review of
Robert A. Heinlein's Starman Jones
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - May 28, 2016

I might as well add Heinlein to my pantheon of favorite SF writers even though I feel like I 'left him behind' around 46 yrs ago. Starman Jones is another great example of Heinlein's promotion of the idea that people of 'humble' 'unpromising' origins can develop their latent extraordinary abilities & succeed under highly challenging circumstances.

Max Jones starts off as a farmer living in straightened conditions. His father's dead, his stepmother's not particularly caring.

"Max liked this time of day, this time of year. With the crops in, he could finish his evening chores early and be lazy. When he had slopped the hogs and fed the chickens, instead of getting supper he followed a path to a rise west of the barn and lay down on the grass, unmindful of chiggers. He had a book with him that he had drawn from the county library last Saturday, Bonforte's Sky Beasts: A Guide to Exotic Zoology, but he tucked it under his head as a pillow." - p 9

Already Max is presented as potentially a working-class intellectual - something that few people seem to accept as a possibility. He's knowledgeable enuf to be able to tell time by the stars:

"Venus had set, of course, but he was surprised to see Mars still in the west. The moon had not risen. Let's see—full moon was last Wednesday. Surely . . .

"The answer he got seemed wrong, so he checked himself by taking a careful eyesight of Vega and compared it with what the Big Dipper told him. Then he whistled softly—despite everything that had happened it was only ten o'clock, give or take five minutes; the stars could not be wrong." - p 23

Heinlein's a 'realist' of sorts. Things happen just as much b/c of human idiosyncracies & dysfunctionality as they do b/c of people being 'as they shd be':

""Good. Here's the deal. The Man says we have to have two teamsters to each rig—or else break for eight hours after driving eight. I can't; I've got a penalty time to meet—and my partner washed out. The flathead got taken drunk and I had to put him down to cool. Now I've got a checkpoint to pass a hundred thirty miles down the stretch. They'll make me lay over if I can't show another driver."

""Gee! But I don't know how to drive, Red. I'm awful sorry."

"Red gestured with his cup. "You won't have to. You'll always be the off-watch driver. I wouldn't trust little Molly Malone to somebody who didn't know her ways. I'll keep myself awake with Pep pills and catch up on sleep at Earthport."" - p 34

Starman Jones was published in 1953, the yr I was born. It's interesting for me to see the ethos of the time presented:

"The library book had been burning a hole in his rucksack; at Oklahoma City he noticed a postal box at the freight depot and, on impulse, dropped the book into it. After he had mailed it he had a twinge of worry that he might have given a clue to his whereabouts which would get back to Montgomery, but he suppressed the worry—the book had to be returned. Vagrancy in the eyes of the law had not worried him, nor trespass, nor impersonating a licensed teamster—but filching a book was a sin." - p 37

Heinlein's work is never lacking in futuristic imaginings: "He found himself presently in front of Imperial House, the hotel that guaranteed to supply any combination of pressure, temperature, lighting, atmosphere, pseudogravitation, and diet favored by any known race of intelligent creatures." (p 38) A sensible & ambitious enterprise under conditions that may one day prevail.

"["]Only a member of this guild, trained, tested, sworn, and accepted, may lawfully be custodian of those manuals."

"Max's answer was barely audible. "I don't see the harm, I'm not going to get to use them, it looks like."

""You don't believe in anarchy, surely? Our whole society is founded on entrusting grave secrets only to those who are worthy.["]" - p 45

Max may or not "believe in anarchy" but he does find his way around the unfair restrictions on membership into the guild he desires to join. Aiding him is this greatly is that he's eidetic, a mnemonist:

""Well, I'll be a beat up. . . . Look, you're a page-at-a-glance reader? Is that it?"

""No, not exactly. I'm a pretty fast reader, but I do have to read it. But I don't forget. I can't forget anything."" - p 53

As it turns out, anarchy isn't given a bad rep here after all:

""That's your problem. But best of all, the place still has a comfortable looseness about it. No property taxes, outside the towns. Nobody would pay one; they'd just move on, if they didn't shoot the tax collector instead. No guilds—you can plow a furrow, saw a board, drive a truck, ir thread a pipe, all the same day and never ask permission. A man can do anything and there's no one to stop him, no one to tell him he wasn't born into the trade, or didn't start young enough, or hasn't paid his contribution. There's more work than there are men to do it and the colonists just don't care."

