Starman Jones

A 1953, classic science fiction from the grand master Robert A. Heinlein is about a Ozark farm boy who travels to the stars when he is forced to run away from home. A not easy feat to accomplish because entering the trades is tightly controlled. You must pay large amounts of money and for an

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astrogator you must be recommended. Max Jones has learned from his uncle and his eidetic memory doesn’t hurt either. He becomes a stowaway on board a intergalactic spaceship. The pilot dies and the charts and tables destroyed. The survival of the ship will depend on Max. This series called, Heinlein juveniles series, is easy to read because it is written for young boys and the book reads as a stand alone book. The book may be written for youth but the author folds in an adult theme of labor unions. Max is triumphant because he has noble character even though he has misled to obtain a place on the ship, he later confesses. The computer is an important part of space travel but in the book still dependent on man to run them unlike computers we have now. The computer was just making is debut and it was big and chunky. There is also mathematics in this book with the explanation of congruence (like a folded scarf) as a way to go from one place to another that is many light years away.

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Another rollicking good read in the typical Heinllein style, this story follows the adventures of Jones, a young man with ambition to reach the stars. Light and frothy, this is a great relaxing book that won't unduly stress your brain.

This is a 'romance' for men, Max doesn't get the girl, he gets the life he alwyas dreamed about and the life he worked hard to be worthy of.

Romantic love is good but it's hard to be on a spaceship if your wife wants a house in the suburbs!

Still a surprisingly good read in spite of being written in 1953. The computers only take binary input and decimal to binary conversion is done on spaceships by looking up the conversion in reference books - and I still enjoyed reading it. The story survives the dated stuff by still feeling good

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with the stuff that hasn't dated - and it's a cracking good 'boy's own' adventure story.

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It's been about twenty years since I last read this and I wanted to see if it was as good as I remembered. It's not... it's better. Heinlein hits all the right notes in this thrilling space adventure and i believe it is the best of all his juvenile (if one can call it that) stories.

I enjoyed Starman Jones. It is a young adult science fiction novel that is quite out of date, from a technology standpoint. It was entertaining to read, and the lessons in it were bssic but still valid. Worthwhile reading for people of any age and enjoyable. More sophisticated young readers may be

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either amused or disdainful of the technology, but hopefully they enjoy the message.

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This is one of Heinlein's "juveniles"--that is, what we now call young adult. I tend to prefer quite a few of those to his adult novels such as Stranger in a Strange Land. I wouldn't count this among his best in that category though--of which my favorite is Citizen of the Galaxy. I'd say it's only

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about average for Heinlein--which still means it's very good indeed. This is the coming of age tale of a boy who goes from dirt between the toes farm boy to the stars.
Yes, some aspects are dated--social aspects such as the relations between the sexes and the technology, especially computer tech seems...quaint. But hey, this was published in 1953, and I'm willing to make allowances--regardless it's still a very entertaining story.

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This is one of Heinlein's juvenile novels. Though I think that many of them stack up well as reading material for adults. The cheif difference between these juveniles and Heinlein's adult novels is the lack of sex.
One thing about this story that's rather funny is how he imagines the different rates

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of development of the regions of the US. He has space ports in apalatia before electricity extends to rural Arkansas. Having lived in Arkansas, I can understand how he came to that view.

The themes presented here that recur in some of his other novels are:
A similarity in the space voyages and encounters that seems similar to [Time for the Stars] and [Methuselah's Children]. A striking mental ability on the part of the protagonist similar to the protagonists in [The Number of the Beast] and some other later novels. (Though it might be mentioned that [The Number of the Beast] is a bit of a farce that is self-conciously using elements common to science fiction pulps and popular adventure stories. To demonstrate this note how the professor is described as pear shaped, an allusion to the type of character who needs to be rescued by the hero.)

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This is the book that got nine-year-old me started on a fifteen-year science fiction binge, until the genre started to get darker and edgier (and duller). I loved the fast-paced story-telling and the wish-fulfilment; farm boy becomes... well, I'm not going to spoil it but it's a great ride.

