The Paperback Time Machine

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 …!