Starman Jones
I’m reading Starman Jones by Robert Heinlein, a good book by a very good author. It was published in the early 1950s in the U.S.A. It’s set in an undefined future period, when interstellar travel involves traversing folds in the flat space between solar systems; there’s some form of artificial gravity, a fair number of settled planets in several systems, with active colonizing going on. Our hero starts as a hillbilly on a failing farm, with his stepmother and not much livestock. He’s had some high school education, including use of a slide rule. His uncle was an astrogator, with paper books of logarithms. Our hero, in his late teens, has dropped out of school to financially support his stepmother and manage the farm. He dreams of going to space.
I realize that science fiction is written based on the author’s imagination of what may happen; it can feel dated, or it can feel a product of its time. What I’m noticing is that, while there is an assumption that math and computers will play a big part in the future, this author has extrapolated from what he knows:
We visit a truck stop, same as now, but with enormous aerodynamic “trucks” that hover and travel 200 miles an hour. The truckers eat at a diner where attractive young female waitresses bring them steak and eggs, “barely dead”. The freight highway and other long-distance fast transit are not used by other vehicles, but don’t have the careful safety structures around them that the 21st century demands.
Our hero can’t legally go to space because he can’t pay the fees to become an apprentice in a guild. The more prestigious guilds, moreover, are hereditary; people already in them must recommend family members to succeed them. Skill matters, but only if you already have the cachet to be considered. It sounds very much like unions winning out.
Earth, in this novel, is so badly overpopulated that food is rationed; the government refuses to allow farmers to “allow farmland to fall out of use”, even if the farmland is so unproductive that our hero cannot grow enough to do well. On the other hand, the future equivalent of a superhighway is being built; at the start of the novel his stepmother marries a redneck who has sold the land out from under our hero. The land is going to a syndicate that anticipates reselling the land to the government at a premium. The house they’re in is a cabin or lean-to, with three small rooms, lights but no running water, and hand-made shelves. Our hero has a sawhorse handy outside his bedroom window for sneaking in and out. Their mule has died, so he’s been borrowing horses to plow with, and working off the cost rather than paying. There is a TV-equivalent, used to watch soap operas, not education.
The police assume he’s a vagrant, someone to get rid of. The guild officials he meets assume he’s up to no good, until shown that he has a legitimate interest, through his uncle’s guild membership. Still, while his cause is just, they can do nothing effective for him.
He meets a hobo, in the early 20th century sense, a guy sitting over a fire hidden from the road, heating mulligan stew in a can. This guy feeds him and offers him blankets to sleep in, then steals his identification and his uncle’s books, pretends to be him, is rejected by the guild, and meets him outside the guild after our hero has also been declined. The guild pays our hero for returning his uncle’s books; they claim that information is precious and should not be spread around. This guy, Sam, is not surprised that the guild would not give the help our hero wants.
On the black market Sam gets our hero a new ID and guild papers; together they sign up to travel on an outgoing star ship. They show up only a half hour before the ship lifts, to prevent being too closely questioned. The guild papers get turned in to a guild master on the ship, who tosses them into a basket to read later. There’s none of the instant verification that sets so firmly in the 21st century.
