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 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.
war. To prepare for this, Hugh Farnham constructed a fully stocked bomb shelter beneath his house years before. On a night when Hugh’s daughter, Karen, invites her friend Barbara to the house, the local radio station in their Midwestern town begins transmitting warnings of a possible nuclear strike. Hugh’s son, Duke, is skeptical that either side would commit such an act of suicide. He considers the bomb shelter an overreaction on the part of his father—until the radio station issues its first bomb warning during a round of bridge (a game that features prominently throughout the story).
Arguably some of Heinlein’s best short fiction, Assignment in Eternity offers four fantastic tales including:
Suffice it to say that like any collection, certain stories are better than others and this one is no exception. However, the majority of the entries are some combination of witty, engaging, chilling, thought provoking, or amusing. Of course, how could it be otherwise with such luminaries as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, C.M. Kornbluth, Robert Sheckley, Theodore Sturgeon, and A.E. Van Vogt, just to name a few.
With few exceptions, most of my 2017 reading consisted of classic SF and speculative fiction primarily from Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke with a dash of Rod Serling, Alfred Hitchcock, A.E. Van Vogt, and H.G. Wells.
story is occasionally stifled by several pages—and an entire third chapter—of purely scientific (or pseudo-scientific) discourse in the form of dense info-dumping. This is something that would never make it past a contemporary editor, of course, but as an avid reader of golden age SF novels, I’m accustomed to it. At that time, it was fairly common in the genre. Modern readers might also stumble over Heinlein’s occasional use of what would now be considered archaic grammar, but, in such cases, meaning can easily be derived from context.