Starman Jones

What Hacker News says

1. hguantDec 2016
   Farnham's Freehold was the book that made me lose a lot of respect for Heinlein. I started reading him as a 13-14 year old - books like "Have Space Suit, Will Travel", "Farmer in the Sky", and "Starman Jones" - and ate them up. I got older and my dad recommended "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and "Starship Troopers"; I really liked reading him alongside Asimov, who did such a great job of going into __how__ people/societies would exist in the future; Heinlein was much better at going into the __why__. The ideas he put forward in "Starship Troopers" and "Stranger in a Strange Land" formed the basis for some of the best conversations I've had with friends.

   However.

   Farnham's Freehold was just ubermensch porn coupled with some really weird racism. He used more hackneyed "I can do everything" stereotypes than an Ayn Rand novel, which is something he was always guilty of but it really came to a head here. The multiculturalism and openness that was so explicitly prevalent in Starship Troopers, Stranger, and Harsh Mistress (the main character of Starship Troopers is a bisexual South American) vanishes, replaced with this weird fear of black people - "they seem nice, but they'll turn on you when they get the chance" is the message the Joe character imparts.

   Just a very weird book.

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2. emeralddAug 2015
   Not a movie but some books that I helped shape my view on life and learning:

   http://www.amazon.com/Have-Space-Suit-Heinleins-Juveniles-eb...

   http://www.amazon.com/Starman-Jones-Robert-A-Heinlein/dp/145...

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_of_the_Galaxy

   That's the set I remember most at least. "Have Spacesuit Will Travel" has some good stuff on getting where you want to be in life.

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3. tkgallyDec 2019
   When I think back on the science fiction I read and enjoyed as a child and teenager a half century ago, the wrong predictions that amuse me most are two central plot elements in Robert Heinlein’s 1953 “Starman Jones” [0]. Faster-than-light travel through interstellar space is now routine, but the “astrogators” who guide the starships must refer to coordinates that appear in a set of printed manuals. When a starship gets lost and those books are stolen, the ship is able to return to Earth only because our hero, who has an eidetic memory, is able to recall all of the coordinates from memory.

   In 2019, of course, the information in all of those printed manuals could be put into a wristwatch with room to spare, while manned interstellar travel is nowhere in sight.

   [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starman_Jones

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4. MaysonLJul 2019
   I wonder if Nathaniel Bowditch was an inspiration for Heinlein's 1953 novel Starman Jones. It seems quite possible, given his Navy career.
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5. eesmithFeb 2019
   I don't usually think of "frowned upon" as a euphemism for "offensive", so thank you for explaining what you meant. I asked if you could mention some specific "frowned upon" ideas of his, and I'm still not sure. Was it free love? Or libertarianism? Surely not feminism, which is the third theme you mentioned.

   It's hard for me to understand the full context of his later books, like TSBTS. It feels as if he is trying to be semi-autobiographical, or at least informed by personal history. The history of books like Peyton Place, and the Kinsey Reports, show that a lot of how people actually lived wasn't talked about. And of course there are communities which experimented in free love, perhaps the most famous of which is the Oneida Community in the 1800s. This makes it hard to tell how much of TSBTS reflects how things were, or if it was only a small free love culture, or it's his projection of how it should be.

   When you write "empowered many young female readers", which stories supported that empowerment, and what sort of empowerment was it? I don't think TSBTS is the go-to story for women who felt empowered by Heinlein.

   To make myself clear, I think Heinlein had many strong women characters. Edith Stone is a medical doctor, and Hazel a "founding Father" of Luna, a skilled pilot, and better at writing space opera than her son. Wyoh is another "founding Father", and critical to the revolution. "Jack" in 'Tunnel in the Sky' is equally as skilled as Rod - they are part of the same class test - and Rod's wiser and older sister even more competent. Holly, the protagonist of 'The Menace from Earth' and one of Heinlein's few female protagonists (in 1957 no less), aspires to be a starship designer, and is doing well at it.

   I could go on, but I think this helps show that I have an idea of what I am talking about.

   My observation, though, is that Heinlein shows (IMO as a white male from the US brought up in the Protestant faith) how strong women can still do well in a male dominated societies. For examples: the ship captains and judge in 'Rolling Stones' are men, and the mayors in 'Tunnel' are both men. "Jack" disguised the fact that she is a woman. The plot of 'Menace' is based on Holly's relationship with Jeff, her starship designer partner. It goes from friendship, to jealousy, to love, and at the end she's thinking about marrying Jeff and including changing her name.

