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Starman 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.
Plot
After his father dies and his mother remarries a man that Max Jones detests, he runs away from the family farm. Following the ring road, he finds a friendly face in hobo 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 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 goes to Earthport in the hopes of becoming a starship astrogator, hitching a ride with a friendly trucker. (The trucker who gives rides to down-and-out hitchhikers is a recurring theme in Heinlein's books.) Once there, he is disappointed to find that his uncle had died before he could nominate him, but he is given a refund of the large deposit his uncle had made to secure his astrogation books.
With the money, Sam (who had stolen the books and tried to turn them in first!) cooks up a way for them to join the crew of a starship. Sam becomes the master-at-arms, and Max signs on as a steward's mate third class (drawing on his hasty memorization of a borrowed book).
On board the starship, Max is assigned by accident to work he understands: looking after animals on the bottom deck, including feeding the passengers' pets. Eldreth Coburn, owner of a spider monkey Max befriends, learns that Max can play 3-D chess and challenges him to a game (she lets him win).
When it is discovered that his uncle had taught Max astrogation, he is promoted to the ship's shorthanded control room, where under the tutelage of Chief Astrogator Hendricks and the warmer but equally tough training of Chief Computerman Kelly, he becomes a Probationary Apprentice Astrogator. In a meeting with Hendricks, Max sheepishly admits to faking his record to get into space and is told off by Hendricks: "It's worse than wrong, it's undignified!" But, to his surprise, he is neither exposed or punished.
Hendricks dies, leaving a big hole in the astrogation department. The aging captain tries to take his place, plotting the course for the next interstellar transition. When Max detects an error in his calculations, neither he nor assistant astrogator Simes believe him, and the ship winds up lost in uncharted space.
They land on a nearby hospitable world and the passengers become colonists. Meanwhile, the crew continues to try to figure out where they are and how they can get back. Unfortunately, it turns out the planet be already inhabited by intelligent centaurs, who capture Max and Ellie. Fortunately, Ellie's spider monkey is able to guide a rescue party to them. They are freed, but Sam is killed covering their retreat.
Vastly outnumbered, the humans are forced to leave, their only recourse to attempt a perilous return to known space by reversing the erroneous transition. Since Simes had hidden or destroyed all the astrogation tables, they have to rely on Max's eidetic memory, together with his skill in astrogation, to get back safely.
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 also because of his 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 sadly outdated. (1) The book depicts a civilization that travels between star systems with the aid of electronic computers, but the computers must be "programmed" on the spot, and what we consider elementary electronic computing operations, like 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. It is evident that Heinlein, writing in the days when computers were big, clunky, and rare, had little idea of the computer's potential. (2) The "transitions" that take a ship from one star system to another are effectuated 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 scarf, is sound mathematics (though it may not be true physics).
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 admitting the superiority of another species to mankind was anathema to Heinlein, and this part of the book expresses his vociferous rebuttal.
External link
"Starman Jones"