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Starman Jones

by Robert A. Heinlein, 1953

Published: 2021.06.19

Home > Book Reviews > Robert A. Heinlein > Starman Jones

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry. Cover art by Rick Sternback.

★★★★ (of 5)

 

Summary

One of Heinlein’s juveniles, this is a coming of age story wrapped in a space travel adventure. A New York Times review in 1953 called it “superior science-fiction... carefully plotted, lucidly and beautifully written”. The briefest way I can summarize the plot is: Max Jones is a poor farm boy who wants to go to space, but space travel is restricted to wealthy passengers and colonists who can pay for it, and to members of the highly exclusive guilds. So Max resorts to fraud and gains passage as a crewmember, eventually rising through the ranks due to his strict work ethic — and a near-freakish photographic and mathematic ability. All the while, there are adventures.

A slightly longer description of the plot: Max works an Ozark farm for his stepmother after his father’s death. The book opens with stepmom marrying the town jerk, who immediately sells off the family farm and threatens to physically abuse Max for the slightest infractions. So Max runs away. His only hope is that his late uncle Chet had been a starship astrogator. Broke and hungry, Max meets an apparent hobo named Sam (who we later learn was once a deserter from the Imperial Marines and knows plenty about extralegal channels). Society is apparently run by the Guilds, which strictly control access to the various professions, and the Astrogation Guild is unmoved by Max’s relation to former member Chet. The guild turns over to Max his uncle’s security depost on the astrogation books that Max returns, and this turns out to be enough money for Sam to forge documents for both of them. Sam and Max slip aboard the starship Asgard as “legal” crewmembers for a months-long interstellar haul. The ship is short an astrogator so once the officers learn that Max has memorized all his uncle’s books, they move him up to apprentice. At some point the ship goes off course and Max’s contribution becomes crucial. There’s a powerful and fun twist near the end.

 

The Good

From a writer’s standpoint: This book is a master course in how to introduce complex and amazingly believable worldbuilding without hampering the story’s flow. There is never a stretch of paragraphs in which the narrator explains backstory or history, nor is there awkward dialog between characters in order to tell the reader how the society is set up, yet it’s somehow all there. Character and ship descriptions are masterfully kept to a word or two yet all are easily pictured in the mind.

Every character was differentiated in personality and motivation — none of the flat and interchangeable characters of previous novels show up here — and this was conveyed to the reader through words and actions, never boringly described. While there was no obvious antagonist (much like in real life, the “bad guy” is often the situation and the way society is set up, rather than an evil villain), some people by their very nature were rubbed the wrong way by Max — threatened by his abilities, work ethic, and by-the-book approach — and took it out on him. This felt incredibly realistic; the office politics in the Asgard’s control room could have played out in any occupation I know of.

In short, this is the kind of book that shoots all kinds of holes in my writer ego, which wasn’t very inflated to begin with. That sounds like a downside for me, but I enjoyed reading it and admiring the craft. Heinlein was hitting a stride here in the early to mid-1950s that makes it easy to believe he was considered one of the greats.

Points Off For...

I found very little to criticize about this novel. Perhaps one nitpick would be the number of coincidences that further the plot — at least one sci-fi great (Jack Williamson) criticized Starman Jones on this count. The fact that Sam turns out to be adept at both hand-to-hand combat and chicanery while also feeling “maternal” toward Max, or that a young ship’s passenger who develops a crush on Max turns out to be the daughter of a very wealthy man and thus has influence over the ship’s officers, or that some of the officers remembered Max’s uncle Chet fondly... Each of these coincidences helped Max along the way and some would consider this too contrived. However, it’s a weak criticism for me, because when I look back on my own life or the lives of others, they are very often driven by coincidence, unexpected turns of events, and so on.

For me, the weakest area of the novel was when the Asgard and its crew encountered non-human sentient life forms on an unknown planet (which they named Charity). In this universe, sentient life abounds and has already been mentioned multiple times earlier, so I expected there to be a more formal, long-establish method of meeting and/or studying new life forms but the crew acted as if there was no protocol for such a situation (unlikely). This felt incongruent to me, as if the ETs at the end, or maybe the ETs at the beginning, had been added in later for flavor without reconciling the two bits of worldbuilding.

For Its Time

The society depicted here was less progressive than I saw in the previous few Heinlein books. Here, the entire crew of the Asgard, from Captain to deck-scrubber, was male. The early women in the story were the stepmother, a receptionist, and a barfly. All the later women were passengers on the Asgard, either middle-aged married women or eligible daughters. Few were treated kindly. Whether this was (again) a blind spot for Heinlein or simply a depiction of how such a stratified society might turn out is difficult to tell. Near the end, the girl who crushes on Max gets a couple of pages to correct his assumptions about females, which helps a little.

(Max:) “I suppose girls are probably as intelligent as men, but most of them don’t act like it. I think it’s because they don’t have to...”

(Ellie:) “Mr. Jones, has it ever occurred to you, the world being what it is, that women sometimes prefer not to appear to bright?”

—pages 210-211

Though race/ethnicity was never mentioned among the humans, at least one surname was Asian (Noguchi) and a few others were Spanish in origin (Vargas, Mendoza, etc.)

The technology in the background of the story was impressive considering the story was written in the 1950s. High-speed railless trains in the U.S., for example, were the common mode of long-distance planetside transportation. Much of the astrogation calculation was done with computers (though the kind with lights and buzzers, not the kind with flatscreen monitors). Also, I think this was the first time a Heinlein novel made explicit reference to faster-than-light travel and control over gravity.

Three-Dimensional Chess

Perhaps like many people, I had assumed “3D chess” was something that originated with Star Trek in the 1960s. So I was surprised to see Max teaching Ellie how to play three-dimensional chess in this book (the first mention is only page 76). Max even mentions four-dimensional chess at one point, though that advanced version isn’t described. Several parts of 3D chess, are, however, described. So I learned that Star Trek was not the origin of of 3D chess, which was in fact toyed with by actual chess players in the late 1800s and by the early 1900s several variants existed in real life. Of the several fictional depictions I uncovered, it looks like Starman Jones is the earliest.

Conclusion

This was a fun read, combining some of Heinlein’s best qualities (lucid and concise storytelling in an interesting universe) with a lack of most of his worst qualities (endless monologues about politics and society, lengthy narration about backstory or technology). I think I would put this on a very short list of best sci-fi novels of the era.

 





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