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oldschoolcrimefighters(Originally posted between December 27th and December 31st, 2015)
David Starr, Space Ranger
Been reading Asimov’s Lucky Starr books and John Bigman Jones may be my new fave. He’s such a trigger-happy little goon and also super protective of Lucky and I love him.
They were written in the 50s they count for this blog
.
This whole Martian-magic masked-vigilante Space Ranger business is so dramatic and ridiculous and unlike the later books and I have to take a break every other paragraph to just cackle
.
It’s a good thing Lucky gave up on this whole vigilante schtick because he is shit at keeping his secret identity secret.
“I’m not going to be there, but The Space Ranger is!”
“All of my information came from this one person WHO IS TOTALLY NOT DAVID STARR AND ALSO TOTALLY NOT ME BY THE WAY”
.
“Hi Uncle Hector, this is my new best friend Bigman, I met him on Mars and I’m taking him on Council business with me from now on”
“David no”
– a conversation that followed David Starr, Space Ranger at some point, probably
Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids
Lucky’s backstory reminds me a lot of Harry Potter. Parents killed when he was young, mom heroically sacrificing herself to protect her son, adopted and raised by dad’s best friends (who are totally not together except that they totally are). Space pirates instead of wizard hitler, of course, among other details, but there are still some parallels.
.
Maybe I just know too many people in excess of six feet but it’s weird to me that characters make a big deal about Lucky’s height. Like, yeah, 6’ is a good height, I just don’t feel it’s particularly notable for a (presumably cis) dude?
I get the same thing with The Shadow or Sherlock Holmes, but at least Holmes has the excuse of being in the late 1800s and I can assume 6’ was less common.
Edit: Moons of Jupiter says he’s 6'1", earlier books just said he was tall or ‘reach[ed] six feet’. Tiny bit better.
.
They keep talking about how Earth’s population is so high that it’s not self-sustaining and is dependent on Martian farms and Venusian yeast-products for food production.
The population is five billion.
Ah, fifties.
.
You know, for as much as he goes on about the Council’s policy against publicity, Lucky gets recognized an awful lot. Which makes sense after the first two books considering he did some Deeds, and makes sense in the second book because the guy who recognized him had backstory with dad Starr.
But in the first book, before he’s done much of anything except become the youngest Councilman, Bigman recognized him. By name. And knew that the library Lucky directed him to was Council-controlled, to Lucky’s surprise.
I feel like there is a story here with Bigman that has been glossed over.
Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus
Lucky and Bigman casually conversing in the bathroom with a naked Lucky
I love this series
.
Lucky’s lowkey a dick to Bigman in Oceans of Venus.
Maybe he was in the other books too but that came off as more because he needed Bigman to follow his plans instead of staying attached at the hip, whereas in this one he’s just occasionally dickish for no reason.
"if you're going to cry turn away" stfu Lucky he was worried, you nearly got killed
.
"Look at this, Lucky!"
-- John Bigman Jones in approximately 90% of Oceans of Venus.
.
Part of Lucky’s evidence is the fact that a guy is inseparable from his portable computer. Man but this plot point does not fly in the age of smartphones.
Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury
No commentary
Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter
Moons of Jupiter gives a retconned timestamp of ‘a thousand years since mankind invented the first spaceship’, in contrast to the first book’s 'ten thousand years after the pyramids were built and five thousand years after the first atom bomb had exploded’. The latter places the date just short of 7000 AD (the first atomic explosion being in 1945); the former only around 3000 AD (the first manned spacecraft being in 1961, five years after publication).
Technically, since the first manned flight occurred after publication, it could be 'one thousand years after an unspecified point in the future’, but I’d say that accounts for a leeway of maybe 200 years at the most generous (we damn well better have gotten off this rock by 2156, jeesh.)
Even accounting for zeerust and the slower rate of technological advancement in the 50s, the 7000 AD timestamp always seemed excessively far-out to me. 3000 AD still feels awfully far given our current rate of development, but I can see it seeming reasonable in '56.
.
"The computer spat out its results in coded tape that wound on to a spool and dictated the tapping of a typewriter that spelled out the results in figures."
Zeerust is amazing
Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn
Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn: 9/10 needed more cuddling.
Okay on a serious note, I loved this story, I love these characters, and there were several times I had my hands over my face going ‘oh noooo’ which is a good thing.
On the other hand I couldn’t ever shake the irony that the implied whiteness of pretty much the entire cast kind of undercut the whole 'human diversity is good’ message running counter to the Sirian eugenic mindset.
However, the whiteness is implicit, not explicit, so canon-compliant racebends are a go.
Other Thoughts
Fanficcers haphazardly assigning colors to Bigman’s boots like his favorite color isn’t obviously vermilion.
Seriously, the only time his Martian hip-boots aren’t vermilion-and-something (‘something’ being chartreuse, scarlet, silver, or orange, depending on the pair), they’re orange-and-black. It’s pretty clear he’s into orangey-reds.
.
Making a comic adaptation of Lucky Starr would be neat but it’d feel wrong to adapt it without updating the science and I don’t know enough about astrophysics to do that well.
To say nothing about how modern understanding completely invalidates major setting details in at least two of the books.
(Ignore me I want to make comic adaptations of everything.)
.
I’m frankly amazed that the Alpha Centauri trinary system never got brought up in Lucky Starr. Like, not even a token mention of the closest star system to our own, it just kinda skips right over it to Sirius.
