• Welcome to the new COTI server. We've moved the Citizens to a new server. Please let us know in the COTI Website issue forum if you find any problems.
  • We, the systems administration staff, apologize for this unexpected outage of the boards. We have resolved the root cause of the problem and there should be no further disruptions.

Origins of the K'Kree

M

Mithras

SOC-14 1K
I 'm slowly picking my way through old SF, and today finished 'Starman Jones' by Heinlein. Its dated 73 as first printing, but copyright 53 (?) to Heinlein, so I'm not sure when it was written. Marc Miller read it, because it has three things in it:

1) 'Imperial Marines' and the symbol of the empire is a sunburst. My cover has a close-up of an astronaut, with the sunburst above his browband... Weird to see!

2) Complete breakdown of civillian starship crew, captain, first officer, purser, chief engineer etc... really useful stuff!

3) Centaurs, intelligent, belligerent carniverous centaur aliens living a TL 1 life. THey capture humans and another race of subhumans and domesticate them for meat. I can 't see Marc coming up with K'Kree without some passing knowledge of these beasties. They are quite alien and very eerie.

My ratings for Starman Jones are:


Good Read 4/5
Traveller References 3/5
Usefullness in a Game 2/5
 
Starman Jones is a 1953 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein about a farm boy who wants to go to the stars. It was first published by Charles Scribner's Sons as part of the Heinlein juveniles series.

It is likely that yours was the "first printing" from that particular publishing line.*


As for the "centaurs", Wiki has this to say about them...

The later part, taking place on the planet of the "centaurs"—intelligent, horselike carnivores who dominate all other fauna on the planet including deformed human-like creatures—is evidently intended as Heinlein's commentary on and antithesis to the fourth part of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

In the original, Gulliver is stranded in a country dominated by civilised horses, the Houyhnhnms, finds them much superior to humans, and identifies European humans with the degenerate "Yahoos" which the Houyhnhnms in his view justifiably dominate. The experience leaves Gulliver permanently misanthopic, even on his return to England feeling a yearning for the civilised Houyhnhnms and having nothing but contempt and loathing for the uncouth "yahoos" around him (including himself).

Heinlein, to the contrary, has little good to say of the cruel "centaurs", who not only butcher and eat their "yahoos" (and would like to add the Earth variety to their menu) but also practice systematic euthanasia towards old and weak members of their own species. While the planet's local humans are just as degenerate and subservient as Swift's yahoos, which they strongly resemble, Max and his fellow Earth humans are brave and resourceful, at their best in fighting the centaurs.

Clearly, Swift's idea of having another species domesticate mankind was anathema to Heinlein (who did not hesitate to point out weaknesses of both human and alien characters in his works), and this part of the book expresses his vociferous rebuttal
Click to expand...


* Publishing history is here: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1121

# Starman Jones, (1953, Robert A. Heinlein, publ. Charles Scribner's Sons, $2.50, 305pp, hc) Cover: Clifford Geary
# Starman Jones, (Jun 1953, Robert A. Heinlein, publ. Atheneum, 0-684-13467-5, lb)
# Starman Jones, (1954, Robert A. Heinlein, publ. Sidgwick & Jackson, xii+305pp, hc)
# Abenteuer im Sternenreich, (1954, Robert A. Heinlein, publ. Gebrüder Weiss, hc) Cover: Bernhard Borchert
# Starman Jones, (1955, Robert A. Heinlein, publ. Charles Scribner's Sons, $2.75, 305pp, hc) Cover: Clifford Geary
# Starman Jones, (1966, Robert A. Heinlein, publ. Puffin, #PS267, 4/6, 250pp, pb) Cover: Roger Payne - [VERIFIED]
# Starman Jones, (1967, Robert A. Heinlein, publ. Charles Scribner's Sons, 305pp, hc) Cover: Clifford Geary
# Starman Jones, (Aug 1967, Robert A. Heinlein, publ. Dell, #8246, $0.60, 252pp, pb) Cover: Berkey - [VERIFIED]
# Starman Jones, (Apr 1968, Robert A. Heinlein, publ. Dell, #8246, $0.60, 252pp, pb) Cover: John Berkey
# Starman Jones, (Aug 1968, Robert A. Heinlein, publ. Dell, #8246, $0.60, 252pp, pb) Cover: John Berkey - [VERIFIED]
# Starman Jones, (Jul 1969, Robert A. Heinlein, publ. Dell, #8246, $0.60, 252pp, pb) Cover: John Berkey
# Starman Jones, (Feb 1971, Robert A. Heinlein, publ. Gollancz, 0-575-00621-8, 304pp, hc)
# Starman Jones, (Aug 1971, Robert A. Heinlein, publ. Dell, #8246, $0.60, 252pp, pb) Cover: John Berkey - [VERIFIED]
# Starman Jones, (Feb 1975, Robert A. Heinlein, publ. Ballantine, 0-345-24354-4, $1.50, 252pp, pb) Cover: Lee Rosenblatt - [VERIFIED]
Click to expand...

And many more later printings from multiple publishers.
 
Mithras said:
3) Centaurs, intelligent, belligerent carniverous centaur aliens living a TL 1 life. THey capture humans and another race of subhumans and domesticate them for meat. I can 't see Marc coming up with K'Kree without some passing knowledge of these beasties. They are quite alien and very eerie.
Click to expand...
To paraphrase one of my favorite aphorisms, don't attribute to causality what can be adequately explained by chance. Militant herbivores are not so amazing an idea that two people can't have thought of them independently.


Hans
 
Not sure I remember the book, but parts of it sound familiar. Anyway, the centaur thing sounds interesting Is there a maniacal race of lizards that get wiped out in there?
 
Been a long time since I read Starman Jones. Totally had forgotten about the centauroids. I had kind of thought that they were loosely based on the centaurs of Greek myth. We kind of had that classic sf, horror & myth background: dog people (Vargr), cat people (Aslan), psychic people (Zho), soul-drained people (Vilani...they had the individuality drained from them), horse people (Centaurs), reptile people (Droyne/Ancients), intelligent manipulative starfish out of Lovecraft (Hivers)...and classic heroes from mythology--Earth humans/Solomani.

Gordon Long
 
I normally get more time in the winter to read than in the nicer, warmer months. Being cooped up indoors is alleviated somewhat by losing myself in good fiction. ;)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top