It was my great pleasure to read -- in paperback, right off our home shelves! -- Starman Jones, for the first time in about (ahem) forty years. It's unusual to review an old book, but the truth is, some things are so old, they're new again, if only because they've been forgotten. So here goes!
The book itself is a piece of history;
a glimpse into the mindset of a bygone age which was flexing its
muscles through the exercise of looking forward into the starship
era. The novel is as much a time machine, or time capsule, as any film
about 1940 made in 1940 (rather than a film set in that
era made by people from a different world. Us).
I first read Starman Jones in
the early 1970s. It was a good read then, and it's a good read now.
Robert Heinlein wrote it in 1953 for a largely YA readership, but the
narrative is rich enough to be rewarding to adult readers at the same
time as not being too heavy for younger chilluns. A well-written
story often stands the test of time, even if not quite in the
way the author might have imagined...
Heinlein might possibly have written
the ultimate Steampunk without ever knowing it.
Think about this: in a world where
electro-mechanical “computers” were the cutting edge of
technology, he had to figure a way to navigate a starship.
Not to
power the ship, mind you, because there was nothing to be
done, way back when, other than call the engines “the so-and-so
drive,” and then get on with the story. Faster than light travel is
still a mystery 60 years later; it'll probably remain a mystery in
another 60 years. But –
How to navigate a starship from planet
to planet via a series of natural space-warps caused by the gravity
fields of nearby stars … and how to do this without recourse to
computers as we understand them. Now, that's the question. And a very pretty pickle it is. Arthur C. Clark managed to get a spacecraft home from the Saturn (or was it Jupiter??) system with abacus calculation, but piloting a ship between stars, at optic velocity is a whole 'nother beast.
Ten years after Heinlein devised
a system of calculus performed by a team of mathematicians using
telescopic sightings of doppler-shifted stars, from the astrodome of
a ship moving almost at the speed of light, the best computer in the
world was the size of a house and had to be “programmed”
by a team of people who literally set innumerable dipswitches before
the “Go!” button was pushed. The “computer” made the
calculation all of a piece, in an instant; the answer to the calculation flashed
up in binary (light on, light off) which was translated back into
numbers.
So Heinlein devised a system of
calculus using the living brains of a team of humans who are fed data
by technicians manning telescopes and stereo cameras. It's actually
brilliant. The fact it's utterly redundant now, in the age of
computers, is irrelevant. By 1965, just 12 years after Heinlein
nutted out a computerless solution, Star Trek had already left
behind the whole problem and driven on. Today, many phones
have the processor power to handle the math for these calculations;
but that's not the point.
The point is, Heinlein devised a
way to navigate a starship in 1953 … and it would probably have
worked just fine.
Here's how Wikipedia defines Steampunk:
“Steampunk is a subgenre of
science fiction or science fantasy that incorporates technology and
aesthetic designs inspired by 19th-century industrial steam-powered
machinery.”
The tech, such as it is, in Starman
Jones was almost certainly inspired by the electro-mechanical
genius behind battleship gun sighting “computers” in the 1940s. It's
very, very close to the spirit of Steampunk, though the starship
Asgard surely isn't powered by steam!
As for the story itself: young boy runs
away from home to see if he can follow his uncle into the Astrogators
Guild, winds up having to join the service under false pretenses and,
after disaster strikes the ship, quite literally saves the day due to
his eidetic memory. It's a good, tight plot and once I'd have said it
was ideally suited to younger readers and especially boys around ten
… so long as today's lads can set aside their pooh-poohing of
computerless astrogation, when they know for a fact how the
Enterprise is navigated. Or the Nostromo. Can
ten-year-olds do that? Well … probably not.
Pop over to Goodreads and you'll see
many readers/reviewers giving the novel three stars; not for
being a poor book, but for using outdated tech. This is actually a
weak reason to mark down a book so old, it's a piece of history
itself. A better reason would be to point up the seeming sexism with
which the female characters are written … but then you must remind
yourself that in a 1953 YA book aimed at boys, it's a wonder there
were any female characters at all, much less a properly developed one
who's a social rebel and turns out to have (!) a brain --
And one point made me, in 2016,
curiously uncomfortable: the utter revulsion with which the central
characters view alien species. Today, post-Avatar and so on,
we relish the difference between species. The Ood leap to mind: so
ugly and so heart-wrenchingly beautiful, at one time. It was quite
astonishing to read of characters being revolted by alien forms, as
recently as 1954; but … it's sixty years. People change; the
zeitgeist changes; it should; it must.
So who'll get the most from Starman
Jones today? Kids, for whom it was written? Unlikely. Try fans of
Steampunk who're fascinated by the meld of outdated, outmoded tech
and the age of starships.
For myself, I enjoyed it a lot, at the
same time remembering to make the allowances one must, and wouldn't
hesitate to recommend it; unless you think your kid will line the
budgie cage with it in disgust when he reaches the Steampunk navigation part. Or perhaps you worry he'll get hopelessly confused and wonder if
it's somehow impossible to use computers on starships. But just a
second, Mister Spock said …!
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