On

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re-reading the book recently, I winced a bit at some of the attitudes towards women, but that was par for the course in 1953 and the female protagonist was a tough cookie, as were some of the other women. In short, I enjoyed it for what it is, and will doubtless read it again – though perhaps not enough times to make the book fall to pieces as I did all those years ago

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A charming farmboy-in-space adventure tale. On another level, worth reading for the historical (1953) scifi perspective on space travel (and the glaring, in retrospect, omission of computers).

An Illinois farm boy with a photographic memory, Max Jones runs away from home after his widowed mother marries the town loser, whose only goal is to sell the Jones farm for quick cash.

Max decides to head for Earthport on the hope that his late Uncle Chet, a career astrogator, had nominated Max as

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a future member of the Astrogator’s Guild as he had promised before his death. Along the way, Max encounters a congenial homeless man named Sam who ends up stealing Max’s government ID card and a set of astrogation books given to him by his uncle.

At Earthport, Max is further disappointed to learn that Uncle Chet never registered him for membership in the Guild. Shortly after, Max meets Sam in the street just outside the Guild Hall. After a brief confrontation, Sam decides to take Max under his wing and together, they stow away aboard the space cruiser Asgard using forged identifications.

Aboard the Asgard, Max finds himself in familiar territory. As Steward’s Mate, he is assigned to the care and feeding of pets and livestock being transported from Earth to an off world colony. It isn’t long before Max befriends a precocious and brash young lady named Ellie and her talking spider puppy, Mr. Chips.

During the voyage, a series of circumstances permits Max to be promoted to an Apprentice Chartsman and then to Astrogation, where his photographic memory allows him to make computations with inhuman speed based on charts and tables he long ago memorized from his uncle’s books. However, Max’s rapid rise through the ranks pits him against a resentful senior officer who makes his life difficult at every opportunity.

After an astrogation mishap sends the Asgard leaping to a completely unfamiliar part of space, the captain orders the ship to set down on a serene Earth-like world that the passengers eventually christen “Charity”—a compliment that turns out to be a deadly misnomer. Will Max and the bridge crew calculate the proper path back to known space or will they and the passengers be doomed to wander this strange area of the galaxy in search of a new home?

Published in 1953, Starman Jones is counted among Robert A. Heinlein’s twelve “juvenile” SF novels—what is known today as “young adult." I haven’t read a Heinlein juvenile novel yet that failed to entertain. They’re an absolute trove of fun and imaginative space adventures. Character development, pacing, and plot are all masterfully crafted. As renowned SF anthologist Groff Conklin once said, “Nobody but nobody can beat Heinlein in the writing of teen-age science fiction.”

I completely agree.

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This Heinlein guy was pretty good at telling a story.

Max Jones is a young farmer, working hard to support his unlovable stepmother after his father's death, but he dreams of the life his Uncle Chet lived, as a member of the Astrogators' Guild. Chet had promised him that he'd nominate him for

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membership, but died while Max was still too young to join, and then Max's father, before he died also, made him promise to take care of his stepmother.

But when his stepmother remarries and she and her new husband sell the farm out from under him, he runs away, taking his uncle's astrogation books with him. The books get stolen from him by a deceitfully helpful conman, and then he discovers that his uncle had died before nominating him for the guild, and all his dreams seem crushed forever. But then he meets that charming conman again, who decides that they can help each other get what they both really want—a berth on a starship. For Max, it's a berth as a steward's mate, and he's tending farm animals again, but he's on a starship, and he's a plucky, resourceful, just plain likable young Heinlein hero, who makes you buy into every improbable plot twist along the way to his dream.

Once again, great fun.

Update, May 2017: Rereading this decades after originally reading this is interesting. It's still a fun story, with the plucky, young Heinlein hero who makes you buy into all the improbable plot twists. It is, of course, very dated in a number of ways. The improbability of star travel depending on a set of printed books of numbers and equations has often been commented on. The social dynamics of Heinlein's world has been the subject of lots of commentary and discussion, most particularly the often quite rigid gender roles, especially in the "juveniles," i.e., Heinlein's young adult novels. It's worth noting that he often (but far from always) subverts those roles somewhat. For instance, in this book, Ellie rather testily points out to Max that women are dealing with the reality of the rules they live with. Another woman, an appallingly predatory creature, sheds that behavior when the ship hits a real crisis and there are more important things to do than play social games.

