Starman Jones - Literary Significance and Criticism

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 eidetic 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.

Heinlein makes a special distincion in the book between Max's eidetic memory, and the perhaps more well-known photographic memory. He has Max explain that he cannot simply glance at something and have it memorized; as in the case of the astrogation and Stewards' Guild manuals, he must actually read them as would anyone else, but then the knowledge is perfectly retained in his memory.

The book has a strong feeling of verisimilitude 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 U.S. naval officer.

Another outstanding quality of the book is its superior architecture. A common criticism of Heinlein's novels commonly is that they are episodic, or have weak or rushed endings. Starman Jones has a smooth and logical progression as we watch Max grow from a hillbilly farmer through many stages to a mature young man. The storyline is genre bildungsroman.

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 modern 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 holding the ship at just under light speed until it reaches precisely the right location and then accelerating it over, causing it to reappear 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).