory does save the day at the end of the book, but earlier in the book, Hendrix explicitly tells Max that his unusual memory was much less important than careful hard work at astrogation. Max ends the book having learned valuable lessons about life. While he gains from having broken guild rules, he also accepts the consequences of his actions.

The book has a strong feeling of verisimilitude because so much of it is based on Heinlein's real-life experiences.Fact|date=June 2008 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 U.S. 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 (which computers are actually at their best at), 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, which 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 folded scarf, is sound mathematics (though it is not known physics).

Adaptation to other media

Although Heinlein rarely permitted dramatic adaptations of his work, he authorized Douglas L Lieberman to stage "Starman Jones" at the Goodman Children's Theater in Chicago. Written and directed by Lieberman, the 2-act play ran for 25 performances in 1972. The title role was played by Charles Fleischer, who later performed the voice of Roger Rabbit in Hollywood. In 1974, Avon Books published the script as part of the anthology "Contemporary Children's Theater" edited by Betty Jean Lifton.

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.

External links

*isfdb title|id=1121|title=Starman Jones