And yet Heinlein never really questions those basic social roles, even as later in his career his expectations of what jobs women can hold expands considerably.

No, what really struck me this time is Heinlein's unquestioning assumption that starships and hyperspeed trains will exist side by side with dirt farmers relying on mule traction, cooking over an open fire is a mundane necessity for poorer farmers, and the hobos who would have been regularly encountered during the days of Heinlein's early adulthood.

It's a world largely unchanged, not from the 1950s, but to a great extent from the 1930s.

However, another thing that caught my attention this time is the way characters, major or minor, may be described in terms revealing that they are ethnic or racial minorities, with the fact having zero plot significance. Dark skin or an epicanthic fold are treated merely as mundane items of physical description, part of the normal range of humanity, just like brown hair or green eyes. There's a loud, tiny segment of contemporary sf readership that claims to revere Heinlein and yet thinks this is controversial when today's writers do it.

It's still great fun to read--at least for someone who first read it in the early 1960s. No guarantees for Gen Y or millennials, who grew up in an entirely different world than I did! Because pretty much everything I just mentioned as anachronisms were still real things that people knew about when I was a kid, even though less common than when Heinlein was.

For my fellow Boomers, you'll wince at some of the datedness, but for my mileage, it hasn't had a serious visit from the Suck Fairy.

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(Original Review, 1980-07-24)

Random rumblings on our inability to predict the future.

Pop-up display screens and visual aiming (guiding a missile by looking at the target) for fighter pilots is discussed in the recent fiction paperback "FoxFire.'' The technology for visual aiming is actually quite

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old. It is derived from the device (I'm not sure what it is called) used by psychologists to measure eye movements. I have seen articles in Scientific American which use this device, showing the sequence of eye movements as a subject looks at some object (a chess board, for example). Relating to SW and TESB, is it necessary for a society that is more technically advanced than ours to be able to do EVERYTHING that we can do, better than we can do it?

Now on to the main topic. Predicting anything interesting in the future is difficult. I am not sure how one can train for such a task, and I have very few examples where a really far-seeing prediction has come true. Does anyone wish to supply me with some examples? Of course, the inability of people to predict the future. Even those people paid to do so, such as Science Fiction writers can be amply documented. My favorite example comes from Heinlein's “Starman Jones.'' Jones' job is to look up the binary equivalents of base 10 coordinates so that they can be input to the navigation computer. While it seemed to Heinlein very plausible that computers would handle complex navigational calculations -- computers, after all, only understand binary. What now appears ridiculous to us, seemed like a perfectly good logical extension of technology. Do we, living in a time of accelerated change, have any better idea of the future? I say no, the complexity of society is growing faster than the complexity of the predictions we can make.

Before ending, I would like to plug two enjoyable books. Both predict the unpredictability of human endeavors. They were written pre-World War II, by Czech writer--and almost Nobel Prize winner--Karel Capek. The first is ``R.U.R.,'' Rossum's Universal Robots, although the term androids would better describe these creations. The book is a fusing of the Frakenstein legend, with the struggle for ``human'' rights.

The second book, "War with the Newts'' also by Capek is a satire (I think it quite funny) concerning a similar situation. I won't give too much away, but the plot concerns the discovery and exploitation of a large (the size of a ten year old), intelligent, amphibious newt. The book describes, from a global as well as personal viewpoint, the impact of this new source of labor. In this sense, it is similar to ``RUR,'' but it paints a darker and funnier picture of the human race. I strongly recommend both books.

[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.]

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In my continuing survey of classic SF I'm finding many authors and books I missed when I was young. This is one of them.
I like a many of Heinlein's novels but, as with some of his early juveniles I had trouble getting into the story. I put it down a couple of times. Of course, Heinlein came

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through in the end and I'm glad I went back to it. The last third sucked me in and kept me there.

Pretty good story and as a teen I would have given it 4 stars.

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I loved the concern that Max had for his library book. That really hooked me into the book. After that it was a fast, fun ride.

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

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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.

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Adolescent fiction. Was a fun read over half a century ago but less satisfying for my taste now.

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

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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.

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