In the novel, Starman Jones by Robert Heinlein, our hero finally gets onto a star ship as an employee. His papers say he’s a low-ranking member of the steward’s guild, so he’s put to work shoveling manure. On a starship. They’re taking livestock to various colonies for breeding, as well as carrying the treasured pets of various wealthy passengers. One of the pets is a spider monkey, not really a spider and not really a monkey: it’s a six-legged simian-faced alien with the ability to understand about as much as a one-year-old child and less vocabulary than a parrot. He feels sorry for it, as its owner doesn’t show up to care for it for the first week of travel. He is in charge of feeding and cleaning it anyway, so he lets it ride on his shoulder while he cleans out the stables.

Basically this whole section is based on oceanic travel by luxury liner; he meets the owner, she’s a wealthy patrician with the quaint notion that legally everyone is equal. He plays 3D chess with her in the pet room, but can’t meet up with her elsewhere because even if she wants him to come, his boss would have his hide for fraternizing with the passengers, all upper-crust. Turns out his uncle’s name is one to conjure with, though; she lets it be known upstairs that he’s the nephew of Chester Jones, astrogator, and he gets promoted to chartsman. He has to pay a fee to try for a different guild, of course, which comes as a hefty IOU. His pay isn’t that much and he has nothing saved.

As trainee chartsman, he gets to help change the photographic plates in the ship’s cameras, so they can take star sightings. He gets to diligently compare spectrographs of known stars so they can figure out exactly where they are. This business of crossing a fold in space involves determining exact placement while accelerating towards light speed, then surging past lightspeed at exactly the right spot, so they cut through to a known location on the other side of the fold. They don’t use the computer to calculate where to surge; they don’t use it to store logarithms, nor to do the math. Instead they depend on the astrogator’s ability to figure out exactly where and when to surge past light speed, using calculations on paper or in his head, using paper books of logarithms to convert the answers into binary, then typing binary code into the computer so it can tell the engine to fire. In between folds, they cruise through space at a much slower pace, crawling inward towards planets to stop at, crawling outward towards flat space between systems. The amount of technology that has been superseded since, boggles my mind. And yet, we can’t travel to other stars!

The thing that baffles me the most, however, and at the same time makes the most sense, is the ironclad elitism of the wealthy passengers and the officers, as opposed to the “enlisted” lower guild members. Yeah, yeah, the law says they’re all equal. Some people are considerably more equal.

I grew up in a small town in northern Wyoming, where most people gave the appearance of being about average: not too well off, not too poor; not too well educated, not total hicks. It was a small pond and while my family was not the biggest fish, neither were they the smallest. I knew only a couple families whose relative wealth showed in any obvious way. My mother taught politeness and proper behavior, but we were all working class and striving to do better. I knew families that were obviously poorer than we were, but my parents never showed off or acted in any way better than thou. I was taught not to slurp my soup but we only used china at Christmas and my father gardened and cut his own firewood. There was no “higher class” to kowtow to.

On the star ship our hero eventually becomes an officer; whereupon he is not allowed to socialize with Sam, now the equivalent of ship’s sergeant at arms. Nor does Sam want him to: Sam tells our hero that he’s as proud of him “as if I invented you”, but that a junior officer can’t immediately mix with lower ranks. Instead our hero has to eat at the Chief Engineer’s table, seated with those passengers who don’t sit at the Captain’s table. The Chief is welcoming but remote, working in an entirely different part of the ship. The passengers are well-adorned women and their husbands, men of prestige and influence, all wearing formal evening clothes. Our hero has to maintain his dress uniform, watch how they use their forks so he can imitate them, while responding politely to catty remarks. The spider monkey’s owner greets him with congratulations and a kiss on both cheeks. A lady seated by him moistens her hanky and wipes his cheeks. She says, “Mama fixed,” and he blushes even more.

Later they get stranded by a mistake in astrogation; the other astrogators die, one of them as he’s trying to take over the colony they start. The natives are not just hostile; they treat the humans as cattle, not even worth trying to talk with. So the ship has to leave. Our hero, as the only astrogator, is put in as captain. One of the lady passengers, seated at his table, still teases him relentlessly. After the meal he asks to have her removed to a different table. It’s a shock to him that he can, and no one questions it; they simply move her.

They get back to known space; they travel on to their next port of call instead of going back. He gets a pat on the back and a reduction back to cadet, one step up from trainee. The patrician with the spider monkey goes home. She sends him a wedding announcement; he shakes his head and thinks, an astrogator shouldn’t marry anyway. He’ll be spending the rest of his days in space.

All the ship’s officers are male; most of the named passengers are female. The officers don’t mention having wives or children or indeed any relatives, even sons to succeed them, except… the Chief Steward Mr. Dumont, when our hero first becomes an officer, says that he’ll need to get new insignia sewed on his uniform. He volunteers his wife, Mrs. Dumont, to sew it, “since she cares for the lady passengers’ clothing”. Mrs. Dumont never shows up otherwise. Ever.