   Or, take "Cliff and the Calories", where the protagonist Maureen decides that she needs to lose weight because "It started with Cliff - most things do. I am going to marry Cliff, only I haven't told him yet." She doesn't think it's because of her "so-to-speak physical attributes. ... I have yet to find the girl who would swap a twenty-one-inch waist and a good silhouette for sterling merit ... a few wolf whistles never did any harm and are good for the morale."

   Oh, my. And there's a line meant as a joke "if you will have that carried in by eight Nubian slaves" ... that didn't age well!

   Anyway, by the end we find that Cliff loves her Rubenesque figure, takes her to the museum to show what that means, and '"What this country needs," said Cliff, "is more plump girls - and more guys like me who appreciate them." ... Cliff is such a wonderful man.'

   Again, the story is based around the female's relationship with a man.

   There are plenty of stories with a strong female character who isn't a love interest. Take "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel." Peewee, the genius tomboy, is more like a kid sister, though I think there's an intimation at the end that she and Kip should be together once she is old enough. Mother Thing is an extremely competent female character, whose actions are more behind-the-scenes and supportive.

   On the other hand, we also find that Kip's mother was his father's "star pupil". Yet for the entire book she's there to be supportive. We have no other information about her background, and it seems like a one-off line to justify why Kip may be smarter than Peewee.

   There's also the gender essentialism of "Mother Thing" and, later on, "Father Thing". One of Heinlein's other characters (Hilda? in 'Beast'? brought up the idea that males and females are two different species - something makes no sense to me.)

   (I've spent too much time on this, so I'm not going to dig up my books to verify all the names now.)

   There are several strong female characters in "Citizen of the Galaxy". The woman on the slave planet who helped Thorby escape. She knows how to survive in a patriarchal society, including bribes. The mother of the captain of the Sisu, which is a matrilineal culture, and the Margaret Mead character who explains is. I read this as bringing in his readings from the new results from cultural anthropology. This is one of the things which makes Heinlein's readings so distinct. The last is the woman at the end who switches her proxy votes to give Thorby the election win. She knows how to survive in a patriarchal society by being smart but hiding it as a society girl.

   (See also the passenger in "Starman Jones" who is part of her planet's upper class, and who hides her chess expertise from Jones.)

   So, I can agree that Heinlein is a feminist, but he sits somewhere between first-wave and second-wave feminists both chronologically and in terms of ideas. He lacks the vocabulary and concepts that the latter feminists movements would develop.

   What makes it more complex is that we are seeing things often through his characters. Take the transvestites in "The Year of the Jackpot", aka, the "Silly Season" story. They are described as:

   > The male member of the team wore a frilly feminine blouse but his skirt was a conservative Scottish kilt, his female companion wore a business suit and Homburg hat; she stared with lively interest

   We soon find out that the female is also a lawyer, and are correctly suspicious of the protagonist's intentions ("Potty") towards the woman who strips on the street ("Meade"). Heinlein didn't have to make the female transvestite be a lawyer, but he did, and he describes their attire as being in good taste.

   Then later on, Meade comments that the transvestites were 'characters in the mixed-up clothes' while Potty describes them as:

   > male-and-female dress customs were arbitrary, but they had seemed to be deeply rooted in the culture. When did the breakdown start? With Marlene Dietrich's tailored suits? By the late forties there was no male article of clothing that a woman could not wear in public but when had men started to slip over the line? Should he count the psychological cripples who had made the word "drag" a byword in Greenwich Village and Hollywood long before this outbreak?

   Does Heinlein consider them to be 'psychological cripples'? Or is that only the views of the character?

   We then see "Or had it started with the resurgence of Scottish nationalism reflected in the wearing of kilts by many Scottish-Americans". Which ties into LL who wore a kilt.

   Which ties back to 'To Sail Beyond The Sunset', because it's showing us that the culture back in the 1950s was much more complex and knotty then the simple version that tricked down to me when growing up.

   This complexity embedded in his stories, even in one-off comments, is why I think it's hard to figure out Heinlein's views simply by reading his books. That's why I think you should highlight specific themes and details, rather than stick with anodyne generalizations.

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6. Freak_NLSep 2018
   Honestly, I find it very refreshing to read SF from different decades — if only to occasionally get away from the dystopias of today's tomorrow.

   Sure, space rockets with paper printouts (Heinlein's juvenile bildungsroman Starman Jones) may seem silly today, but I find that it adds to the flavor of yesterday's tomorrows.

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