The novel “Starman Jones” by Robert A. Heinlein was published for the first time in 1953.

Maximilian Jones runs the family farm after his father’s death. However when his stepmother marries a bad guy Max runs away from home. His dream is to become an Astrogator like his uncle but in the future every profession is regulated by a guild and Max discovers that his uncle died before he could designate as him as his heir in his guild.

During his journey Max meets Sam Anderson, a man with a dark past who knows various ways around the laws. The two combine their resources to become part of the ship Asgard’s crew with forged papers. Max has an eidetic memory and studied his uncle’s manuals and Sam knows how things work on a spaceship thanks to his past experiences so they don’t get discovered. For Max it’s the beginning of an adventure that’s very exciting but also dangerous because the art space navigation is very complex.

“Starman Jones” is one of the juveniles written by Robert A. Heinlein in the late ’40s and ’50s and contains many elements typical of the author. In fact the main character Max Jones is a young man who early in the novel has a limited knowledge of how things work in the world but eventually learns a lot, especially to take responsibility for his actions. Another typical element of Heinlein’s stories is the presence of a more experienced person, in this case Sam Anderson, who helps Max in his growth path.

The plot of “Starman Jones” is fluid and simple – now it seems even naive in some ways – yet it’s rich in topics. For Robert A. Heinlein the fact that a novel that was written for a young audience didn’t mean that it had to be dull. On the contrary, the author inserted complex elements in his juveniles in the belief that his readers could understand them.

First of all, in “Starman Jones” Heinlein explains in details how things work on a spaceship. The author was in the Navy so he uses his experience in describing how the life of a spaceship is governed not only by regulations but also by traditions and customs that actually sometimes go against regulations.

On the spaceship crew members belong to different guilds too. In some of his earlier stories, Robert A. Heinlein was critical to labor unions demanding standards that bring small benefits but cause long term damage. In “Starman Jones” unions have turned ​​into guilds in which a job is passed from generation to generation as a legacy. For Heinlein such a situation is detrimental because it doesn’t allow people who have the right potential to have access to a certain profession.

In “Starman Jones” Max must resort to cheating because his uncle died before he could designate as his heir in the Guild of Astrogators. On the starship Asgard there’s also Astrogator Simes, who obviously joined the guild inheriting the job but actually isn’t a good officer. In fact during the novel appears clearer and clearer that Simes puts his ambitions before the ship’s welfare and this is a mortal sin to Heinlein.

The role of Astrogators is very important because it mainly consists in guiding ships through transition points in space that allow them to cross many light years in an instant. Reading “Starman Jones” today you can’t help noticing the description of computers as big and limited devices. The Astrogators are under great stress because they have to perform many calculations and then put the results into the computer. This could still be plausible when the novel was written but today this element is inevitably outdated.

The voyage of the ship Asgard includes various stops on planets in solar systems colonized by humans and “Starman Jones” is one of the few stories by Robert A. Heinlein featuring alien species, which he describes with great imagination. The part of the novel set on a planet inhabited by centaur-like creatures and another humanoid species is inspired by Gulliver’s Travels. Heinlein’s ideas however are opposite to Jonathan Swift, who sees the civilized horses of his novel as better than human beings. The centaurs in “Starman Jones” are cruel and try to capture humans to keep them as pets, an idea unacceptable to Heinlein.

In “Starman Jones” There are several characters and only the main ones are well developed. However Heinlein gives at least some characterization to several other characters giving many many of them some shades of gray. Under this point of view, Sam Anderson is the most complex character because he has a past ambiguous to say the least and clearly he knows how to cut corners but in the end he does the right thing.

Despite some flaws such as the rushed ending, which however is rather typical of Robert A. Heinlein, “Starman Jones” is a classic of science fiction that goes far beyond the label of juvenile so I absolutely recommend it.