"Max tried to imagine such anarchy and could not, he had never experienced it." - pp 68-69

Heinlein may not be an anarchist but he's no perpetuator of class-serving myths either. In his world, a 'hayseed' can be a mathematician:

"She made a face. "But you told me that all you went to was a country high school and didn't get to finish at that. Huh?"

""Yes, but I learned from my uncle. He was a great mathematician. Well, he didn't have any theorems named after him—but a great one just the same, I think."" - p 78

Heinlein is, indeed, an exemplary SF writer. He imagines a possible planet reached by humans: "Garson's Planet appears to us to be a piece of junk left over when the universe was finished. It has a surface gravity of one-and-a-quarter, too much for comfort, it is cold as a moneylender's heart, and it has a methane atmosphere unbreathable by humans." (p 101) Such descriptions are only side details in a novel of space travel but they add alot. & Heinlein has a sense of humor:

"Their driver, Herr Eisenberg, interpreted for them. The native who sold the souvenirs kept swiveling his eyes, one after another, at Mrs. Mendoza. He twittered some remarks to the driver, who guffawed. "What does he say?" she asked.

""He was complimenting you."

""So? But how?"

""Well . . . he says you are for a slow fire and no need for seasoning; you'd cook up nicely. And he'd do it too," the colonist added, "if you stayed here after dark."

"Mrs. Mendoza gave a little scream. "You didn't tell us they were cannibals. Josie take me back!"

"Herr Eisenberg looked horrified. "Cannibals? Oh, no, lady! They don't eat each other, they just eat us—when they can get us, that is. But there hasn't been an incident in twenty years."" - p 137

In short, Heinlein combines class-consciousness, imagination, humor, & science in a way that must've been very inspiring to me as a boy even tho I barely remember my reaction to him anymore:

"A fast hyperboloid swing past both settled the matter. The bolometer showed number three to be too hot and number four to be tropical. Number four had a moon which the third did not—another advantage for four, for it permitted, by examining the satellite's period, an easy calculation of its mass; from that and its visible diameter its surface gravity was a matter of substitution in classic Newtonian formula . . . ninety-three percent of Earth-normal, comfortable and rather low in view of its over ten-thousand-mile diameter. Absorption spectra showed oxygen and several inert gases." - p 168

Yep, after having long since rejected Heinlein I'm inclined to read everything by him now that I've read Starman Jones. It's not that I think it's absolutely great, it's that it resonates w/ me so strongly that I feel deep affection for it. ( )

Encouraged to re-read this by seeing other goodreads people writing about Heinlein and the big difference between his earlier and later books. As a young adult I read this and Starship Trooper more than once, identifying with the male leads. Even now the fact that the only working women in this book are a cafe waitress and a bar 'hostess', comes across as parochial and stupid rather than anything sinister. How he could write like this in 1953 is beyond me, I guess he was living in his own little bubble - but the story is well told and I've enjoyed the re-read, especially the books of mathematical tables and the entry of binary into the computer, so have another bit of a star. ( )

Heinlein’s “juveniles” are an interesting collection — they are certainly simpler than his mid-career greats (and way better than the last books), but they are still totally engaging and some of the best SF novels written. If any other author had written most of these, I would probably consider them career-defining good books.

This was the tale of an individual of superior ability in a society sclerotic with regulation and stasis. ( )

Typical Heinlein juvenile in many ways. A hillbilly gets a berth on a starship crew, mostly by trickery, and makes friends and enemies on the bridge and in the hold. More math- and testosterone-intensive than most. A dark but thoughtful book, Starman Jones has shadows of the upcoming Starship Troopers in tone. ( )

I could not get into this. Max Jones is set up in such a way that I never had any reason to worry about whether he'd make it through his various scrapes and struggles. Maybe I could've enjoyed this if I were 10-12 (the age group this book is written for), but reading it for the first time as an adult in the Year of Our Lord 2017 meant I found it boring, predictable, a bit preachy, and quite sexist. (Although I hear that for 1953 this book was progressive for even including female characters who take part in the plot.) It's not actively bad, but definitely not what I need right now.

Also: the introduction for my edition, written in 2011, got a dig in at "lazy, entitled millennials" (I guess because we're not all running away from home to work ourselves almost to death on starships?) which set a very bad tone for the book. ( )