The Saturday Morning Post EXTRA! EXTRA! (134)

                      

In this week's second episode we take a stroll down memory lane. Or rather a hike... or maybe a safari. We're traveling more than sixty years back down memory lane as I reread one of my pre-high school era's favorite books. I first read it as a library book, though I picked up a mass market paperback some years later, and reread it again. So, without further ado...

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

Starnan Jones by Robert A Heinlein  C (This time around)

A "C" is actually a fairly good grade for a juvenile written in 1953. As I said in the lede, it was perhaps my favorite science fiction story of my early youth, though when I reread it in my late teens, even then I can remember thinking that it didn't measure up to my memory of it. And knowing this, I went into this reread with muted expectations.

Let's get the story out of the way. It concerns an orphan in the Ozarks whose stepmother remarries a brutal man, and the title character, Max Jones, wisely heads for the hills, taking with him his late uncle's secret navigational books of the Astrogators' Guild, i.e. the people who navigate ships in space. His uncle had promised to nominate for that guild. (All work on Earth being controlled by guilds.) He meets Sam, a kindly hobo, who, while Max sleeps, steals the books and his ID. Max continues on to the space port and confronts the Astrogators' Guild. Though they are willing to help him find a guild and give him some money,  they won't accept him into the Astrogators' Guild. Plus, he learns he's not the first Max Jones who has just showed up. Rejected, he meets Sam again in the space port. Though he has some ill feelings towards him, he lets him talk him into using the money he was given to create false records so that both of them can join the crew of the passenger starship Asguard. This works and they become members of the purser department. What follows is the star-crossed voyage of that ship, and Max's advancement on board, due, in part to fact that he has a photographic memory, and thus can remember ever digit printed on those Astrogator's books he inherited.

Looking back now, I can see many aspects in this story that have remained a staple in my reading life. One can wonder what came first, the chicken or the egg, Starman Jones or a propensity for stories about ships.

Starman Jones is essentially a sea story set aboard a ship in space. In it are all the elements of a sea story, including (spoiler) a cursed ship and shipwreck. Ships in space - real ships, not little one-man UPS Trucks in space have always been in my wheelhouse. I wrote those stories myself. And I have always loved sea stories as well, though those came afterwards. I don't think there's a cause and effect; I think ships just appeals to me, though you won't get me on one.

The second element that this Heinlein book offered, that may have appealed to me back then, is just a hint, mind you, a hint of romance. These were written for young readers, and during this stage in his career, Heinlein had little use for, nor likely did his editor, for girls and romance. Nothing comes of it, and it's rather ham-fisted in its presentation, but it's there. A romance has always been a welcome feature in my favorite books - Edgar Rice Burroughs always had one in all of his stories.

In short, it was entertaining to see how closely this story hewed to my later taste in books.

Heinlein's Earth was also very interesting, in a strange way. At the start of the story we are introduced to "trains" that fly through the air, guided by rings on towers, as well as levitating 200 feet long trucks that travel at 200 mph, and yet Max was working the family farm plowing fields behind mules. There was something like TVs, but the star ships had nothing more complicated than cameras to take sights on stars and books of calculations used to navigate; values of which had to be fed to the astrogator who steered the ship to a certain "folded" spot in space to cross lightyears in an instant. While 1953 is a pretty long time ago, I am pretty certain that even in 1953 most farmers were using tractors.

It was also interesting to see that even at this point in his career, he was getting up on his soapbox and sprinkling his libertarian philosophy throughout the story; self-reliance, anti-government, or in this case anti-guild, honesty, at least when confronted, duty, and self-sacrifice. There were, however, no mention of female crew members at all, much less female officers. Women just were meant to be wives. That came through pretty clearly since Max's almost-girl-friend, a planet's junior chess champion's only goal was to get home and marry the man she loves.

By and large, it could've been worse, but I have no desire to revisit my youth again any time soon.