David Starr, Space Ranger
Been reading Asimov’s Lucky Starr books and John Bigman Jones may be my new fave. He’s such a trigger-happy little goon and also super protective of Lucky and I love him.
They were written in the 50s they count for this blog
.
This whole Martian-magic masked-vigilante Space Ranger business is so dramatic and ridiculous and unlike the later books and I have to take a break every other paragraph to just cackle
.
It’s a good thing Lucky gave up on this whole vigilante schtick because he is shit at keeping his secret identity secret.
“I’m not going to be there, but The Space Ranger is!”
“All of my information came from this one person WHO IS TOTALLY NOT DAVID STARR AND ALSO TOTALLY NOT ME BY THE WAY”
.
“Hi Uncle Hector, this is my new best friend Bigman, I met him on Mars and I’m taking him on Council business with me from now on”
“David no”
– a conversation that followed David Starr, Space Ranger at some point, probably
Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids
Lucky’s backstory reminds me a lot of Harry Potter. Parents killed when he was young, mom heroically sacrificing herself to protect her son, adopted and raised by dad’s best friends (who are totally not together except that they totally are). Space pirates instead of wizard hitler, of course, among other details, but there are still some parallels.
.
Maybe I just know too many people in excess of six feet but it’s weird to me that characters make a big deal about Lucky’s height. Like, yeah, 6’ is a good height, I just don’t feel it’s particularly notable for a (presumably cis) dude?
I get the same thing with The Shadow or Sherlock Holmes, but at least Holmes has the excuse of being in the late 1800s and I can assume 6’ was less common.
Edit: Moons of Jupiter says he’s 6'1", earlier books just said he was tall or ‘reach[ed] six feet’. Tiny bit better.
.
They keep talking about how Earth’s population is so high that it’s not self-sustaining and is dependent on Martian farms and Venusian yeast-products for food production.
The population is five billion.
Ah, fifties.
.
You know, for as much as he goes on about the Council’s policy against publicity, Lucky gets recognized an awful lot. Which makes sense after the first two books considering he did some Deeds, and makes sense in the second book because the guy who recognized him had backstory with dad Starr.
But in the first book, before he’s done much of anything except become the youngest Councilman, Bigman recognized him. By name. And knew that the library Lucky directed him to was Council-controlled, to Lucky’s surprise.
I feel like there is a story here with Bigman that has been glossed over.
Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus
Lucky and Bigman casually conversing in the bathroom with a naked Lucky
I love this series
.
Lucky’s lowkey a dick to Bigman in Oceans of Venus.
Maybe he was in the other books too but that came off as more because he needed Bigman to follow his plans instead of staying attached at the hip, whereas in this one he’s just occasionally dickish for no reason.
"if you're going to cry turn away" stfu Lucky he was worried, you nearly got killed
.
"Look at this, Lucky!"
-- John Bigman Jones in approximately 90% of Oceans of Venus.
.
Part of Lucky’s evidence is the fact that a guy is inseparable from his portable computer. Man but this plot point does not fly in the age of smartphones.
Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury
No commentary
Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter
Moons of Jupiter gives a retconned timestamp of ‘a thousand years since mankind invented the first spaceship’, in contrast to the first book’s 'ten thousand years after the pyramids were built and five thousand years after the first atom bomb had exploded’. The latter places the date just short of 7000 AD (the first atomic explosion being in 1945); the former only around 3000 AD (the first manned spacecraft being in 1961, five years after publication).
Technically, since the first manned flight occurred after publication, it could be 'one thousand years after an unspecified point in the future’, but I’d say that accounts for a leeway of maybe 200 years at the most generous (we damn well better have gotten off this rock by 2156, jeesh.)
Even accounting for zeerust and the slower rate of technological advancement in the 50s, the 7000 AD timestamp always seemed excessively far-out to me. 3000 AD still feels awfully far given our current rate of development, but I can see it seeming reasonable in '56.
.
"The computer spat out its results in coded tape that wound on to a spool and dictated the tapping of a typewriter that spelled out the results in figures."
Zeerust is amazing
Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn
Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn: 9/10 needed more cuddling.
Okay on a serious note, I loved this story, I love these characters, and there were several times I had my hands over my face going ‘oh noooo’ which is a good thing.
On the other hand I couldn’t ever shake the irony that the implied whiteness of pretty much the entire cast kind of undercut the whole 'human diversity is good’ message running counter to the Sirian eugenic mindset.
However, the whiteness is implicit, not explicit, so canon-compliant racebends are a go.
Other Thoughts
Fanficcers haphazardly assigning colors to Bigman’s boots like his favorite color isn’t obviously vermilion.
Seriously, the only time his Martian hip-boots aren’t vermilion-and-something (‘something’ being chartreuse, scarlet, silver, or orange, depending on the pair), they’re orange-and-black. It’s pretty clear he’s into orangey-reds.
.
Making a comic adaptation of Lucky Starr would be neat but it’d feel wrong to adapt it without updating the science and I don’t know enough about astrophysics to do that well.
To say nothing about how modern understanding completely invalidates major setting details in at least two of the books.
(Ignore me I want to make comic adaptations of everything.)
.
I’m frankly amazed that the Alpha Centauri trinary system never got brought up in Lucky Starr. Like, not even a token mention of the closest star system to our own, it just kinda skips right over it to Sirius.