STARMAN JONES (audiobook) by Robert A. Heinlein

 


Originally published in 1953.

Digital Audiobook version published in 2008 by Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Read by Paul Michael Garcia.
Duration: 8 hours, 29 minutes.
Unabridged.

Legendary science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) wrote a set of novels for the Scribner's publishing house early in his career as a novelist starting in 1947. Scribner's published 12 of them. One of his most famous works, Starship Troopers, was rejected as one of this series, but it was intended to be in it.  A 14th and final book featuring a female lead character was also rejected.  They all share a theme of space exploration moving roughly from humanity's first steps away from Earth to contact with massive alien empires in far and distant places.

Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988)

Starman Jones falls right in the middle. It is the seventh novel in the series and humanity can travel to far and distant places and has met alien species, but it is exceedingly tricky. 

Max Jones is a teenager in the Ozarks on a future Earth. Times are tough and people with pull, connections or money are moving off-planet. Max has no pull, maybe has a connection and certainly has no money. When his widowed step-mother marries the neighborhood bully and lets him sell the family farm without warning Max runs away from home to find his own way.

As you can tell by the title, Max eventually makes it to space. The problem is that Heinlein spends a lot of time explaining the bureaucracy of the various space guilds (every profession has its own guild and its own obscure rules) and then goes on to explain in excruciating detail the formal and informal rules of a ship - how the galley works, how discipline is maintained, how to run an illegal still on board, how the crew relates to the passengers, how the crew relates to the officers, how the officers relate to the passengers, how the bridge officers relate to the other officers, how the bridge officers relate to each other and how the captain can help or hinder the ship's morale. It reminded me quite a bit of the extended descriptions of military life in Starship Troopers. 

If all of the "explaining" were edited out, or at least cut back, this book would probably come in 3 hours shorter and be all the better. Paul Michael Garcia did a great job with the text but it is flawed. 

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Starman Jones by Robert A. Heinlein. 

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